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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A pamphlet needs to be printed to be handed out at ICE raids to agents, or perhaps dropped in bulk from a drone, that reads:
The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to due process to "persons," not just "citizens." This is a key distinction that extends this fundamental right to a broader group, including non-citizens.
The Fifth Amendment (applies to the federal government):
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury... nor shall any person... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 242, also known as "Deprivation of rights under color of law," is a key federal civil rights statute:
§ 242. Deprivation of rights under color of law
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section, or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.
The agents who chased an alien into traffic, resulting in his death, could under this statute be subject to the death penalty. The current regime won't last forever.
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.