Home Depot has long been a popular place for day laborers looking for temporary jobs, so U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been focusing on the home improvement chain to carry out immigration raids. This has led to fear and anxiety among these laborers, who include both legal citizens and undocumented immigrants. And many believe Home Depot isn’t pushing back enough.
Numerous raids
While cities across the country are seeing an increase in raids at Home Depot, Los Angeles has become ground zero for the events. At least a “dozen Home Depot stores have been targeted, some of them repeatedly, in Southern California since the administration stepped up its immigration crackdown this summer,” said The Associated Press.
The home improvement chain was also reportedly “mentioned as a target for immigration raids by Stephen Miller,” the White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, said the AP. Miller was reportedly angry that more raids weren't happening. Stephen Miller “wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” an ICE official said to the Washington Examiner.
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Some of these Home Depot workers have gone to extreme lengths to avoid ICE. One man, identified only as Javier, “narrowly escaped three raids at the store, avoiding agents by hiding beneath a truck,” he said to the AP. The ICE agents “come in big vans and they all go out to chase people.”
At least one of these cases ended in tragedy when Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, a day laborer from Guatemala, died after “fleeing from agents at a Home Depot parking lot in Monrovia,” said NBC News. Valdez “ran onto a nearby freeway and was hit by a car.” The Department of Homeland Security said Valdez was not being pursued when he was killed, adding that ICE is enforcing laws everywhere, not just at Home Depot.
‘It’s just not right’
Home Depot’s top brass has largely stayed out of the conversation around the raids and has claimed to know little of what takes place. Associates “should report any suspected immigration enforcement operations immediately and not to engage for their own safety,” the company said to NPR. Home Depot isn’t “notified that immigration enforcement activities are going to happen, and we aren’t involved in them. In many cases, we don’t know that arrests have taken place until after they are over.”
But many have criticized this approach. “It’s just not right,” said Home Depot shopper Ray Hudson to NPR. They are “out here trying to make an honest living. They are not hurting nobody. They are not bothering nobody [sic].” Home Depot has a “responsibility and certainly a moral obligation to defend day laborers, who are both customers and service the stores where they seek work,” Chris Newman, the legal director of the National Day Labor Organizing Network, said to NPR.
The Latino civil rights group LULAC has urged Home Depot to deny ICE access to its stores “unless presented with a valid court-issued warrant and proper advance notice.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also supports legal proceedings against ICE. Many in the Los Angeles area say the targeting of Home Depots strikes at the heart of the community. It's a “place that becomes familiar,” Javier said to the AP. “Here, all of us together, we have become friends.”
