Summer is the busiest time of the year for immigrant day laborers outside Home Depot, picking up jobs as roofers, painters and construction workers.
But the usual crowd of both legal and undocumented workers has vanished from many Home Depot parking lots.
Dozens of day laborers in recent months have been arrested outside various stores around Los Angeles, New York City and Baltimore, fueling national protests. Top White House official Stephen Miller directed ICE officials in late May to target day laborers at Home Depot and other businesses, the Wall Street Journal reported, part of the Trump administration’s deportation push.
“Right now, I’m behind on my rent because I’m scared of getting detained at the corner of Home Depot or having an encounter with ICE,” one undocumented day laborer who has been in the United States for a decade told CNN in Spanish.
This worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of deportation, has stopped looking for jobs outside a Home Depot in East Windsor, New Jersey. “This is the most important season for us to work, and the fear is stopping us from going out.”
It’s no accident that Home Depot is at the center of a volatile fight over immigration. The fifth largest US retail chain has a fraught, decades-long connection to day laborers, or jornaleros.
As Home Depot spread across America beginning in the 1980s, an informal economy of day laborers looking for work, mostly from Mexico and South America, grew around the company’s sprawling parking lots in cities and suburbs with large immigrant populations.
The relationship has been, at times, symbiotic. Home Depot benefits as a one-stop shop for small contractors and homeowners to find the tools and materials for projects and workers needed to complete them. Day laborers with limited transportation gain access to a popular, centralized hiring point.
But the complex ties between day laborers and Home Depot are broken.
“We don’t know what to do,” said the worker, who is affiliated with the worker advocacy group Resistencia en Acción NJ. Outside Home Depot “we don’t have any sort of protection, we’re out in the open, and only God looks over us.”
‘Politics, protest and anti-immigrant hostility’
Home Depot told CNN it isn’t notified when ICE operations will happen or involved in coordination, and it’s required to follow local and federal laws. When an ICE agent arrives, Home Depot asks employees to report incidents and avoid interactions with immigration officials.
Home Depot’s role as one of the country’s largest hiring sites for day laborers — and an easy target for ICE raids — stems from larger social and economic forces, including the growth of illegal immigration; changes in the construction industry; the company’s dominance; and the boom-and-bust cycle of the housing market.
“Day laborers have emerged as on-demand workforce at Home Depot as a result of these huge trends,” said Nik Theodore, an urban policy professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and one of the country’s leading researchers on day laborers. But “Home Depot is part of this story. They’re not just innocent bystanders. The success of the company has helped create these conditions.”
To many people, the image of day laborers waiting for work outside Home Depot has become one of the most visible symbols of a broken immigration system. Anti-immigration groups such as the Minuteman Project and Save Our State picketed outside Home Depot stores in California in the early 2000s. Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio conducted sweeps outside stores in Phoenix during his immigration crackdowns.
“There have been various points in time where day labor hiring sites have become a flash point of politics, protest and anti-immigrant hostility,” Theodore said. “It feels like we’re in one of these moments now.”
Rise of Home Depot and day laborers
No national data on day laborers exists. But a 2006 study by Theodore and other researchers estimated that there were about 117,000 day laborers back then gathered at US home improvement stores, gas stations and other retailers on any given day. The numbers are likely larger now, experts say.
Day laborers are part of “Home Depot’s business model,” said Chris Newman, the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), an advocacy group for day laborers. “Day laborers love Home Depot. And Home Depot’s bottom line loves day laborers.”
Home Depot said it was “incorrect” that day laborers are built into its business model, founded more than 40 years ago. “Home Depot was a new retail concept based on customer service, value and product authority, which still guide our business,” a spokesperson said.
But Home Depot’s expansion has coincided with the growth of the day laborer workforce, especially in construction.
“We don’t feel it’s a Home Depot problem,” a Home Depot official said in 1997 in one of the first articles on day laborers gathering around Los Angeles stores. “But we recognize we’re associated with it.”
Home Depot supported the rise of do-it-yourself home remodeling during the 2000s, leading DIYers to seek out skilled day laborers at stores to give them a hand remodeling projects or install appliances.
