Home Depot stores have become a target for immigration agents

At a Home Depot parking lot, a man patrols on a bicycle for federal immigration agents, toting a megaphone on his hip so he can blast a warning to day laborers waiting to land a landscaping or construction job.

- BY AMY TAΧΙΝ AND ANNE D’INNOCENZIO

DAVID BUTOW For The Times

HOME DEPOT has long been an informal job-seeking hub for day laborers. Above, the store in Westlake.

The workers from Mexico, El Salvador and elsewhere carry whistles to also sound the alarm, while activists swap details over two-way radios about whether cars whizzing by could be unmarked vehicles carrying officers preparing for a raid.

Their work is cut out for them. Agents have raided the lot outside the 108,000-square-foot Home Depot store in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles at least five times this summer, rounding up some immigrants and sending others running in search of safety.

Home Depot stores in Southern California have long been an informal job-seeking hub for day laborers in the country both legally and illegally. Now the locations have become a target for immigration agents.

In fact, Home Depot was reportedly mentioned as a target for immigration raids by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of President Trump’s immigration policies, earlier this year.

At least a dozen Home Depot stores have been targeted, some of them repeatedly, in Southern California since the administration stepped up its immigration crackdown this summer.

Immigrant advocates sued over the raids, but on Monday the Supreme Court cleared the way for federal agents to continue conducting sweeping immigration operations for now in Los Angeles, the latest victory for the Trump administration at the high court. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called it “a win” for the rule of law, while advocates swiftly criticized the ruling.

“When you undermine the civil rights of those who are more vulnerable, you undermine the civil rights of everyone else,” Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said Monday during a news conference held near a Home Depot.