Sara Crocker
Audio By Carbonatix
Four Zipps Sports Grill employees are facing criminal charges as a result of the massive Homeland Security Investigations raids on the chain’s 14 Valley locations on Jan. 26. The U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona announced the criminal indictments Thursday evening.
In total, 39 people were arrested in the raids, according to federal authorities. It’s not clear if the 35 people who are not facing criminal charges are instead facing civil immigration charges. Spokespersons for the U.S. Attorney’s Office and for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the parent agency of HSI, did not immediately return messages seeking clarification.
Three employees — identified as Ludwin Benjamin Perez Velasco, Edwin Flores Rosales, and Salvador Villanueva-Rosas — face charges of filling out fraudulent I-9 forms, which are used to verify employment eligibility. A fourth employee, 36-year-old Diego Armando Gonzalez-Rosales, faces five charges stemming from his alleged role in providing stolen identities to undocumented employees for the purpose of filling out their I-9 forms. Gonzalez-Rosales, who the indictment says oversees all the Zipps kitchens, faces two charges of making false attestations on an I-9 form, one charge of transferring means of identity without authority, one charge of aggravated identity theft and one charge of pattern and practice of knowingly employing unauthorized aliens.
Villanueva-Rosas is a 48-year-old Mexican citizen who has lived in the U.S for nearly two decades. Velasco is a 22-year-old Guatemalan, telling investigators he paid $80,000 Guatemalan dollars to be smuggled through the desert into the U.S. in 2022. Flores-Rosales, 28, did not have identification documents when picked up, his indictment says. Court documents show that a judge ordered Velasco and Villanueva-Rosas to be detained pending trial, but no such order is associated with Gonzalez-Rosales and Flores-Rosales. Phoenix New Times has contacted the attorneys listed for the four indicted men in court documents but has not heard back.
In an emailed statement, a Zipps spokesperson wrote: “We are reviewing the government’s statements and filings. Because this remains an active matter, Zipps cannot comment right now on purported allegations, investigative steps, or employee-specific information.”
According to probable cause statements filed with the indictments, HSI first began investigating Zipps in February 2025, not long after President Donald Trump reentered office. The HSI Phoenix office “received a tip” that Zipps was employing illegal aliens in their kitchens and that management was aware that those employees were using fraudulent documents. In March, HSI served all 14 Zipps locations and its corporate headquarters with a Notice of Inspection that required the company to produce all its I-9 forms.
HSI then took every social security number on those forms and requested the associated 2024 and 2025 wage reports from the Arizona Department of Economic Security. DES then provided the number of jobs that were attributed to each social security number during the second quarter of 2025.
According to the indictments, that review showed that 76 Zipps employees had between three and 42 active employers other than Zipps during that period. Those employees had attested to being U.S. citizens in their paperwork. “The DES reports showed multiple jobs and extremely high wages earned in that same quarter,” the indictments read, “which is consistent with aggravated identity fraud.”
Morgan Fischer
Allegedly at the center of that ring was Gonzalez-Rosales. According to his indictment, Gonzalez-Rosales’ I-9 form fraudulently listed himself as a lawful permanent resident, but the 36-year-old’s social security number and alien registration numbers actually belonged other people, with the latter belonging to a citizen of Gambia. Per the indictment, Gonzalez-Rosales is actually undocumented, having entered the country illegally from Mexico two decades ago.
The indictment accuses Gonzalez-Rosales of running a complicated system of identity theft in order to employ undocumented immigrants in Zipps kitchens. The probable cause statement for his indictment describes two interviews with undocumented immigrants arrested in Monday’s raids — who do not appear to have been criminally charged — in which they describe Gonzalez-Rosales helping them fill out fraudulent I-9 forms and other employment paperwork with fake names and IDs and social security numbers belonging to other people.
Furthermore, the indictment says that Gonzalez-Rosales would recycle these documents, using them for subsequent employees after those previously using them had left Zipps. The stolen social security number used by one of the interviewed employees had earned more than $180,000 across 17 jobs in the second quarter of 2025, suggesting it was being used by multiple people.
Gonzalez-Rosales told investigators that he started as a dishwasher at Zipps not long after crossing the border in 2006, eventually working himself up to his current position. He denied formally hiring anyone, but said Zipps management pretty much hires whomever he recommends. He claimed he is unaware of his employees’ legal status, saying that “the office staff” are the ones who verify their documents. But he also told investigators that “every manager knows that many of the IDs are fake” and that “managers know they can get through the E Verify inspection with fake identity documents and that they do not care.”
Gonzalez-Rosales then went on to say that “every cook in the restaurant is working under fraudulent identities” and that he helps employees fill out their documents, “even though he and the manager knew the identities were fake.” He denied providing physical IDs to people but said that at least once, he took a picture of someone else’s ID to provide it to employees needing it to pass their employment verification check. He denied receiving money for doing so.
He also allegedly admitted that “there were multiple instances that Zipps rehired the same person under multiple different names” and confirmed that stolen IDs would be passed down to future employees. The indictments for the other three charged employees allege that they received stolen identities in a similar manner.
