Home Depot stores, long a hub for day laborers, now draw immigration agents out on raids

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — At a Home Depot parking lot, a man patrols on a bicycle for federal immigration agents, toting a megaphone on his hip so he can blast a warning to day laborers waiting to land a landscaping or construction job.

The workers from Mexico, El Salvador and elsewhere carry whistles to also sound the alarm, while activists swap details over two-way radios about whether cars whizzing by could be unmarked vehicles carrying officers preparing for a raid.

Their work is cut out for them. Agents have raided the lot outside the 108,000 square-foot Home Depot store in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles at least five times since June, rounding up some immigrants and sending others running in search of safety.

Home Depot stores in Southern California have long been an informal job-seeking hub for day laborers in the country both legally and illegally. Now the locations have become a prime target for immigration agents.

In fact, Home Depot was 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, earlier this year.

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.

Immigrant advocates sued over the raids but on Monday the Supreme Court cleared the way for federal agents to continue conducting sweeping immigration operations for now in Los Angeles, the latest victory for the Trump administration at the high court. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called it “a win” for the rule of law, while advocates swiftly criticized the ruling.

“When you undermine the civil rights of those who are more vulnerable, you undermine the civil rights of everyone else,” Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said Monday during a press conference held near a Home Depot.

Last month, outside a Home Depot in Monrovia, a man ran onto a nearby freeway to flee immigration authorities, and was struck and killed.

The Van Nuys location has been hit particularly hard.

Javier, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who has lived in U.S. states spanning from California to Kansas over the past three decades, said he narrowly escaped three raids at the store, avoiding agents by hiding beneath a truck, peeling off in his car and dashing inside among the busy shoppers.

“They come in big vans and they all go out to chase people,” he said in Spanish, asking that his last name not be used out of fear of government reprisal.

The store sits on property near the Van Nuys Airport that is owned by Los Angeles World Airports, a department in a city whose policies limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement that her office supports the litigation against the sweeps and has trained city workers to prepare for immigration enforcement on city-owned properties.

City councilperson Ysabel Jurado has voiced opposition to a plan for a new Home Depot in her district, contending the company hasn’t done enough to fight the raids.

Chris Newman, legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said “these locations should be protected by the city to the same degree the public libraries are.”

In response to questions about raids at Home Depot stores, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement Tuesday that the agency has made more than 5,400 arrests in the Los Angeles area since early June and is targeting immigrants based on their legal status, not their ethnicity.

“Every day, DHS is enforcing our nation’s laws across all of Los Angeles, not just Home Depot,” she said.

Immigrant advocates say the country’s largest big-box home improvement retailer benefits from having an ample labor pool at the ready for contractors and should do more to protect customers, employees and day laborers.

The Atlanta-based company, with nearly $160 billion in annual sales through Feb. 2, counts on contractors and professionals for about half its business — and that’s a key draw for largely immigrant-day laborers. Its second-ranked competitor, Lowe’s, gets about 30% of its business from contractors, relying more heavily on homeowners and DIY enthusiasts, said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail.

“So if you’re going for the volume, if you’re going where people are, and you can enforce things, you go to Home Depot,” Saunders said.

The raids haven’t hurt overall sales, but the disruptions could affect specific stores by making some customers afraid to shop there, Saunders said.

In the Los Angeles area, the company’s stores saw a 10.7% decline in foot traffic in June from a year ago and a 10% decline in July, according to Placer.ai, an analytics firm that tracks people’s movements based on cellphone usage. That’s a larger drop than the 3.8% and 2.7% declines reported at stores nationwide for the same months.

Home Depot has repeatedly denied being involved in immigration enforcement operations. The company’s late co-founder Bernie Marcus supported Trump, though a Home Depot political action committee has donated to both Democrats and Republicans.

The company said it isn’t told if a raid is going to take place at any of its roughly 2,300 stores.

“We tell associates to report any suspected immigration enforcement activity immediately and not engage with the activity for their safety,” said Beth Marlowe, a company spokesperson, adding that if employees feel uneasy after a raid, they can go home for the rest of the day with pay.

In Van Nuys, witnesses said federal agents have arrested those in the lot before appearing to ask about their immigration status. Local managers have shut the store’s automated glass doors to keep agents out, they said.

“They’re just fishing,” said Luis, a 37-year-old day laborer who is a legal resident and grew up in the United States after arriving from Mexico as a child. He declined to use his last name fearing government reprisal.

The trend of workers gathering outside Home Depot began with the rise of the home improvement retail store that allowed people, including contractors, to price shop and buy materials directly, said Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

“The basis of competition began to shift and what distinguishes a contractor from getting the bid or not more and more has to do with labor costs,” Theodore said. “Home Depot is not an innocent bystander in all of this. Their sources of success were instrumental in catalyzing this change.”

As the trend grew so did complaints about workers congregating in store parking lots, and in 2008 Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring similar retailers opening up to adopt plans to provide relief, such as a seating area, bathrooms and trash facilities.

In the parking lot in Van Nuys, a non-profit runs a labor center that takes workers’ names and tracks employers who fail to pay as promised. That’s one reason workers said they keep returning even after the repeated raids.

The other is community.

Since the raids, Javier said he’s started considering returning to Mexico to wait out the Trump administration. In the meantime, he said he’ll keep coming to Van Nuys to find work.

“It’s a place that becomes familiar,” he said. “Here, all of us together, we’ve become friends.”

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D’Innocenzio reported from New York. Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.