An employee at a D.C. Burger King says she has filed a complaint with the D.C. Office of Human Rights for alleged discrimination at her workplace. Nineteen-year-old Ingrid Contreras also claims that her complaints have resulted in reduced work hours, which are affecting her ability to pay for nursing school and help her mother with bills.

Last Sunday, Contreras and a group of activists with immigrant advocacy organization Many Languages One Voice protested at the Burger King. They held posters, asked customers not to eat at the restaurant, and delivered hand-made cards to management.

Contreras tells DCist that she began working at the Burger King in Van Ness (the only publicly available Burger King in the city—there’s also a location at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling) last August. One of her managers, she says, consistently made comments about Contreras’ sexuality that she says she found embarrassing and hurtful.

Once, some months into her employment, the manager allegedly asked Contreras, who has a girlfriend, who was “the man” in her relationship. “Imagine how I felt. She asked me in front of a bunch of construction workers,” Contreras says in Spanish. “And they all started laughing, and that made me feel bad.”

Contreras also says that the manager implied several times that the nineteen-year-old was romantically or sexually interested in customers she interacted with at the cash register. “When a customer would come to me … and I would compliment her, like her nails or her shirt or something, [the manager] would imply that I liked her,” she says.

While these comments bothered Contreras, she didn’t decide to file a complaint until November 11, after an incident with another employee. That day, Contreras says she told another coworker that she looked pretty, and the manager said out loud: “Ingrid, you’re making me scared that you’re falling in love.”

“I felt so bad. She said it in front of everyone and I felt so bad,” Contreras says. “I went down to the basement to cry because I didn’t want to show my face after what she said.”

After that incident, Contreras decided to complain to management at Burger King. She wrote a letter to the district manager describing the November incident, which eventually led to discipline for the manager who she says had harassed her. The manager apologized during the conversation, and Contreras says she thought the ordeal would end.

But after that meeting, Contreras claims that the rest of her coworkers began ignoring her during her shifts. “I would ask someone for a burger for a customer, and they would ignore me. That made me feel a loneliness like you can’t imagine,” she says.

The manager in question stopped making comments about her sexuality, but according to Contreras, began screaming at her during shifts for even minor mistakes. “She made me feel like I was useless and worthless,” Contreras says. In mid-December, she filed a complaint with the D.C. Office of Human Rights, she says. Under the D.C. Human Rights Act, sexuality is a protected trait, which means that it’s illegal to discriminate against someone in a workplace for their sexual orientation. It’s also illegal to retaliate against an employee—by firing them, for example—for making a complaint about discrimination.

Contreras says she also petitioned for a restraining order against the manager, which was denied last month by a judge.

Eventually, district management agreed to schedule Contreras and the manager on different shifts. But at the start of January, Contreras says that her shifts began decreasing. She used to work five days per week, and lately she’s been working three. It’s decreased her paycheck by hundreds of dollars, she says.

A store manager at Burger King who would only give his name as Lee said that Contreras’ hours have gone down because they’ve had to schedule her on different shifts from the manager who allegedly harassed her. Contreras contends to DCist that there are shifts that manager doesn’t work when they could schedule her, but they choose not to.

“She has not come to me personally one time [to ask to be scheduled on more shifts],” Lee tells DCist. “I’ve always been on Ingrid’s side in this, from the beginning. And she’ll tell you that. This just doesn’t make sense to me why this is happening right now.” Lee declined to comment further.

Contreras says that, when she told Lee that the manager had begun screaming at her over minor mistakes, Lee defended Contreras and told the manager to stop.

Megan Macareg, an organizer at Many Languages One Voice, tells DCist that the organization plans to go back with Contreras to speak with a district manager and demand that the franchise conduct a training on homophobia.

Contreras still wants to keep her job, she says. She recently graduated from Cardozo High School after coming to the U.S. from El Salvador in 2016, and is trying to become a nurse assistant, she says. She needs the paycheck to help her pay for classes. But Contreras says that the situation she’s faced at Burger King has severely affected her mental and emotional health.

“I went through a whole process of coming out to my grandma. My grandma is a Salvadoran woman who is very traditional and close-minded,” she says. “And now I’m here, and this happens?”