ICE Out of Home Depot

Campaign Organizer: NDLON

Send a postcard to Home Depot’s CEO and Executive Vice-President

The Trump Administration has turned every Home Depot into a giant trap for human beings. Because immigrant workers gather outside Home Depot to find jobs to feed their families, ICE goes there to easily kidnap them. And Home Depot is doing nothing to stop them.

The raids are happening over and over, all over the country. They are terrifying, chaotic and sometimes deadly. Carlos Roberto Montoya, a day laborer from Guatemala, was killed in August in Monrovia, near Los Angeles, as he fled a Home Depot raid. He ran onto the freeway and was hit by a car.

The Home Depot company has not resisted or condemned these raids. It has not publicly demanded that the Administration stop assaulting and abducting people on and outside its properties. As far as we know, it hasn’t even been asked.

Home Depot’s silence and inaction make it a passive partner in ICE atrocities. With every new raid, it is helping ICE to meet its arrest quotas, to fill its private prisons, to spread fear and anguish in our communities.

This must stop. In the name of Carlos Roberto Montoya and all other victims of the Home Depot raids, we will do all in our power to make it stop.

Today we make these demands of Home Depot.

Publicly condemn the raids. Tell the truth about what is happening on and near your properties: Immigration agents are violently, recklessly and seemingly randomly targeting brown people. Their evidently unlawful actions are terrorizing and put customers, workers and the community in danger.

Demand that they stop. Tell the Trump Administration that it cannot send ICE or partner agencies onto Home Depot premises to conduct surveillance, commit violence or carry out unlawful kidnappings.

Keep people safe. When ICE is conducting a Home Depot raid, store managers should close and lock the doors and gates to keep agents out and to keep customers and workers safe inside.

Set clear rules. Issue a consistent policy and protocols that are binding on every store manager and associate across the country. As a private business, Home Depot has the right to lock down stores and deny access to potential federal agents and bounty hunters who do not present a valid judicial warrant to justify an arrest.

Help the victims. Provide resources to families that have been harmed by raids on Home Depot property, for needs like financial support and legal defense.

Release the videos. Share with the public all security video and other footage of enforcement actions at Home Depot stores, to help in documenting unlawful assaults, harassment and arrests of customers and workers.

Home Depot did not start out as the store where contractors and homeowners pick up both workers and supplies. But for the last 30 years, the company has profited from day laborers who gather at their stores. Informal hiring has become a key part of Home Depot’s do-it-yourself business model.

The arrangement has benefited everyone involved. Since the 1990’s, the company has profited and grown. Shareholders, contractors, homeowners have all reaped the benefits. So have immigrant laborers. Many who started with nothing have survived and thrived, learned skills — and made their communities stronger, sturdier, cleaner and more beautiful.

Home Depot’s slogan is, “Home Depot: How doers get more done.” A more accurate slogan would be: “Home Depot: How ICE meets its quotas.”

Home Depot did not ask to be ground zero for Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, but now it is. It has become a hub for injustice, cruelty and violence.

The only question that needs answering now is — what will Home Depot do to stop this?