SCOOP: Immigration Groups Weigh Boycott of Home Depot
As ICE raids target the home-improvement chain, what does the company owe its customers and the immigrants who do work for them?
DONALD TRUMP’S INCREASINGLY violent deportation regime has changed the country in myriad ways. But for one major U.S. company, the challenge has been uniquely intense, forcing it to grapple with the question of how to keep a business running after it becomes a staging ground for ICE.
Check any news coverage of immigration raids in recent weeks and months, and chances are one of them has taken place outside a Home Depot.
In August, a Home Depot location in Los Angeles was the site of a haphazard raid, with federal agents in tactical gear scrambling out of a moving truck to go after day laborers and street vendors. Days later, a Guatemalan immigrant, Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdés, 52, was killed by an SUV as he fled ICE outside an L.A. Home Depot. More recently, eight day laborers were ambushed by border patrol agents outside a Home Depot in Chicago. They were chased into the woods, with at least one ending up in the Chicago River. When the agents returned to the Home Depot, I’m told, they detained yet another man who was coming out of his work truck and heading into the store.
“He was a customer, he was going to go into the store. We know because the organizers on the scene have a good grasp of who is a regular day laborer and who is not,” Miguel Enrique Alvelo Rivera, the executive director of the Latino Union in Chicago, which is affiliated with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), told me.
The Trump administration has defended these actions by insisting that—like Willie Sutton robbing banks because the money’s there—they are just going to where the undocumented workers are. In this case, they apparently have in mind those who are getting materials and equipment for landscaping, painting rooms in suburban homes, and clearing gutters.
This approach to enforcement has produced a dark pattern of people being chased, detained, and thrown into vans outside stores of one of the largest retailers in the United States. And it has raised some difficult questions: What responsibility does Home Depot have to protect workers in its parking lots? What obligation does it have to the customers walking in or out of the stores who could be tackled by an agent in a case of mistaken identity? And what type of pushback should be directed at the corporation itself by those who oppose Trump’s deportation efforts?
On that last question, Democrats and immigrant allies increasingly say that Home Depot must do more. And there have been behind-the-scenes efforts to force the issue, including through direct meetings with Home Depot’s corporate leadership—and, increasingly, talks of a national boycott.