A protest over immigration broke out next to a Compton restaurant. The owner, an immigrant, offered help to both protesters and cops

By Chris Boyette, Graham Hurley, CNN

(CNN) — Elizabeth Mendoza watched nervously as demonstrators protesting President Donald Trump’s immigration raids and policies clashed with police outside of her Compton restaurant, Restaurante Y Pupuseria La Ceiba.

“It started with just a few people, then it started growing very quickly,” she told CNN in an interview translated from Spanish.

Mendoza, herself an immigrant from El Salvador, has gained notoriety after videos of her and her staff sheltering protesters and helping law enforcement agents in her Los Angeles County restaurant spread across social media.

In the late afternoon hours on Saturday, June 7, the protest began to ramp up significantly as demonstrators and officers clashed right in front of her business. At one point, Mendoza recalled seeing the police push the protesters away from her storefront and deploying chemical irritants.

“I don’t know what happened with the tear gas they threw. It was so strong at one point that we all felt like we were suffocating,” Mendoza told CNN. “Then they came in. It wasn’t something planned, it wasn’t something I was thinking about, but it just happened,” she said.

Inside the restaurant, video at 5:30 p.m. shows Mendoza and her employees getting water for LA County Sheriff’s deputies, fanning their blinking, watering eyes and applying wet towels to their faces.

An employee guided one of the officers toward the walk-in refrigerator at the back of the store after wiping off his face, surveillance video shows.

In a video Mendoza uploaded to TikTok, three of her employees can be seen taking care of two officers: One employee holds a cloth to the face of an officer while another fans his face.

“I looked for masks and gave them to different people … The only thing I managed to grab for some protesters were towels, towels we use to clean. And I told them to cover yourselves with this. And then they covered themselves,” Mendoza said. “I also offered them milk. I ran out of milk.”

Clashes between protesters and law enforcement have resulted in hundreds of arrests in Los Angeles, and Trump invoked a rarely used law to federalize the National Guard over the objection of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and local officials, which further inflamed the response.

The Trump administration also mobilized 700 Marines to the Los Angeles area on Monday, though it is not yet clear when they will be deployed onto the streets to help with protests, according to a US Northern Command spokesperson.

Mendoza said she never directed her staff to help the people suffering after the confrontation just outside the restaurant – they acted of their own accord.

“I was at the door, just letting everyone in,” she said. “They just acted the way they felt they should have done to other people themselves.”

Almost half of Los Angeles County’s nearly 10 million residents are Latinos or Hispanics, according to US Census data. Over one-third of Angelenos are immigrants.

Mendoza came to the United States without her family – “without a father, without a mother, without siblings,” she told CNN, and first found work at a restaurant.

She opened her own restaurant 15 years ago and has since found her place in the community.

“I was afraid something bad would happen and they would destroy my restaurant, which you hear about,” Mendoza said. “So I decided to stay there, and looking at that whole situation, thank God, I sympathize with many protesters. I live in the area, and I can practically tell you that I know several of them, and they are good people and are my clients.”

Multiple friends contacted Mendoza and urged her to close her restaurant for the day after seeing all of the chaos surrounding the protests in her neighborhood. Mendoza felt that she had to stay open to provide for her clients that had stayed with her “through the good and the bad.”

“I have to take care of them and, above all, of my clients, who have always been with me through thick and thin, and who are my Latino people and people of any other race,” she said.

While the restaurant workers’ compassion has been praised by many, Mendoza said some have criticized her for helping both demonstrators and authorities.

“I just want them to know that we did it as human beings,” she said. “I’m happy to have helped those people, just like I did with the people who were there for the protests.”

Mendoza said the world could use more “empathy and humanity for all people,” and that as an immigrant, she wants people to know most immigrants who come to the United States do so to work hard and make a better life for themselves and others.

“Sometimes we’re treated like aliens; we’re not like that. The fact that we’re darker-skinned doesn’t make us different,” she said.

“We’ve all seen it as a wonderful country, and we’ve all seen a country with better opportunities for our lives. Yes, and maybe that’s why we decided to come here, and maybe some of us haven’t done it the right way. But in the same way, we’ve all come with a purpose, which is to work and put in the effort. And often, I think they don’t realize that it’s us Latinos who come to do the most difficult jobs.”

More demonstrations are planned nationwide this week and weekend, when the military parade honoring the Army’s 250th birthday is planned in Washington, DC.

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