Home Depot is Embarrassing
As migrants are chased into traffic and slammed to the pavement, Home Depot insists it doesn’t coordinate with ICE. Communities aren’t buying it.
WASHINGTON — You go to Home Depot to buy nails, a two-by-four, maybe a gallon of paint. But in the parking lot, under that big orange sign, America gets built by the people who never go inside. Men and women with tool belts and paint-splattered jeans stand around waiting for a day’s work that’ll pay in cash. They fix the roofs after wildfires, rebuild schools after storms, patch up the drywall after some kid puts his fist through it.
And that’s where the government goes hunting.
In Los Angeles’s Westlake neighborhood, federal agents came in June like extras in a bad cop show—masks on, trucks blocking exits. They grabbed everyone: a fruit vendor, a roofer, even a U.S. citizen, a PhD student who happened to be filming. He got slammed to the pavement for his trouble.
Weeks later came “Operation Trojan Horse.” Border Patrol rolled up to another Home Depot in a rented Penske truck, like they were delivering plywood. Sixteen people detained. Six with old charges. Ten guilty of nothing but standing in the wrong lot at the wrong time.
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Then Monrovia. A man, terrified, running from ICE, darted across the 210 Freeway. He didn’t make it. You could say the car killed him. But the truth is, ICE chased him into traffic. That’s where this policy leads—straight into the morgue.
Home Depot insists it doesn’t coordinate with immigration agents, doesn’t know when raids are coming. Maybe. But when your lots keep becoming crime scenes, “we don’t know” starts to sound like “we don’t care.”
Pull back, and the pattern sharpens. These aren’t random stings; they’re part of a strategy. The Trump administration wants numbers—3,000 arrests a day. To feed the quota, federal agents target the most visible and vulnerable workers.
Day laborers at Home Depot aren’t hiding. They’ve been there for decades, part of an informal hiring system that undergirds the American economy. But these raids turn an open-air job site into a stage set for political theater.
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The justification is gangs like MS-13, but arrest records tell the real story: most detainees have no serious criminal history. The point isn’t justice. It’s fear. Fear in Westlake. Fear in Pomona. Fear on Florin Road in Sacramento. Fear on Rhode Island Avenue in D.C.
And the corporations, the institutions, the politicians—they get to choose where they stand. Home Depot pleads neutrality. But neutrality, in practice, looks like complicity. It looks like mothers in Van Nuys waiting for calls that never come. It looks like the widow in Monrovia, left to bury her husband after he ran from the orange-vested ghosts of deportation.
The irony is that these workers—Guatemalans, Hondurans, Mexicans, Salvadorans—are the very people who rebuild this country when it falls apart. After the floods, after the fires, after the earthquakes, they’re the ones hammering shingles back onto your roof. The raids don’t just break families. They break communities. They starve local economies. They make people afraid to show up to work, and customers afraid to show up to shop.
History will not remember these sweeps as isolated operations. It will remember them as part of a broader campaign to redefine who belongs here, to turn a hardware store parking lot into a battlefield over American identity.
A nation that treats its builders as criminals is a nation tearing down its own house.
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Your article reminds me of a theme In another article I read this morning. This regime wants us to fail. They love playing the victim. If they actually had to govern they can’t do that. When this starts to tank the economy they will take no responsibility. Let alone the disgusting dehumanization of it all. It’s grotesque. I am so ashamed of our government.
I’m ashamed of Home Depot. I am cutting up my credit card and returning it to them telling them why and am boycotting them from now on. All those who go there looking for good and willing and capable hard working people are also getting something of value for cheap and are they standing up for the workers being rounded up like criminals?