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President Trump’s new focus on deporting immigrants is upending businesses around the U.S., and putting a particular spotlight on one retail chain close to where a high-profile raid recently took place: Home Depot.
Earlier this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested day laborers outside of a Home Depot in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles. A separate protest also sprung up outside of a Home Depot location in a different part of the city the next day. Although the retailer does not contract with day laborers directly, the area outside of store property has long been a place for people to congregate in the hopes of finding work.
In response to these raids, Home Depot has issued new guidance to employees about what they should do if ICE shows up, Bloomberg first reported. Home Depot confirms to Fortune that store employees are required to report any ICE-involved incident as soon as it happens. Workers across the chain have been reminded to avoid interactions with agents for their own safety. And regional store leaders at locations impacted by raids in Los Angeles are allowing workers who feel disturbed by the raid to leave for the day with full pay, although that is not a corporate-wide policy.
“We are not alerted to any of these immigration enforcements ahead of time,” a spokesperson for Home Depot tells Fortune.
It’s likely that ICE sweeps across the country will continue, and even intensify, in the weeks and months ahead. Trump wrote in a social media post on Sunday that ICE agents would “do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
That means we’re likely to see other companies creating and sharing internal policies with their workforce about what to do if ICE agents disrupt business. And of course, even if a workforce is not directly impacted by a raid, people might have friends and family members who are—something that employers should keep in mind when it comes to considering the morale of their workers.
“There may be some employers who are just sort of sitting on the sidelines and not necessarily putting the plans in place. They have this wait-and-see type attitude,” Stephen Toland, an attorney at law firm FBFK, previously told Fortune. “With continued momentum around immigration, employers are going to have to start taking the possibility of raids more seriously.”
Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com
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