 This is the National Mall in Washington, D.C. More than 25 million people visit annually. At lunchtime, on any given day, hungry tourists spill out onto the streets. Majid Naim, the owner of the food truck Chicken Friendly, is feeding them. From his spot in front of the National Museum of American History, as he competes against dozens of others in a parking free-frol. Location is everything. To keep their prized spots, vendors park dummy cars overnight. These trucks offer better value than the pricey cafes of the Smithsonian Museums. Right now, customers are at the National Mall, and they're screaming out for more food options. Attorney Justin Pearson directs the National Street Vending Initiative at the Libertarian Legal Nonprofit, the Institute for Justice. So it makes sense the food trucks try to provide those food options so that the food trucks can stay in business and not lose their dream. The diversity is incredible. The food is so well cooked. You can see they really pour their hearts into it. The prices are extraordinary. You can't beat it. These food trucks really have an impact on people around here, and I just think they're good for the community. They face another challenge, these guys. We are struggling a little bit with the tickets every day. Sometimes it's $200 each day, $300 each day. So it's not like easy here. Sometimes the police bother us. And sometimes, I mean, not sometimes, all the time we get a ticket. Selling food from a truck along the National Mall is technically illegal. That mattered less before COVID because there were other neighborhoods where they were allowed to serve lunch. What was appealing was the gratification you get when you have 50 people in line that are just dying to try your food and they love it. The pandemic obviously closed all of the office buildings. Trucks then had to find other places to vent. The mall became the only spot in D.C. with significant lunchtime foot traffic. So we worked here at the National Mall for just the tourists. Before Naim was serving chicken fingers, he raised live chickens on a farm in Egypt. He eventually saved enough to buy his own truck. We hope everything goes back to like a normal. I don't have nothing else to do besides this, but it's just only the food truck business. Meanwhile, the fines rack up. Last year, the city collected $467,000 in parking tickets along the mall. What's happening at the National Mall is a real shame. Customers are being ripped off by overpriced food sold at the museum's cafeterias. And that problem is directly a result of the lack of competition. It's ultimately a problem of jurisdiction. Nobody seems to want to take charge on the enforcement. Patrick Rathbone, who's the owner of the big cheese truck, used to serve the D.C. lunch crowd. Now he focuses exclusively on catering and special events. So the roads are D.C. jurisdiction. As from the sidewalk on is National Park Service. They think the National Park Service maybe should be doing the enforcement. There's inter bureaucracy like apathy, I guess. Nobody wants to be in charge of actually taking care of the trucks down there. The National Park Service has resisted calls from lawmakers to make vending legal there. I think there has to be a meeting between the D.C. folks and the National Park Service. D.C. can say we can solve the parking and the illegal vending piece of it. But if we don't solve the transaction side of things that's in your hands, Park Service, it's not going to work. With no compromise in sight, food truck operators remain stuck in the middle. And millions of visitors keep coming to the mall every year, looking for a delicious and affordable lunch, with officers waiting nearby. I see the future kind of like a little bit difficult, because we still get like buzzer from Barco Police and for the tickets. So I was thinking a lot to leave this business to get something else. But for now, I'm sitting in this business to see what's going on.