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?

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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.

Frustration with Home Depot has been mounting for months, as lawmakers and stakeholders in various cities have increasingly felt as though the company is not doing enough to protect workers and customers.

In late September, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, along with pro-immigrant groups like NDLON and CARACEN—the largest Central American immigrant rights organization in the country—met in L.A. with Home Depot executives from across the country.

The meeting, which has not previously been reported, was convened by Bass and included Heather Kennedy, vice president of government relations at Home Depot; Francisco Uribe, the senior director of government relations; and general counsel and executive vice president Teresa Wynn Roseborough, according to two sources who were at the meeting.

The goal was for Bass to directly connect groups representing workers and immigrants with the executives in an effort to make the company more attentive to community needs and concerns, as one meeting attendee put it. But another attendee also described the gathering as unhelpful, with the Home Depot team seeming reticent about ICE operations on their properties.

George Lane, a Home Depot spokesperson, told me when I shared that criticism with him: “We had informative meetings, and we have not heard that feedback,” he said. “We welcome direct engagement from our elected officials to discuss their concerns.”

Chris Newman, the general counsel for NDLON, which includes 71 pro-immigrant affiliate groups, was at the meeting. While he refrained from discussing what was said by others, he did summarize for me the message he offered attendees: that the ICE raids at Home Depots amounted to “a human rights crisis” and that the company had “a shared interest in mitigating the calamity that is unfolding at their stores.”

Newman was quick to acknowledge that Home Depot plays a critical—constructive—role in cities like Los Angeles, which has been ravaged by calamitous wildfires. He described the company as central to the recurring recovery process, saying it is an “integral” part of the supply chain for goods used in rebuilding and recovery.

But, he added, the day laborers who make a living there are just as integral.

Home Depot’s “entire business model has benefited enormously from immigrant labor, and that’s inarguable, and the stores are doing nothing to protect one of its core groups of customers,” Newman said.

In its public-facing communications, Home Depot has been cagey about the ICE raids on their properties. I asked the company to share their policies on federal agents targeting people, including customers, outside and inside their stores, and the prospect that these enforcement actions could hurt their business. Lane offered me a version of a statement he has had to make before: “We aren’t notified that ICE activities are going to happen, and we aren’t involved in the operations. We’re required to follow all federal and local rules and regulations in every market where we operate.”

He added that “in terms of the sales impact, we don’t break out business performance by individual stores so that would be speculative.”¹

But in Chicago, at least, it appears that the administration’s enforcement actions are impacting the company’s bottom line. One manager for a Home Depot location who spoke to me on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information told me sales are down 20 percent in some of the city’s stores.

“It’s killing the business,” the manager said.

The manager noted that Home Depot is emphasizing “free delivery for contractors so they don’t have to risk themselves”—a sign of how the company has had to adjust.²

“In that sense, we can help out the community; we will deliver to the job site so you guys can focus on the job,” they told me.

A looming national boycott of Home Depot

AS ICE RAIDS CONTINUE outside Home Depot locations, activists and Democrats have begun debating a new way to put pressure on the company: a national boycott. Two weeks ago, the comedian Chelsea Handler said she was beginning one herself because of the company’s surveillance practices and refusal to denounce ICE. Home Depot “cannot claim to serve our communities while allowing federal agents to terrorize people on their property,” Handler wrote in an accompanying caption. Her post appears to have prompted Occupy Democrats, with millions of followers across social media, and 50501 Movement, with more than half a million followers on Instagram, to call for people to join a boycott or attend a vigil outside their local Home Depot tomorrow, Saturday, November 1.

Activists told The Bulwark that a formal movement to start a national boycott of the company could be underway before the year is up.

It’s worth noting that the company has some deep-reaching Republican roots. One of the Home Depot cofounders was billionaire Trump donor Bernie Marcus, who died last November. Billionaire cofounder Ken Langone, who supported Trump in 2016 before retracting his support after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, came back into the fold earlier this year, saying he has “never been more excited about the future of America” than he is under Trump.

But the company’s recent history suggests Home Depot may respond to public pressure. The company issued statements distancing itself from Marcus in 2019 after facing a boycott over his support for Trump.

So far, NDLON has been silent on whether it would embrace a boycott campaign. Instead, the group and the Latino Union will start holding vigils outside Home Depot locations on Saturday:

One source close to the Latino Union told me the vigils should be viewed as an escalation on the road to an eventual national boycott because the home improvement company has been “uncooperative and standoffish.”

“We’re trying to build to a boycott,” the source said. “This is the first step to build to it.”

Newman told me NDLON is doing everything they can to avoid a boycott, but if it happens it will be because the 71 member organizations voted for it. He said that while a number of coalition members want to boycott, they don’t yet constitute a majority.

Collective-action campaigns against companies that have sold out to Trump have found a measure of success so far in his second administration. For example, when millions of people canceled their Disney+ subscriptions after late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air (reportedly for a joke he told related to the murder of Charlie Kirk), the company put him back on in under a week. Veterans of past immigration-related boycotts say similar tactics could be effective with Home Depot.

Salvador Reza, a prominent immigration advocate in Phoenix, helped orchestrate a campaign targeting a local furniture store as a means of rallying opposition to now-disgraced former sheriff Joe Arpaio. He did so because the store was working closely with police to surveil, arrest, and deport day laborers. The boycott cut the company’s business by 50 percent. Reza laid out a way for activists to scale that approach to a multinational corporation like Home Depot.

“A national boycott is hard to maintain, but locally, we can target different Home Depots that allow ICE to come into their parking lots and their buildings,” he told me. “Locally, we don’t have the capacity to go national, but we do have the capacity to punish them here, and we’ve done that before.”

1. Astounding if true.

2. I have asked a corporate spokesman about this apparent shift, and whether it reflects a company-wide decision or one made at the regional or individual-store level; as of this writing, I have not yet heard back.