Home Depot stores, long a hub for day laborers, now draw immigration agents out on raids

LOS ANGELES (AP) — 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.

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 since June, 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 prime 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 Donald 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 press conference held near a Home Depot.

Last month, outside a Home Depot in Monrovia, a man ran onto a nearby freeway to flee immigration authorities, and was struck and killed.

The Van Nuys location has been hit particularly hard.

Javier, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who has lived in U.S. states spanning from California to Kansas over the past three decades, said he narrowly escaped three raids at the store, avoiding agents by hiding beneath a truck, peeling off in his car and dashing inside among the busy shoppers.

“They come in big vans and they all go out to chase people,” he said in Spanish, asking that his last name not be used out of fear of government reprisal.

The store sits on property near the Van Nuys Airport that is owned by Los Angeles World Airports, a department in a city whose policies limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement that her office supports the litigation against the sweeps and has trained city workers to prepare for immigration enforcement on city-owned properties.

City councilperson Ysabel Jurado has voiced opposition to a plan for a new Home Depot in her district, contending the company hasn’t done enough to fight the raids.

Chris Newman, legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said “these locations should be protected by the city to the same degree the public libraries are."

In response to questions about raids at Home Depot stores, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement Tuesday that the agency has made more than 5,400 arrests in the Los Angeles area since early June and is targeting immigrants based on their legal status, not their ethnicity.

“Every day, DHS is enforcing our nation’s laws across all of Los Angeles, not just Home Depot,” she said.

Immigrant advocates say the country’s largest big-box home improvement retailer benefits from having an ample labor pool at the ready for contractors and should do more to protect customers, employees and day laborers.

The Atlanta-based company, with nearly $160 billion in annual sales through Feb. 2, counts on contractors and professionals for about half its business — and that's a key draw for largely immigrant-day laborers. Its second-ranked competitor, Lowe's, gets about 30% of its business from contractors, relying more heavily on homeowners and DIY enthusiasts, said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail.

“So if you’re going for the volume, if you’re going where people are, and you can enforce things, you go to Home Depot,” Saunders said.

The raids haven’t hurt overall sales, but the disruptions could affect specific stores by making some customers afraid to shop there, Saunders said.

In the Los Angeles area, the company’s stores saw a 10.7% decline in foot traffic in June from a year ago and a 10% decline in July, according to Placer.ai, an analytics firm that tracks people’s movements based on cellphone usage. That’s a larger drop than the 3.8% and 2.7% declines reported at stores nationwide for the same months.

Home Depot has repeatedly denied being involved in immigration enforcement operations. The company’s late co-founder Bernie Marcus supported Trump, though a Home Depot political action committee has donated to both Democrats and Republicans.

The company said it isn't told if a raid is going to take place at any of its roughly 2,300 stores.

“We tell associates to report any suspected immigration enforcement activity immediately and not engage with the activity for their safety,” said Beth Marlowe, a company spokesperson, adding that if employees feel uneasy after a raid, they can go home for the rest of the day with pay.

In Van Nuys, witnesses said federal agents have arrested those in the lot before appearing to ask about their immigration status. Local managers have shut the store's automated glass doors to keep agents out, they said.

“They're just fishing,” said Luis, a 37-year-old day laborer who is a legal resident and grew up in the United States after arriving from Mexico as a child. He declined to use his last name fearing government reprisal.

The trend of workers gathering outside Home Depot began with the rise of the home improvement retail store that allowed people, including contractors, to price shop and buy materials directly, said Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

“The basis of competition began to shift and what distinguishes a contractor from getting the bid or not more and more has to do with labor costs,” Theodore said. “Home Depot is not an innocent bystander in all of this. Their sources of success were instrumental in catalyzing this change.”

As the trend grew so did complaints about workers congregating in store parking lots, and in 2008 Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring similar retailers opening up to adopt plans to provide relief, such as a seating area, bathrooms and trash facilities.

In the parking lot in Van Nuys, a non-profit runs a labor center that takes workers' names and tracks employers who fail to pay as promised. That's one reason workers said they keep returning even after the repeated raids.

The other is community.

Since the raids, Javier said he's started considering returning to Mexico to wait out the Trump administration. In the meantime, he said he'll keep coming to Van Nuys to find work.

“It's a place that becomes familiar,” he said. “Here, all of us together, we've become friends.”

