José Andrés, a Spanish celebrity chef with 14 restaurants in the D.C. area, five of which are closing on Thursday, has been particularly vocal, tweeting his support on Tuesday. (Andrés is currently also involved in a legal battle with Trump over calling off a deal to open a restaurant at Trump’s D.C. hotel.) Andrés says he found out about the planned strike from his workers over the weekend. “They were giving us a heads-up that they weren’t coming to work on Thursday, and the number of employees kept increasing. The restaurant is the home for everybody, and everybody is part of the restaurant. We asked them whether they felt we needed to be closing,” explained Andrés in a phone interview on Wednesday. “[My employees] are doing it to show how important immigrants are for America, and we’re supporting them in closing.”

Led primarily by Latino restaurant workers and business owners, the effort has expanded this week to include a wide variety of establishments, from local eateries to even Michelin-starred restaurants. Late Wednesday afternoon, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced that it would be closing all 18 D.C. locations in support of the protest. Two notable New York City restaurateurs, Eric Bromberg of Blue Ribbon and Tom Colicchio of Craft joined in as well: Blue Ribbon will be closing seven of its restaurants (affecting around 500 employees) in New York, while Colicchio tweeted support should his staff decide to join the strike.*

“I sense that we have many people who are very uneasy about what's happening,” says Andrés. “We have over 11 million undocumented immigrants in America. They're the backbone of the American economy ... By not working tomorrow, it's a way to feel good that they're doing something about it and sending a message. This is almost saying, ‘We're here. We're working. We want to be part of the system. We want to keep supporting the America that has supported us, but at this moment we're really fed up.’”

“A Day Without Immigrants” takes its name from a national march in 2006, where close to a million people—including immigrants, advocates, and supporters—in over a dozen cities protested immigration reforms that would have criminalized any assistance to illegal immigrants. That day is said to have had a lasting effect on the politics surrounding immigration.

Carlos Rojas Rodriguez, a community organizer with the immigrant-rights group Movimiento Cosecha, says that he first saw information about the strike on Whatsapp and Facebook. “There's a lot of self-organizing that's going on in the immigrant community, and what's really interesting is that the call for ‘A Day Without Immigrants’ on [Feb 16] isn't being organized by any established organization. This is a call from the community, from business owners, and immigrant families,” said Rodriguez. The group says it is not responsible for organizing Thursday’s protest, but is organizing a national protest for May 1 of this year.