彭博商业周刊长篇特写：家得宝困于冰封房市与特朗普移民执法，但无新增公司事实

The last time Ana Victoria Montoya spoke to her father, he told her he was fearful of being picked up by ICE. It was August 2025, and the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign seemed to be unfolding all around Carlos Roberto Montoya, an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant. Federal agents had recently stormed the parking lot of the Home Depot in Monrovia, California, a Los Angeles suburb, where Montoya regularly waited with other day laborers hoping to be hired by its customers for jobs such as installing Sheetrock and painting walls. Officers had recently grabbed some of Montoya’s friends, but luckily he was at a job site when the agents arrived. Now, he told his daughter in Guatemala, he was being careful, rarely leaving the apartment he shared with six other workers in Compton. But if he wanted to keep sending money back to his wife and their four children and seven grandchildren, he had to go back to the Home Depot.

Early the next morning in Guatemala, Ana received a call from her father’s number. The woman on the line was a stranger. There’d been an accident, she told Ana. An ambulance was coming for her father. The line went dead. Ana tried calling back, but no one answered. She soon learned that there’d been a raid at the Home Depot that day by agents from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which had been carrying out President Donald Trump’s directives. Her father had run and had been struck and killed by a car as he tried to cross nearby Interstate 210. None of it made sense to Ana. Why had a 57-year-old man done something as patently suicidal as dashing across a busy California freeway on a weekday morning? Unless federal agents were chasing him and he had little choice.

There was one thing Ana learned as she tried to find out the truth: Home Depot likely had some visual evidence of what had happened. It had been monitoring its lots with cameras, prompting some immigrant-rights activists to question whether Home Depot Inc. was feeding such data to federal authorities. To provide much-needed answers to Ana and her family, migrant workers’ advocates and local elected officials appealed to the retailer to release footage of the raid. (A Home Depot spokeswoman says the company only shares footage with law enforcement in response to investigations, not the public.)

Montoya’s death resulted in not just the usual “Abolish ICE” chants, but also a backlash directed at Home Depot itself. Protesters accused the company, which has refused to condemn such raids and says it can’t do anything to prevent them, of being complicit in the Trump administration’s crackdown. Montoya’s death spawned a series of national protests at its stores. (Home Depot says accusations of complicity with the Trump administration are meritless. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, parent agency of CPB and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), didn’t directly respond to questions about whether it has coordinated with Home Depot on raids or to more detailed questions, but they said, “Our message is clear: if you come into our country illegally and break our laws, we will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you.”)

Perhaps no retailer has been caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s second term policies more than Home Depot. Others, including Walmart Inc., have had to navigate the tariff onslaught and have preemptively dialed back their diversity policies for fear of drawing ire from the White House. But Home Depot’s parking lots have become backdrops for raids just as Americans have stopped engaging in the national pastime of buying and selling homes, the lifeblood of the world’s largest home-improvement retailer. Trump’s erratic moves have extended what was already a painful housing slowdown, with mortgage rates climbing near a three-year high of 7.5%. Most consumers shop for home-improvement goods when they’re switching addresses — redoing the kitchen or upgrading a bathroom — but with so many people staying put, at best they are buying stuff for the occasional touchup. Contractors, Home Depot’s most lucrative customers, are also being pinched, particularly by tariffs on lumber and steel, which have raised prices on much of what they buy. All this has curtailed the company’s growth in the past three years in a manner unseen since the Great Recession.

As a result, earnings calls for Home Depot, which had sales of $165 billion in fiscal 2025, have taken on a Groundhog Day-like quality. Chief Executive Officer Ted Decker, who’s held his title since 2022, has waxed enthusiastically about everything that will ignite the company’s sales once the market unfreezes — most notably, the millions of homes in need of repairs that their owners have deferred, the trillions of dollars in equity these homeowners will be able to tap once housing becomes more affordable. But quarter after quarter, Decker has had to tell investors he has no idea when that day will come. Instead, he’s reported flat or declining comparable sales growth over the last three years, and Home Depot’s shares have lost more than a quarter of their value since hitting a record high in 2024. Then, on Aug. 12, Home Depot announced its 63-year-old CEO would be taking a leave of absence for an unspecified medical condition, returning “within the next few months.” This news raised questions about who will steer the company through the remainder of Trump’s second term.

