The footage was striking: A food delivery worker scrambles with his e-bike across a bridge in Chicago, chased by a cadre of armed, masked federal agents. “Get him!” one yells, before the worker ultimately slips away.
The viral clip became a rallying point this week for critics of President Donald Trump’s deportation machine, which has spread to multiple U.S. cities and swept up citizens in the process. For Mike Peregudov, the co-founder of e-bike subscription service Whizz, it was a visceral representation of the abject fear delivery workers have described to his team for weeks in Chicago.
That’s because the threat of being snatched up by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or one of the many other agencies helping boost the administration’s deportation numbers, has become measurable in Whizz’s own metrics.
“The reason Whizz’s fleet hasn’t grown in Chicago in the last month,” Peregudov wrote in a LinkedIn post, where he shared the clip. “It has become way harder to deliver a food order in the city.”
Whizz is relatively new to Chicago, having only launched in the city a few months ago. But Peregudov told TechCrunch in an interview the company’s fleet was “growing really fast” over the summer, from having zero bikes on the ground in March to around 300 by the end of July.
This growth was encouraging for Whizz’s mission of providing safe, reliable, and affordable bikes for delivery workers. For years, many of those same workers have had to rely on a mish-mash of products with questionable reliability, causing the vehicles to be banned in some cities.
Dynamics changed in August when Trump threatened to send National Guard troops into the city, according to Peregudov. Growth not only halted, but Whizz has lost about 8% of its business since, he said. The National Guard threats, plus the constant ICE raids, has spooked the food delivery workforce.
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“They’re afraid,” he said of workers who have returned bikes to Whizz’s Chicago office. Whizz doesn’t employ these gig economy workers; it only rents out e-bikes, which can be obtained by anyone with proper identification, a social security number, and a credit card.
With U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents getting scooped up in similar raids around the country, Peregudov said this fear is shared by both documented and undocumented immigrants.
“When a raid happens, these people can [detain] the guy for, whatever, two weeks,” he said. “When they understand he is legally here, they will let him go away, but he will lose those two weeks.”
Immigration raids are happening in most of the other cities where Whizz operates, including New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. But those locations have so far been spared Trump’s more militaristic deployments, which amp up the tension.
The company also operates in Washington, D.C., where President Trump has brought in National Guard troops. Curiously, Peregudov said business is actually up in the nation’s capital.
He attributes that in large part to the fact that, according to him, police and federal agents appear to be targeting delivery drivers who use gasoline mopeds without a license. That’s driving more delivery workers to Whizz and its less-regulated e-bikes, he said.
An immigrant himself, Peregudov shied away from commenting too much on the administration’s policies and actions. “I came here using a talent visa,” he said, “so it was not that stressful for me. It was way easier than for these guys.”
