And while Tom Cat had no legal obligation to compensate the workers it could no longer employ, the company offered a severance package that included one week’s pay for every year of service, full salary for unused vacation and sick days and three months of continued health benefits. The labor union representing bakery workers stood in full support of Tom Cat.

It is worth noting as well that the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, the city’s reigning seat of ethical food consumption, looked into whether to continue carrying Tom Cat breads. After much research on the part of the coop’s general manager, Joe Holtz, it determined that Tom Cat had conducted itself decently enough. Still, a boycott was put up for a vote, and co-op members voted against it.

One of the complaints that activists advanced was that the severance pay was not sufficiently generous. They also want Tom Cat to adopt guidelines established in part by the National Immigration Law Center directing businesses what to do when ICE intervenes in the workplace.

But when Mr. Holtz sought to find out what companies followed these guidelines, he told me, he could not find any. The advocacy groups involved in designing them have no account of what businesses have voluntarily decided to use them either. The State of California has signed some of the recommended protections into law but the statute has been subject to legal challenge.

Adopting the policies would be largely symbolic, and symbols can be meaningful. But even though the number of work-site immigration investigations has tripled over the past year (to just under 6,100), that figure still represents a tiny fraction of the millions of private-sector employers in the country. The chance of any one business receiving an ICE audit is minuscule; even the Immigration Law Center acknowledges that.

Rage, though, has its own logic. The antipathy directed at Tom Cat would seem to implicate the larger furies around globalism; two years ago the company was acquired by a Japanese baking conglomerate worth billions of dollars. Even so, Tom Cat remained in Long Island City, a neighborhood near the universe of low-income people, many of them undocumented, it could employ.

What this shows us is the extent to which protest can lose its power when it seems indiscriminate. There is a dissonance to opposing a relatively small New York City business, succeeding at a time when these businesses keep disappearing. The Emily group heeds a full roster of liberal values: it starts its dishwashers at $15 an hour, Mr. Hyland told me, and gives jobs to immigrants and sources its ingredients locally as much as possible. It even passes on a percentage of proceeds from its sale of ranch dressing to an animal rescue operation.