D'Innocenzio reported from New York. Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

A day laborer waits for work in the parking lot of a Home Depot in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles, TAug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

A day laborer eats his meal near a Home Depot sign in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles, Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Luis poses with a megaphone used to alert other day laborers of ICE operations in the parking lot of a Home Depot in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

A table covered with a cloth reading "ICE Out of LA" sits under a canopy next to the job center for day laborers outside a Home Depot in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Workers walk toward a food vendor past a Home Depot sign in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — Nickolay Mladenov, the man chosen to serve as director-general for U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace in Gaza, is a Bulgarian politician and former U.N. envoy to the Middle East who frequently worked to ease tensions between Israel and Hamas.

His appointment — announced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and confirmed by a U.S. official — makes him the top official in an unproven international body tasked with governing the Gaza Strip under the next phase of a fragile U.S.-brokered ceasefire after two years of war.

According to the ceasefire agreement, the authority — to be chaired by Trump — is supposed to supervise a new technocratic Palestinian government, the disarmament of Hamas, the deployment of an international security force, additional pullbacks of Israeli troops and reconstruction.

The 53-year-old Mladenov has long been involved in Middle Eastern politics with solid expertise in the region’s dynamic developments.

He is a former Bulgarian defense and foreign minister who served as the U.N. envoy to Iraq before being appointed as the U.N. Mideast peace envoy from 2015-2020.

Milen Keremedchiev, a former diplomat and expert on Middle East politics, said Mladenov’s appointment is the result of his significant contributions to peace, adding that he had earned the trust of both Israel and the Palestinians.

“Bulgaria has long been perceived as a moderate country, one that has avoided extremes in this particularly acute conflict,” Keremedchiev said, adding that during his tenure as foreign minister, Mladenov consistently maintained a carefully balanced approach to the Middle East.

“This approach was positively received by both the Arab world and the State of Israel. Bulgaria’s position has traditionally been one of balance, and he was steadfast in preserving that stance,” he told The Associated Press in an interview in Sofia.

Retired Israeli diplomat Alon Bar, who served as the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director-general for the U.N. and international organizations during Mladenov’s tenure, said it was a “distinct pleasure” working with him.

Bar said that serving as a U.N. envoy is a difficult task given Israel’s long history of rocky relations with the world body, but that Mladenov managed to gain Israel's confidence.

“He was able to create a relationship of trust with the political echelon in Israel, including Prime Minister Netanyahu,” he said. “At the same time, there was a lot of confidence he created on the Palestinian side.”

Mladenov served as the top U.N. envoy in Iraq from 2013 to 2015, before then-U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed him as the organization’s top Mideast envoy. During that job, he helped to defuse cross-border violence between Israel and Hamas and keep up the idea of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In Bulgaria, Mladenov held the position of defense minister for a year, before serving as foreign minister from 2010 to 2013, during the uprisings in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring when Syria also descended into civil war.

In 2012, he hosted in Bulgaria the first-ever meeting of the Syrian opposition, which brought together representatives of various factions that oppose Bashar Assad’s government. The forum ended with a joint declaration that marked the start of a structured dialogue between the various opposition groups.

In the early years of his political career, Mladenov founded the European Institute in Sofia and was its director until 2001. That same year, he was elected a member of the National Assembly on the ticket of the center-right Union of Democratic Forces.

In 2007, Mladenov was elected a member of the European Parliament, where he met his wife, Gergana, the mother of their three children.

As a sign of recognition for his peace efforts in the Middle East, he received in February 2021 the Grand Star of the Order of Jerusalem, awarded by the Palestinian president to officials, envoys, and prominent figures in recognition of their service.

“He knows us, and he knows the Israelis very well, which is a significant advantage,” said Ahmed Majdalani, a Palestinian former minister and member of the PLO Executive Committee. “I believe he is very well-suited for the position."

Currently, Mladenov is based in the United Arab Emirates, where he was appointed to run the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy.

The diplomat holds master’s degrees in War Studies from King’s College London and International Relations from the University of National and World Economy in Sofia.

Bar, the Israeli diplomat, said Mladenov in his diplomacy was focused “not only on declarations and statements, but on trying to connect and trying to find bridges and trying to see where are the places where the positions of Israel, the Palestinians could meet.”

He said these skills would serve him well in his newest position.

“I think it is good news that he’s coming back to this place for this very difficult task,” Bar said. “I think he’s the right man for the job.”

Associated Press writer Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed reporting.

CORRECTED NAME SPELLING - FILE - United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov leaves after a press conference, in Gaza City, Feb. 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File)

CORRECTED NAME SPELLING - FILE - United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov attends a press conference at the (UNSCO) offices in Gaza City, Sept. 25, 2017. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File)