With stores strategically located near construction hubs in working-class urban and suburban areas, the company’s business model catered to small contractors more than Lowe’s, True Value and Ace Hardware. “Pro” customers— such as general contractors, smaller homebuilders and specialty tradespeople —account for half of Home Depot’s roughly $160 billion in annual sales.
But Home Depot’s success also eliminated an important source of profit for contractors. The chain’s popularity drove out smaller stores, which meant contractors could no longer make money buying supplies at wholesale costs and then marking up prices for customers. That forced contractors to save money where they could, fueling demand for a low wage, contingent workforce.
“Labor costs became the deciding factor on whether a contractor won a bid or not,” Theodore said. “Because of the need to hire people on demand, labor markets formed outside Home Depot.”
This pool of cheap, flexible labor has helped the volatile construction industry fill a void, especially during strong housing cycles. The construction industry has a shortage of nearly 500,000 workers, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group.
Roughly 30% of workers in the construction industry are immigrants, with higher rates in states like Texas, New York and California. More than 20% of the entire industry’s workforce is undocumented, according to estimates from the progressive think tank Center for American Progress.
Nuisance politics
The rise of day laborers has created thorny problems for Home Depot.
These workers operate in the blurred lines between private and public spaces, and they raise questions about worker protections for day laborers and public safety. But company and local government policies surrounding these issues are often fragmented.
For example, some cities have banned soliciting work on public streets and sidewalks, while others have come to view day laborers as features of big-box improvement stores’ businesses. Los Angeles in 2008 passed legislation requiring new big-box home improvement stores to provide shelter and basic amenities for day laborers. New York City and others have helped fund day laborer centers.
But two of Home Depot’s co-founders — Bernard Marcus, who died last year, and Ken Langone, who no longer has a role in the company — have been major donors to Trump and outspoken supporters of his agenda.
And while Home Depot has an official no-solicitation policy for its stores, it’s enforced at the discretion of individual store managers and security personnel. Some specific stores do crack down on day laborers waiting outside if there are issues in parking lots, or if they get complaints from customers or lawmakers.
Non-profit groups that organize day laborers and advocate on their behalf, known as worker centers, were formed to root out wage theft and violations among this highly-exploitable workforce. Worker centers often have inconsistent relationships with the company.
Last year, a Home Depot in New Rochelle, New York, began patrolling the parking lot with security guards and dogs, and two laborers were arrested for trespassing, said Jackeline Agudelo, the executive director of the United Community Center of Westchester. The arrests sparked demonstrations outside the store.
Agudelo said the group had worked with day laborers there for more than a decade and “had a very good relationship with Home Depot until the new manager came in.”
“Home Depot should have been more supportive of the day laborers because they were actually bringing clients to them,” she added.
Home Depot did not comment on the New Rochelle store.
Workers staying home
Day laborers avoiding Home Depot has implications for both workers and the retail giant’s business.
“It’s really sad. These are people that have been here for decades. They are homeowners and people that pay their taxes,” Agudelo said. “They’re doing the jobs that no one else will do without any benefits.”
Community groups and day laborer supporters are trying to pressure Home Depot to set up dedicated locations around stores for day laborers, deny ICE entry to private parking lots without a warrant.
Some supporters are threatening boycotts, which could hurt Home Depot as DIY customers slow down spending and the company tries to step up business with contractors.
“Home Depot won’t speak up for us to say that we’re not doing anything bad. We’re just looking for work,” the undocumented day laborer in New Jersey said.
But it’s difficult work, and the homeowners and contractors who employ day laborers sometimes take advantage of them. There’s no set rate at the beginning of a project for a day’s work, which often stretches to 10 hours, and contractors have driven off without paying, the laborer said. But it pays better than other jobs he can find.
“Mainly, those jobs at Home Depot pay better than restaurants. But right now, seeing the situation, it’s better to look for a job in a restaurant,” he said. Even then, however, “there’s still the chance that ICE shows up at a restaurant and detains us.”
CNN’s Maria Aguilar contributed to this article.