A day laborer waits for job offers near a Home Depot in the Bronx.
Photographer: Oscar B. Castillo/Bloomberg
How Home Depot Parking Lots Turned Into Deportation Hotspots
Undocumented day laborers have been gathering at the fringes of America’s biggest home-improvement retailer for decades. Federal agents are turning up there, too.
As President Donald Trump deployed thousands of troops into Los Angeles last weekend, a national group that helps day laborers called for the city’s residents to stage a parallel deployment. “Go to Home Depot, any Home Depot near you,” said a June 8 statement from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, “and stand with the immigrants who are being seized and taken away.”
It’s not even an open secret that Home Depot, with more than 2,000 stores across the US, is seen as a fixture in the off-the-books market for day laborers, the vast majority of whom are undocumented. It’s been that way for more than a generation — roughly 30 years ago, the same group cited Home Depot Inc. as one of the businesses that needed to improve conditions for day laborers. Few other major American retailers are as enmeshed in national immigration issues like those that have boiled over into rolling street confrontations in Los Angeles and other cities over the past week.