The Red Hen restaurant controversy was an American political controversy that began June 22, 2018, when a co-owner of The Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, asked Donald Trump's White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave. The co-owner later cited Sanders' role in what the co-owner called the "inhumane and unethical" Trump administration in which Sanders had "publicly defended the president's cruelest policies."