The irony of Trump making life difficult for Home Depot is that one of its founders, the late billionaire Bernie Marcus, contributed significantly to his political success. Marcus, who retired as CEO in 1997, became a vociferous Trump supporter in his later years, giving more than $8 million to the president’s campaigns. A year before his death at age 95 in 2024, Marcus, who remains a sainted figure at the company, appealed to his fellow Republican businesspeople to set aside their misgiving about twice-impeached Trump as he ran again for office. “There are people I’ve spoken to that are still sitting on the fence, that don’t know what to do. They dislike the person Trump, but they recognize that the talent is there,” Marcus told ABC News in 2023. “My endorsement helps him in a lot of ways.”

Home Depot’s current predicament probably would have been the furthest thing from the imaginations of Marcus and co-founder Arthur Blank when they opened its first three stores in Atlanta in 1979. After getting fired from a hardware chain, the two were convinced that if they put everything a homeowner desired under one roof and sold it at low prices, they’d transform the home-improvement sector. Within a few years, the US economy was booming, and housing prices soared.

To hear the founders tell it in their jointly penned 1999 memoir, Built From Scratch, their company’s greatest strength was its culture, which they promoted with messianic zeal. Marcus, who became chairman and CEO, and the more cerebral Blank, who took the role of chief operating officer, believed in delegating authority to local store managers. They implored their workers, figuratively one hopes, to “make love to the customer.” That might mean driving to a competitor’s store and purchasing a drill or a power saw for a customer if Home Depot didn’t stock it. “Everyone drank the Kool-Aid. Everybody was bleeding orange,” says Tim Daley, a former Home Depot regional manager and two-decade company veteran.

The company went public in 1981 and later expanded into Texas and then California. It sent groups of associates trolling the parking lots of competing retailers, and when these competitors shuttered, Home Depot sent them boxes of roses painted black. The retailer’s culture also fostered copious amounts of drinking, and senior executives “partied like crazy” with vendors, as the founders chronicled in their memoir. It was probably all great fun, unless perhaps you were a woman. In the late 1990s, Home Depot settled several class-action suits filed by current and former female employees alleging they’d been passed over for promotions or hadn’t been hired in managerial positions. (The company denied wrongdoing.) By that time its stores stretched from coast to coast, and yearly sales reached tens of billions of dollars. When the board decided to recruit the company’s first outside CEO in 2000, Home Depot landed former General Electric Co. executive Bob Nardelli, who’d recently lost a three-way race to succeed Jack Welch.

One subject Home Depot’s founders never touch on in their memoir: As soon as some stores opened their doors, migrant workers, large numbers of them undocumented, often showed up in the parking lots looking for work. They also bought equipment, and some even took the company’s free DIY classes, especially those that were available in Spanish.

Some day laborers aggressively solicited shoppers, going as far as jumping into their cars or fighting over prospective customers. But others waited on the parking lot outskirts for customers to approach them. Migrant workers, who today can earn anywhere from $120 to $200 for daily work, were also willing to tolerate conditions that would be inconceivable for most Americans. Several who spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek say they prefer taking work for homeowners over contractors, who often keep them for hours in the hot sun without breaks or water. Contractors are also more likely to stiff them at the end of the day, knowing undocumented workers can’t take them to court. “We just let it go to avoid conflict,” says a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant standing outside a store in Southern California who declined to give his name for fear of being targeted by federal immigration authorities.

The presence of so many noncitizens outside stores created other headaches for Home Depot. As the national immigration debate heated up in the aughts, its stores were picketed by far-right protesters like the Minutemen, who accused the retailer of facilitating illegal immigration. “That just killed Home Depot because they’re from Georgia,” says Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles, who consulted on immigration issues and occasionally lobbied for the company during this period. “The CEO and almost all the top executives, they’re Republicans. And it just killed them that they were being blamed.” (The company says its executives have supported both parties. Its co-founder Blank is a longtime Democrat.)

