Why Home Depot has become a flashpoint in Trump’s immigration crackdown

Why Home Depot has become a flashpoint in Trump’s immigration crackdown

For decades, Home Depot car parks across the United States have doubled as informal hiring hubs. Carpenters, painters, roofers and drywall installers, many of them immigrants, gather early in the morning hoping contractors will pick them up for a day’s work. The arrangement has long been tolerated, even if never officially endorsed by the company. Under President Donald Trump’s aggressive push to deport one million immigrants a year, these familiar scenes have taken on a new and far more volatile meaning, the Financial Times reported.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have carried out arrests outside Home Depot stores in cities including New Orleans, Chicago and Charlotte. In Oregon, a video showed masked agents escorting a man through store aisles. Such images have propelled the home improvement chain into the centre of the immigration debate.

Protests, boycotts and accusations

Footage of arrests has triggered protests outside several Home Depot locations. Activist groups accused the company of allowing its premises to be used for immigration round-ups and attempted to organise a boycott over the Black Friday shopping weekend. Campaigners argued that the arrests amounted to intimidation of immigrant communities and claimed Home Depot was effectively enabling federal enforcement actions.

Home Depot has strongly denied those allegations. In a statement, the company said it does not co-ordinate with ICE or US Border Patrol and is not informed in advance of enforcement activity. It added that it cannot legally interfere with federal agents carrying out their duties.

The legal grey zone

At the heart of the controversy is a murky legal question. Home Depot stores are private property but open to the public. Whether a retailer can bar law enforcement from such spaces is unsettled. Some lawyers argue that police and federal agents cannot be excluded from publicly accessible areas like car parks. Others say property owners retain broad rights to control access.

John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE, said a retailer could theoretically post signs barring law enforcement, but how courts would respond is uncertain. Michael Neifach, a former ICE legal adviser, said that when businesses invite the public in, they generally cannot exclude police from those areas.

Even where a legal right exists, many lawyers say exercising it would be impractical. Confronting armed federal agents risks legal exposure for staff, reputational damage and closer scrutiny from authorities.

Why construction workers are targeted

Undocumented workers are disproportionately concentrated in construction. Of the estimated 8.5 million undocumented workers in the US in 2023, about 20 per cent worked in construction, according to the Center for Migration Studies. That reality makes places like Home Depot particularly attractive to enforcement agencies looking for arrests that can be made quickly and visibly.

Immigration advocates argue that this strategy is deliberate. They say parking-lot arrests are easier than workplace raids and send a chilling message to immigrant communities. Lawyers representing detained workers report that some were arrested after simply purchasing supplies for jobs.

The business impact

It remains unclear whether the controversy is affecting Home Depot’s sales. Customer traffic is down slightly this year, though analysts attribute most of that decline to high interest rates and a sluggish housing market rather than immigration enforcement. At a recent investor conference, executives were not asked publicly about the raids.

Still, advocates warn of longer-term risks. If undocumented workers avoid Home Depot out of fear, contractors may struggle to find labour, and the informal ecosystem that supports renovation and repair work could be disrupted.

A wider signal from Washington

The US Department of Homeland Security has said it is ramping up enforcement nationwide and has declined to comment on specific operations at retailers. The administration has already deported more than 600,000 undocumented immigrants this year.

For Home Depot, the situation highlights how private companies can be pulled into political battles beyond their control. What was once a mundane feature of store parking lots has become a frontline in a broader immigration crackdown, exposing unresolved legal questions and deep tensions between enforcement priorities, business realities and immigrant livelihoods.