At Home Depot, Ice raids terrorize the workers who helped build LA: ‘They just come and grab you'

Yahoo

6 hours ago

The white vans zipped into the parking lot of the Home Depot in central Los Angeles.
Pedro watched from the corner as masked federal immigration agents emerged before grabbing and handcuffing people.
There were a hundred or so day laborers milling about the home improvement megastore's sprawling parking lot – soliciting construction work from homeowners and contractors – plus Home Depot shoppers and a number of food vendors. Everyone was suddenly frantic.
It took a few seconds for Pedro to grasp what he was seeing. Unlike most of the other workers and vendors there, the 27-year-old from Mexico had a legal residency status, so he jumped up to help, trying to usher away workers. Schools were out for the summer, so a couple of the vendors had brought their children with them that day. 'Imagine – young children,' he said. 'They all started to run.'
That raid – and subsequent ones at a nearby garment manufacturer in downtown LA – sparked massive protests in LA, which the Trump administration tried to quell by mobilizing thousands of national guard troops. It also disrupted and destabilized the little economy at the Home Depot parking lot, along Wilshire Boulevard and Burlington Avenue, in ways that Pedro said he's still trying to understand.
In the days after, vendors selling lunch and fruits stopped coming. Hardly any workers came. 'Look – nothing, just silence,' Pedro said as he gestured around. 'I have never seen anything like this before. Not here. Never here in LA.'
The immigration enforcement raids in California have been targeting undocumented immigrant workers all across southern California – at donut shops, car washes, factories and farms.
But among the most common sites have been Home Depots. The chain has long maintained an unofficial, symbiotic relationship with the undocumented laborers who gather in store parking lots, hoping to get hired for a day of painting, landscaping or roofing.
Federal agents trialled the tactic in January, when they rounded up immigrants at a Home Depot in California's agricultural Kern county. Over the past week, agents have visited Home Depot parking lots in the LA suburbs of Huntington Park, Santa Ana and Whittier.
'These workers, this community, has been here for decades,' said Jorge Nicolás, a senior organizer at a day labor center called Central American Resource Center (Carecen). The group maintains a resource center for workers abutting the Home Depot lot in LA's Westlake neighborhood, near downtown. On Fridays, the organization distributes food there – but since the raid, they have stopped, to avoid putting workers and families at risk.
'There's a lot of emotions, a lot of sadness,' he said.
There is also indignation. The raids have entrapped the very immigrant workers who have built, roofed, painted and wired much of the city, he said. Many of these workers have been helping clean and rebuild communities in LA that burned in fires that raged across the region this winter.
Nicolás was nearby when the agents arrived on Friday.
For laborers who escaped military juntas and gang violence in their home countries, the masked, armed agents triggered painful flashbacks to cartel kidnappings. 'It looked like a war zone,' he said.
Lawyers said they had been blocked from speaking to immigrants who were held in the basement of federal administrative buildings in downtown LA for days, without adequate food or water. Some were transferred to detention centers in California's high desert, or in Texas. At least a handful of people were deported to Mexico almost immediately, according to lawyers.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) flatly denied that attorneys had been barred from seeing detained clients. 'These allegations are FALSE,' spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, despite documented evidence that attorneys and even congressional representatives were barred from speaking to detainees this week.
In the days following the raids, Nicolás and other advocates struggled to track the day laborers who had been arrested. 'It really does look like a kidnapping,' he said.
Agents have picked off people with brown skin seemingly at random, said Nicolás. 'Even workers with legal status are worried.'
On Monday, Eduardo saw another raid unfold at a Home Depot in Huntington Park, a city where nearly 97% of residents are Latino or Hispanic.
'They just come and grab you, like grabbing a baby,' said the 45-year-old day laborer. 'They don't ask any questions.'
He watched the whole thing from inside his flatbed truck. It was so fast – all of a sudden, a rush of vans, and a flood of armed agents.
He got lucky – they didn't look his way.
'It is difficult to describe. It is a terrible fear,' he said. 'It feels like a sandbag falling on your body. Your vision starts to darken – because the American dream is escaping you at that moment. And all you can do is dream of your land, imagine what it would be to go back after so many years.'
Eduardo came to the US from Honduras 18 years ago. His older daughter is almost 24, and his younger is nine, and they were worried about him returning to the Home Depot on Thursday. He was worried, too. 'But they already came, and they left me alone,' he said, shrugging. 'And I need the work.'
Only two other laborers and a couple of food vendors decided to take the risk that day. There seemed to be fewer Home Depot shoppers as well.
Across the lot, Carlos, 48, was scanning the half-empty scene. On a typical day, he would make $200, maybe even $300, selling fruit out of the back of his minivan. But since the raids began, he's scarcely seen a customer. He expects he'll make maybe $50 this week, if he's lucky.
He was at home when the raid happened, and friends messaged him to warn him not to come. He returned to the Home Depot the next day, despite the objections from his nine-year-old son, who was terrified he wouldn't come back. But he's a single dad, and he has to make rent. 'I told him God watches over us,' he said.
Across the city, day laborers and street vendors were similarly weighing the dangers of showing up to work against the risks of staying home and losing income.
On Thursday in Paramount – a predominantly Latino suburb of LA, where the presence of federal agents last Saturday triggered a roaring protest – there were no workers outside the local Home Depot.
But larger numbers of customers and workers had begun to return to Home Depot in the Westlake neighborhood – which was among several locations hit by federal agents in central LA on Friday – after volunteers showed up this week to patrol the street corners for Ice agents. 'Now we're ready for them,' said Diego, a 75-year-old day laborer and sometime flower vendor from Guatemala.
Still, everybody was on edge. There was far less work than usual, far fewer customers slowing their cars. 'When someone does stop, there's like a mountain of workers rushing over,' he said. 'And usually they just want to hire one or two people.'
Even if the lot looks the same as always, said Daniel, 45, it's not. 'Everything is different since the raid. Nothing is the same,' he said.
He plans to look for work here for as long as he can. 'We are here because of the luck of the draw,' he said. 'We do not know what is going to happen from here on.'
Note: The Guardian is not using the full names of any workers in this piece, to protect their privacy and safety