Many communities, though, were willing to tolerate noncitizens, viewing them as hard workers just looking to get by, not unlike the people cleaning their homes and washing dishes at restaurants. Federal immigration officials also tended to take a hands-off approach. “I don’t want to say that they were off-limits, but there was not the type of enforcement from an investigative side of the house that was encouraged,” says Jerry Robinette, a former special assistant in charge of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio, where it wasn’t unusual to spot migrant workers loitering in public. “It was just not a priority.”

In such a political climate, Home Depot essentially tried to have it both ways. Officially, it had a nonsolicitation policy in its stores and parking lots. But it often left it to local store managers to deal with the ever-present migrants as they pleased. “We didn’t really pay a lot of attention to them and didn’t really care,” says Steve Mahurin, a former Home Depot senior vice president of merchandising in the ’90s and the early aughts. “I mean, they weren’t bothering us, and in fact, they were helping our customers.”

Things became more complicated when Home Depot embarked on a plan to move aggressively into Southern California. Mike Hernandez, then a Los Angeles city councilman, refused to let the company open stores in his downtown district unless it agreed to allow the city to create day laborer centers adjacent to its parking lots, both to maintain order and to provide migrant workers with shelter and bathrooms. Home Depot wasn’t enthralled with the idea of the centers, believing immigration was the government’s problem, not the private sector’s. “Home Depot was fighting them all along,” Hernandez recalls.

Home Depot’s model, however, relied on incessant growth in the number of stores. It had 930 of them in early 2000, a number that increased more than 50% over the next three years. So Hernandez says the company was receptive when he came up with a plan for the city to float municipal bonds to help pay for the construction of its stores in his district as it had with other large economic development projects. In the end, Home Depot agreed to allow two city-funded day laborer centers adjacent to stores in LA’s Cypress Park and Westlake neighborhoods. The centers turned out to be not much: a trailer in Cypress Park and a single room, metal-roofed structure in Westlake. (A Home Depot spokeswoman says the company had little choice but to go along with the plan.)

When the Los Angeles City Council started debating a citywide ordinance requiring any new large home-improvement stores to have laborer centers, the company flexed its corporate muscles in Washington. In 2007 the late Johnny Isakson, then a Republican US senator from Georgia, introduced an amendment to a comprehensive immigration bill being debated in Congress that would have barred municipalities from imposing such conditions on large home-improvement stores. In a withering editorial titled “Home Depot Amendment,” the New York Times called the proposal “squalid” and “an extraordinary intrusion of federal power into a local land-use matter.”

The amendment became moot when support for the immigration bill collapsed. The city passed its ordinance in 2008. Home Depot didn’t open any more stores there, but it now had a dominant position in the Los Angeles market, and it essentially went back to business as usual when it came to migrants. By then, undocumented immigrants were playing a significant role in the construction and repair industry, making up 34% of the workforce, according to Pew Research Center.

Jorge Nicolas, a coordinator for the Central American Resource Center of Los Angeles, a nonprofit that runs a day laborer center next to the Home Depot store in Westlake, says some Home Depot store managers have been antagonistic toward migrants. Others let them use the store bathrooms and have donated material to spruce up the centers. “There’s some awesome managers with a big heart,” he says.

Federal immigration officers were willing to leave the migrants alone too, sensing that descending on Home Depots would trigger chaos. “What you are seeing now? It was frowned upon,” says Darius Reeves, a former ICE field director in Baltimore who retired last year. “It’s a hot mess. Everybody’s running through parking lots. It’s insane.”

By 2007, Nardelli’s GE-style top-down reign was over. Among other things, he’d replaced many full-time store workers who’d been plumbers and electricians and excelled at customer handholding with part-timers bereft of such know-how. Meanwhile, Lowe’s Cos., often regarded as a more stylish, decor-focused alternative to Home Depot’s brawnier houseware assortment, became the darling of home improvement sector investors.

Frank Blake, another former GE executive, was installed as CEO. With his Dockers aesthetic and admiration for the company’s founders, Blake won over many of his workers, which helped as the retailer took a hit during the housing market crash. Then Craig Menear, a Home Depot veteran who took over the company in 2014 “drew the lucky straw,” says former regional manager Daley, referring to the home nesting days of the pandemic, when people were renovating with gusto. There was also the debut of Skelly: a 12-foot-tall skeletal Halloween lawn decoration that became the retailer’s viral hit in 2020. Skelly made cameos in a Dunkin’ commercial, became an on-stage mascot for Duran Duran’s concerts and even spurred a cottage accessories industry on Etsy.

