Selling hot dogs on San Francisco’s Embarcadero was the only work she could find.

Elsy Hernandez left Honduras for the U.S. with her two children in January aboard “La Bestia,” a notoriously dangerous freight train that travels the length of Mexico. They fled, she said, after a man demanding a loan from Hernandez shot up a cantina, wounding her 11-year-old son.

As a hot dog vendor, her life is only marginally safer. With a hoodie pulled over her head to protect her from the sun, the 32-year-old said that since she started selling hot dogs, she’s been robbed at gunpoint and had wages stolen by an employer.

“Sometimes the business barely makes anything,” she said in Spanish.

Hernandez is among two dozen vendors lining the sidewalk between Pier 33 and Pier 39 on a Friday afternoon in October. Some sell aguas frescas, fruit cups, and bottled drinks from tables beneath canopies; others sell trinkets and hats from beneath umbrellas. Most of the vendors work behind hot dog carts.

The vendors compete for attention, clanking tongs and hollering, “Hot dog-hot dog-hot dooooggg.” They all sell variations of the famous Mission Dog, wrapped in bacon and smothered with grilled onions and peppers. They use a red tool cart outfitted with a gas burner and topped with a griddle. Each has signs with QR codes for Venmo and PayPal.

While hot dog vendors have been part of the city’s gray market for decades, changes in state law in 2018 and 2022 removing illegal vending from the police code and streamlining health permits have led to a boom in their numbers. In response, the city started a campaign warning of foodborne illness risks and launched a vending task force, a multiagency enforcement team that issues fines and confiscates carts. But it’s a cat-and-mouse game.

The workers are mostly undocumented immigrants from Central and South America, The Standard found through interviews with more than a dozen. Some have fled crime and violence. Many are seeking asylum and sending money home while they eke out an existence, one sale at a time. Others are victims of human trafficking: vulnerable people smuggled into the U.S. by groups to whom they are indebted.

Working alongside Hernandez is a 35-year-old mother of two who came to the U.S. from Guatemala in February. She agreed to pay the equivalent of $20,000 to be smuggled across the Mexican border. Before she arrived on U.S. soil, she handed over her identification documents as collateral. (While The Standard can’t verify whether she had been trafficked, experts said her story matched the profile. Her name is being withheld to protect her from retribution.)

“There are many needs in my country,” she said in Spanish. “It is a beautiful place, but there are not enough economic resources. There is a lot of violence — assaults and burglaries.”

At first, she tried to find work in restaurants, but without papers or a work permit, she had no luck. So she walked the streets and came across a man who offered her a job selling hot dogs.

“Needing to cover my kids and pay my debt, [I said], ‘Count me in,’” she said.

A hot dog costs $10, or two for $15. On a good day, a vendor will sell a few dozen, bringing in $400-$600. The workers say they keep about half their daily sales; the remainder goes to the people who employ the vendors and provide instruction, digital payment systems, carts, stands, equipment, and the food itself.

These hot dog “bosses,” like management in other unregulated fields, occupy a strange niche: providing for the vendors but also, some workers say, stealing from them.

On a recent Friday night, three men and a woman walk up and down Grove Street outside Bill Graham Civic Auditorium as a booming dubstep show winds down. They’re scouting not for cops, who have no jurisdiction over hot dog affairs, but for members of the vending task force.

Seeing none, one of the vendors places a call. A white Sprinter van pulls up and parks in front of the Health Department building across from the auditorium. Their boss is behind the wheel. The vendors fling open the sliding door and unload two carts.

The boss, who is everywhere and nowhere, is a grandmother who, with her husband, runs one of the oldest hot dog vending operations in the city.

The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, moved here from Stockton six years ago with her two high-school-age children after being evicted from their home. They lived in two cars and a van for nine months before being placed in an emergency shelter and, two years later, a below-market-rate apartment. All the while, the couple drove for Lyft and Uber and sold food on the street: ice cream, tacos, and, finally, the gold standard: hot dogs.

“It’s crazy here in San Francisco. Hot dogs [are in] such a demand,” she said as the vendors set up their carts.

For years, the couple ran the business out of a storage facility or their apartment. They now rent a house where they prep the food, maintain their inventory, and have enough space for three vans, each of which can hold a half dozen carts.

They hire recent immigrants — primarily from Venezuela, Guatemala, and Peru — who live in homeless shelters. Some stay on board for a few weeks; others for more than a year, she said. (Hernandez works for her now.)

