SCOOP: Home Depot Shareholders to Vote on Whether Parking Lot Cameras Are Helping ICE Find Customers
A vote at the company's May 21 annual meeting could force the retail giant to account for how its license plate reader network may be enabling immigration enforcement near its stores.
WASHINGTON — Every time you pull into a Home Depot parking lot, there’s a camera reading your license plate. The company hired a vendor called Flock Safety to install them. Flock’s network connects to federal authorities. And now, two shareholders are forcing the question that Home Depot’s board would rather not answer: Is this company helping immigration enforcement find its own customers?
The question goes to a vote on May 21.
Item 8 on the agenda for Home Depot’s 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders — virtual only, 9 a.m. Eastern — is a shareholder proposal filed by Neil Fisher and Meryl Loonin. They are asking the company’s Board of Directors to produce a report assessing the risks to customers’ data privacy rights that result from Home Depot sharing sensitive data with third parties. The data in question includes gender, race, ethnicity, and geolocation.
The vehicle is Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Reader cameras — ALPRs, in the business — deployed across Home Depot locations nationwide. According to the proponents’ filing, Flock’s network is accessible to federal law enforcement. The proposal cites what it calls “frequent immigration enforcement raids occurring near its stores” as a source of reputational risk.
That is a careful, lawyerly way of saying something plainly: if ICE wants to know who drove to Home Depot, the infrastructure may already exist to tell them.
The Board of Directors recommends shareholders vote against the proposal. Its position is that existing safeguards and internal risk management programs are sufficient to handle the concern.
That answer will not satisfy everyone who shops at Home Depot.
The company’s customer base includes millions of immigrants — documented and undocumented alike — who buy lumber, pipe fittings, and paint to build and maintain the homes of this country. Those customers have no way of knowing, when they pull off the highway and into the lot, that a networked camera is recording their presence and linking it to a plate that can be queried by federal agents.
The proposal requires a vote because it is considered a non-routine matter under exchange rules. That means banks and brokers holding shares in street name cannot cast a vote on their clients’ behalf without explicit instructions. Shareholders of record as of March 23, are eligible to vote.
Home Depot is not alone in facing this kind of scrutiny. Across corporate America, the question of what data companies collect, who can access it, and under what legal authority is colliding with an immigration enforcement environment that has grown more aggressive by the week. The difference here is that the mechanism — a private surveillance vendor with federal reach embedded in a retail parking lot — has a name: Flock Safety.
Whether shareholders will demand accountability, or ratify the board’s position that everything is fine, will be known on May 21.
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WTF
The guy that owns and started Home Depot is a major Trumper and always has been. I absolutely never shop at Home Depot. Absolutely no way.