Like Blake, Menear made a point of staying close to the company’s founders, but that was no longer a simple task. By then, Marcus was a Trump supporter, angering some progressive shoppers by pledging his support to Trump’s 2020 reelection bid. Some called for a Home Depot boycott. Trump himself defended his billionaire benefactor and his retail creation. “Fight for Bernie Marcus and Home Depot!” Trump tweeted. The company, which has not taken positions in presidential races, distanced itself from one of its most beloved figures, telling reporters he’d retired years ago and no longer spoke for it.

None of it made a dent in Home Depot’s annual sales, which hit a record $157.4 billion in 2022, up more than 40% from three years before. Menear retired that year, and the company chose Decker, a former teenage landscaping entrepreneur and Home Depot veteran, as his successor. It was probably the worst time to become CEO. Inflation reached levels not seen in decades, the Federal Reserve boosted interest rates, and 30-year fixed mortgage rates, the most common means of financing home purchases in the US, spiked to about 8% in 2023. The grim state of the housing market was bad news not only for Home Depot but also for the Democratic Party’s hopes of retaining the White House in the latter part of the President Joe Biden era. In 2024, the same month Marcus passed away, Trump was reelected.

For all his harsh rhetoric about immigration during his first term, Trump didn’t touch Home Depot parking lots when it came to his policies. Once he’d been reelected, the idea of federal agents rounding up immigrants on the company’s property didn’t seem so terrible to at least one prominent member of his administration. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, held a meeting at the ICE headquarters in May, directing a group of high-level officials to target Home Depot or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Federal agents needed to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” Miller told them, according to the Journal.

The following month, Home Depots in the Los Angeles area became scenes of mayhem. Nicolas, who manages the day laborer center in Westlake, says the first time agents came, they randomly grabbed people in the parking lot. The second time, he says, they chased migrants and threw them on the ground and against the wall before taking them into custody. During another raid, masked men threw smoke bombs and fired rubber bullets at workers while mocking them for being afraid.

In an even more infamous episode, that August, CBP agents carried out what they billed as “Operation Trojan Horse” at the Westlake Home Depot lot. They drove up in a Penske rental truck, then rifle-toting agents jumped out of the back, running after day laborers and detaining 16. Nicolas says Home Depot store workers were aghast. “A cashier was telling me, ‘My grandmother came as an undocumented immigrant,’” he remembers.

In other instances, agents chased migrants into stores. A Mexican immigrant who asked to be identified only as Gonzalez for fear of reprisal, says he tried to hide in the gardening section during the raid at a Home Depot in Whittier, another Los Angeles suburb. Federal agents collared him amid the shrubbery and pool-cleaning products. Gonzalez’s wife and five children are US citizens. He has a California driver’s license, which he produced for the federal agents. “They laughed,” Gonzalez recalls. Following his arrest, he was shuttled between ICE facilities in several states before his family could post his bail. He no longer wears an ankle bracelet, but he has an app on his phone that tracks his whereabouts as he awaits the outcome of his deportation case, the timing of which is uncertain.

Democrats and their political leaders called on Home Depot to condemn the raids and prevent federal agents from entering its stores. The company’s response was the same one it had been giving since June 2025: It has no involvement in the raids and can do nothing to keep agents from ICE or CBP away from its property. This didn’t satisfy Home Depot critics. Maegan Ortiz, executive director of the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, another nonprofit that runs several day laborer centers at Los Angeles stores, says she was taken aback by the response of company officials to whom she appealed for help at a July meeting in the office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. “I was like, ‘Well, are you willing to do anything?’” Ortiz remembers. “They’re like, ‘Well, we should push for comprehensive immigration reform.’ I was like, ‘Are you aware of what federal administration we’re living under?’” (Home Depot’s most forceful pushback so far was in August 2025 when the Florida Republican Party started selling merch labeled “Deportation Depot” — the nickname Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis gave his state’s new immigration detention center — and cribbed the company’s familiar orange logo. Home Depot complained it was a trademark violation, and the state party withdrew the products.)