“They’re just only trying to get a job, trying to get stable,” she said. “Usually people come to us when they get to the States. They work with us until they get a main job. My bishop said that we hire unemployable people.”

Some of the immigrants who work for her are in debt from trafficking, she suspects. She thinks it’s madness that immigrants will take out hefty loans to come to the U.S.

“They’re guaranteeing these people from their country, ‘You can make all this money,’” she said. “But when they come over here, it’s not exactly what they thought.”

The competition is fierce, she said. Many families try their hand at the business. The hot dog impresarios share their trade secrets with vendors, who go on to become competition.

“We’re all just trying to figure out how to make it by,” the woman said. “This is a very challenging, unstable type of business model.”

As concertgoers flood out of the auditorium, the grandmother excuses herself and goes to the corner to sell alongside her husband, son, the four vendors working for them that night, and the dozens of others whose attempts to earn a living are getting in the way of other business owners’ livelihoods.

Mary Conde, a senior vice president with Another Planet Entertainment, manages the city-owned Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. With a walkie-talkie clipped to her belt, she watches as concertgoers line up to buy hot dogs.

Conde has seen the number of hot dog vendors increase from a few to several dozen in the past year. One night in June, she counted 128.

“It’s very rare when they’re not outside our shows,” Conde said. “They’re really organized, and I imagine it’s very profitable for them, because I don’t think they’re paying for a lot of refrigeration or sanitation supplies or taxes or insurance.”

Things can get testy: A city worker was caught on tape pushing over a food cart last year, and a vendor was arrested for allegedly striking a city worker in September. Vendors will run away with their carts in tow to escape. Replacing a cart costs about $600 — far less than the estimated $10,000 required for a code-compliant cart with a three-basin sink and a hood.

Conde wants the vending task force to operate later hours. The mayor’s office said the task force’s procedures are evolving. Meanwhile, Conde is involved in talks with the National Independent Venue Alliance to develop a statewide strategy for the rise in vendors.

“We are trying to come up with some coordinated efforts with different entertainment venues,” she said. “This is a problem at Chase Center. It’s a problem at Oracle [Park]. It’s a problem throughout the city.”

Larry Rivera says he’s a victim of the boom in vendors. In July, he closed his Fisherman’s Wharf shop Mango Crazy after six years. He said his revenue dropped 95% because vendors were allowed to sell the same products that he was — fruit cups and aguas frescas — outside his door. Although he doesn’t fault the vendors themselves, he began protesting as a double standard the routine health inspections and fees required to run his shop.

“Do you know how much money I spent on that location just to get it in line with the Health Department [and] to make sure we have sanitation areas — hand-wash sinks, all of that stuff?” he said. “The city should have done a much better job.”

Conde agrees that the law is not working as intended.

“This doesn’t represent the values of San Francisco,” she said. “This is not compassion. It’s not human kindness. It’s desperation, and I don’t know whether there’s human trafficking involved. I don’t know what motivates the women to be out there on the lines at midnight, cooking hot dogs. But it shouldn’t be this.”

In San Francisco, the Department of Homeland Security and the Police Department are responsible for investigating human trafficking. Survivors of trafficking who are willing to help the authorities can receive special visas to protect them from deportation while law enforcement investigates and prosecutes cases. But few are willing to come forward. The incoming Trump administration’s promised immigration crackdown may further hamper cooperation with police.

A report released Oct. 30 examining San Francisco’s work to combat human trafficking said that between 2018 and 2023, the city found an average of 44 incidents per year. In that five-year period, only 11 cases went to court. The actual number of annual cases is probably in the hundreds, the report concluded. What’s more, SFPD has only two officers dedicated to investigating trafficking.

The Guatemalan hot dog vendor is one of the uncounted cases. She owes 50,000 quetzals, about $6,500, and sales have slowed while expenses like rent remain high. On days when she makes no sales, her employer covers lunch, she said.

She plans to ask the traffickers to extend the repayment timeline.

“The truth is they are very demanding,” she said. “They warn you, ‘OK, if you don’t pay, we will take this and this and this away.’”

And if she doesn’t pay, “there are risks of kidnapping, or they may steal from you, or even … kill your relatives,” she said.

Despite the predicament she finds herself in, her family keeps her going. She is trying to find a way to bring her children to the U.S.

“I fight every day to help them move forward,” she said. “Thank God I am almost through and, for the same reason, I am here working day and night, as long as I pay the debt.”

If you think someone is in immediate danger, authorities urge you to immediately call 911. You can also call the San Francisco Human Trafficking Hotline at 415-907-9911.