It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and managers at White Rhino Coffee were on a mandatory weekly district call. Two things stick out to two employees who were part of that call. One was that their employee discount at the cafe was being reduced from 50% to 30%, but that wasn’t what caused people to walk off the job later that week.
White Rhino Coffee (WRC) is a Dallas-based coffee shop founded by Chris Parvin, with more than a dozen locations across North Texas. The company was founded on the concept of providing a third space where everyone is welcome. A motto shared on its website is, “A cup of coffee won’t change the world, but how we share it might.”
Margot Stacy had been working at White Rhino since June 2025. She was a manager at the downtown Dallas location until she quit early on Thursday, Jan. 22.
She had seen ICE officers in her cafe on occasion; she remembers specifically one coming in on the day of the shooting at the downtown ICE facility. Their presence made her uneasy. Her staff is Hispanic, Black, queer and trans, and her customers are often travelers from other countries.
“So we have a very diverse but also vulnerable labor force downtown when I was there,” Stacy says. “And so I’m just constantly aware of safety.”
Margot Stacy quit her job managing a White Rhino cafe over the store’s stance on serving ICE agents.
After an immigration agent shot and killed protester Renee Goode in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, Stacy was more on edge. She asked a question in the manager chat: Can they refuse service to ICE agents? “I was seeking clarification. Some sort of stance, what our general philosophy and the playbook is on this,” she says. “What do we do? … What is the core value here?”
Before that, Stacy decided on her own not to extend the first-responder discount to ICE agents at her store. “We had autonomy to do things like that, and to me it was a no-brainer. They’re not first responders.”
Stacy says there was not a constant presence of ICE agents, maybe once a week, but when they did come in, she was scared.
The response to her question about whether she could refuse service in that chat was no.
She pressed, reading from a screenshot of the conversation that day, “Me: Given that we have a lot of Hispanic customers and staff and there’s a detention facility nearby, it makes me nervous.”
The chat response from management: “I understand our stance is to stay apolitical. We should not involve ourselves in any of that as a business. They should be treated like any other customers.”
The MLK-Day Directive
Stacy was working the line at the downtown Dallas cafe on Jan. 14, MLK Day. Every Monday, the shop has a district call, but it was busy that morning, so she got off the call early to help serve customers. Another employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, remained on the call and says the topic was brought up by a director, who said that after having had some conversations with management, it was decided that not only would ICE agents be treated as any other customers, but they should receive the first-responder discount.
White Rhino Coffee has always offered free drip coffee to active-duty police, firefighters and EMTs, plus 50% off for everything else.
This also came with the news that the employee discount for the shift meal was being reduced from 50% to 30%, although Stacy clarifies that this change was unrelated to the ICE policy. On MLK Day, White Rhino employees were told they would now receive a smaller discount than ICE agents.
The news was passed along to Stacy. She had two subsequent conversations with her district manager. The following day, he asked for a meeting; she thought she was being fired for bringing it up in the first place. He assured her she was not, but rather he just wanted to check in with her.
The Fall Out
She told him these issue goes against everything she believes in. “This goes against who I am, like my own personal constitution and beliefs. It goes against what my staff believes in, and it goes against my call as a manager to protect my staff and customers,” she says.
“And then that’s when we had that conversation about my values,” Stacy says, who is trans. “About my concerns, about how I felt that my concern of safety was met with not just an apolitical choice, but it was met with a direct political choice about who we desire to support and make our customer base.”
On Thursday, Stacy informed her employers in an Instagram post that she quit. She told them her keys and laptop were locked in the cafe’s safe. Her post started: “FUCK THIS JOB AND FUCK ICE.”
The post went a bit viral. Celebrity and activist Kathy Griffin commented on Stacy’s post on Threads:
“She’s doing what it’s going to take. We don’t want to admit that we’re probably headed toward a lot of walkouts international strike that people can’t afford. But we are reaching our breaking point.”
Stacy says up to 10 people walked out of their jobs at White Rhino cafes last week, not in whole, but all in part, because of the ICE policy. She says wages were a simmering problem. The ICE discount was the final straw. We asked White Rhino to confirm this number and did not hear back. We spoke to three people who quit last week, all in part or in whole because of the policy.
ICE Policies
On Friday afternoon, White Rhino sent an email to the Observer denying that it ever instructed employees to give ICE agents first-responder discounts. “White Rhino Coffee does not offer the first responder discount to ICE agents. Our first responders discount policy includes local police officers, local firefighters and EMTs.” The email was from a marketing account, and no name was provided.
As for the Jan. 19 call, the email explained that “the participants on that call did not have the authority to change or implement company policies. If it is determined that any policy was misrepresented or acted upon without authorization, appropriate action will be taken immediately. An internal investigation is already underway to fully understand how this miscommunication occurred.”
White Rhino also shared its HR policy on how to handle the presence of ICE agents in stores, for both customers and employees. (Two managers we spoke with on Friday — Stacy and another who asked to remain anonymous — said they had never previously seen these policies.)
The policy acknowledges that recent immigration-related news and events may be causing some fear or uneasiness for some of our team members. “We want to assure you that our priority is to provide a safe, respectful, and supportive workplace for everyone,” it reads.