As all this played out, Carlos Roberto Montoya was struck by a car as he fled CBP agents in Monrovia. The Pasadena-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network raised more than $42,000 in a GoFundMe campaign to send Montoya’s body back to Guatemala and pay for his burial in his hometown, and it called on Home Depot to release that footage so his family could find out what had happened to him. “Some are saying that he was handcuffed while he was running,” says Pablo Alvarado, the network’s co-executive director, noting that given the company’s cameras, “Home Depot knows what happened. I mean, what we’re asking is so simple. Give the information, make it public. They don’t even want to do that.”

CBP issued a statement denying responsibility for Montoya’s death. A subsequent investigation by the California Highway Patrol, which included a review of Home Depot’s video footage, reached a similar conclusion, blaming the migrant worker for the fatal accident because he shouldn’t have been on the highway. Nevertheless, the tragedy sparked what would be the first of many protests at the Monrovia store. Initially, participants purchased and then immediately returned screws to send a “Screw Home Depot” message. Then they decided ice scrapers would be more metaphorically apt. Except the store didn’t stock them. “We don’t have ice here,” says Sheri Lochner, a nurse who was one of the earliest marchers. “It’s the wrong climate.” So protesters substituted paint scrapers, and the protest spread to other blue states where actual ice scrapers were sold. They also called for a boycott, but it lacked the support of the migrant workers who were supposed to be its beneficiaries. “How do you tell a day laborer, ‘Boycott Home Depot’?” Alvarado asks.

In September 2025, the US Supreme Court handed the Trump White House a major victory when it overturned a lower court order halting sweeps by federal agents of Home Depot parking lots, car washes and other spots known to be migrant worker gathering places. The lower court had ordered a temporary pause of the sweeps because they likely relied on racial profiling. (The case is still pending in federal district court in California.) What made the Trump administration end the raids in early 2026 was the outcry over the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Around that time, the president had dispatched his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis to quell tensions there. By March, Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as questions from lawmakers and others about her leadership at the agency reached a crescendo.

That same month, Home Depot CEO Decker appeared at the company’s annual gathering for store managers at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Orange-aproned greeters, waving pompoms and blowing whistles, welcomed thousands of employees arriving there to get pumped for spring, the chain’s biggest season of the year. On a showroom floor as big as several football fields and spilling out into the adjacent parking lot, there was enough gadgetry to make an HGTV host blush: a new RYOBI electric pressure washer for blasting dirt from decks, a DeWalt cordless 20-volt leaf blower billed as one of its quietest ever, a Milwaukee lightweight battery-powered saw designed to slice through 4-inch-thick pieces of lumber. Decker, practically a celebrity with this crowd, was mobbed in the barbecue section by sales reps from Traeger, the maker of a Wi-Fi-enabled wood-pellet grill.

Before shaking hands and taking selfies, Decker responded to a Businessweek reporter’s question about the less openly discussed side of his business: the migrant roundups in his parking lots. He was heartened, he said, by the slackening of the Trump administration raids. “Things got a little intense earlier this year,” he said, sounding relieved. “Tom Homan’s done a really nice job, and things have calmed down, but it’s a complicated equation for sure.”

Now if only the housing market would pick up. The industry wasn’t counting on it. “It’s probably another flattish year at best,” Decker said.

Before he left on medical leave in August, Decker had been trying to corner the contractor market. In the past two years, Home Depot has invested more than $20 billion acquiring businesses that specialize in roofing, drywall, heating and air conditioning. It started offering premium services including faster delivery of heavy building material such as concrete blocks and roof shingles directly to job sites, and it’s built out a network of warehouses across the country to fulfill these orders. The wooing appears to be working: Home Depot says contractors now account for more than half its revenue, up from 45% in 2021.

But with a dismal housing market, these efforts have done little so far to boost the company’s overall sales or shares. The US housing slowdown is in its fifth year, making this a historic slump, says Chen Zhao, head of economics research for Redfin Corp. She says a recovery won’t look the same as the Great Recession’s. Back then, home prices fell 30%, which eventually helped stimulate demand, though it still took about four years for housing sales to start to recover. But this time around, prices have largely remained stable, which means a lot of people can’t afford to buy. There’s also the lock-in effect, a term referring to the reluctance of many people to relocate because they’d have to abandon a 3% mortgage rate on their existing home for another more than twice as high on a new dwelling. “It’s a little hard right now to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Zhao says.

