When the roving immigration raids began in 2025, some of the first places to be consistently hit with brutal force by ICE were locations of The Home Depot, among other sites frequented by day laborers.
That corporation’s retail locations have remained a major focus of raids and targeted enforcement actions, even leading to the establishment of community defense hubs that specifically patrol Home Depot parking lots and other hotspots for ICE and Border Patrol and provide mutual aid.
The Border Patrol agents working out of Terminal Island conducted some of these raids across Southern California cities, from Santa Ana to the San Fernando Valley, including the infamous “Trojan Horse” raid in which Border Patrol jumped out of a Penske truck at Home Depot’s Wilshire location in Los Angeles.
There was even a fatality during one of these parking lot raids, when Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdes was killed by the driver of a moving vehicle as he attempted to flee from ICE agents who were detaining people at a Home Depot in Monrovia.