Then there’s Lowe’s, Home Depot’s longtime nemesis whose growth has also been hit hard by the downturn. Under its CEO, Marvin Ellison, a former Home Depot executive, Lowe’s is now courting contractors too, spending about $10 billion in recent years to beef up that part of its business. It’s also opened massive contractor-oriented fulfillment centers and dangled more loyalty perks to attract these heavy-spending customers, who currently make up 30% of its sales. Justin Hershey, a builder in Pennsylvania, bought materials at Home Depot for a decade but a few years ago started shopping at Lowe’s because he says it offered better deals. “I just did a massive lumber package, and Lowe’s came in 20% lower than my best price for Home Depot,” Hershey says. “Lowe’s just seem like they’re a lot more hungry right now.”

The competitors are now locked in an arms race over, of all things, Halloween lawn decorations. In August, Lowe’s unveiled 15-foot-tall Skeleton Watcher, an even creepier being than Skelly with a detached head, glowing beady eyes and spooky sound effects. “I don’t want to say Lowe’s is copying Home Depot,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, a retail consulting firm. “But they’ve definitely read the playbook, and they’re taking what they consider the best bits.” Then again, in a down market, everything’s up for grabs. Last year, Home Depot rolled out a 98¢ mini branded paint bucket to go after Lowe’s slightly bigger $1.98 version embraced by social media users who’ve promoted it as a cutesy receptacle for makeup, plants, even cocktails.

In Decker’s absence (the company hasn’t specified an expected return date), Home Depot Chief Financial Officer Richard McPhail and Ann-Marie Campbell, senior executive vice president, are tasked with guiding the retailer through this uncertainty. Either could be a potential successor if Decker decides to step down earlier than expected. Decker said he made the decision to take medical leave after consulting with his doctors, according to an email to employees viewed by Businessweek. Still, his abrupt and indefinite departure probably couldn’t have happened at a more inopportune time.

Some fear that if Republicans forfeit the House and possibly the Senate in the midterms, Trump may become even more unpredictable. Will he try to boost his deportation numbers by sending masked agents back to Home Depot parking lots? It’s hardly an academic question. Markwayne Mullin, the administration’s current homeland security secretary, has tried to distance himself from his more flamboyant predecessor, invoking the company’s name while doing so. “We’re not going to Home Depot and raiding the parking lot,” Mullin said in a speech before the National Governors Association in August. Yet in early September, ICE agents made two such raids in parking lots of Home Depot stores in Phoenix. “They just want to create fear,” says Sal Reza, a longtime immigration-rights activist in the city. (It’s not just Home Depot. In October, New York elected officials and activists condemned Target Corp. for allowing ICE to use its parking lots as a staging area after an immigration agent shot a man in New York City. Target denied any cooperation with ICE.)

Even if this isn’t the beginning of a new wave of parking lot sweeps, the Trump administration’s crackdown will almost certainly have longer-term effects on Home Depot. Construction trade groups reported last year that almost a third of its members were having difficulty hiring enough workers because of the deportation drive. When and if interest rates finally go down, that worker shortage is likely to slow any future housing market recovery.

These days there are fewer migrants around Los Angeles-area Home Depots. But one Mexican immigrant looking for work recently outside a store in Pasadena says he’s no longer being hassled in the parking lot by security guards. “They used to come and kick us out,” he says. “After the raid, everything changed.” That’s because Alvarado’s group has spawned a network of local sympathizers who maintain watch over many of the Home Depot parking lots in the area. Volunteers bring chairs for migrant workers and hire them to do work on their homes. One store manager of a local Home Depot in the area, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak, says these days he’s more concerned about shoplifters from a nearby homeless encampment than he is about migrants in the parking lot. “They don’t cause trouble,” he says. “There’s no customers out there that complain about laborers. Not at this store.” —With Micah Barkley and Alicia A. Caldwell