Activists want boycott of Walmart, Home Depot over day laborer crackdown

On Tuesday, the parking lot of the Home Depot on Thomas Road in central Phoenix was a hive of activity. More than 50 day laborers were hanging out, seeking to flag down drivers for construction and landscaping work. There were no police in sight.

That could change soon, according to pro-immigrant activists. The Phoenix Police Department may soon begin trespassing jornaleros, as the day laborers are referred to in Spanish, which could land them in county jail. There, the jornaleros — some of whom are undocumented — would be screened by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and possibly deported.

Salvador Reza, a community organizer with the group Barrio Defense Committees, said Phoenix police recently gave him a “heads up” that property owners had authorized the department to remove jornaleros from the shopping center that Home Depot shares with Walmart and other businesses. Reza and other activists said that’s a shift in the status quo.

"They were allowing us to stay here in this area," Reza said of the businesses. "But because of the climate today with Donald Trump and the anti-migrant climate, they have decided to sign authority to trespass."

One jornalero, who gave his name as Antonio, said he was 58 and had been doing day labor work as a house painter for 20 years. He spoke in Spanish as Reza translated, saying, "We have the need to work here, to survive."

Reza and others are now calling for a boycott of those Walmart and Home Depot stores, saying the threat of arrest — and the implicit threat of deportation — was being used to clear out the jornaleros.

"What they don't realize is that we buy from them," Reza said of the businesses. "We are the ones that consume here. Most of the people that buy here are Mexicanos or Guatemaltecos, the contractors that hire them, too."

Home Depot responds

Reza said police officials told him that there would be "a period of education" for the day laborers, after which there would be "zero tolerance." Asked if they were going to be more aggressive in enforcing trespass laws at the shopping center, Phoenix police chose their words carefully.

Police spokesman Sgt. Robert Scherer told Phoenix New Times via email that the department "has not changed its policy on trespassing," but he did not answer questions about whether police had been asked for stepped-up enforcement.

"When a business is open," he wrote, "officers will respond to a call for service from the owner or their agent. When responding to a call for trespass at an open business, an officer must contact an owner (or their agent) to verify that the person the owner wants removed is not a customer or otherwise allowed to be on the property. This verification recognizes that it is the decision of the owner or their agent, not the officer, on who may be present on their private property."

Scherer added that a business could also sign an "authority to arrest," giving police "permission to enforce trespassing on the private property when the business is closed," but he did not say whether that had happened in this case.

In an email, Home Depot spokeswoman Beth Marlowe disputed the accusations that the company was seeking to have police trespass day laborers.

"That isn’t accurate," Marlowe wrote via email, adding, "As we often do, we’re partnering with local law enforcement to prevent issues such as shoplifting and illegal drug use in order to ensure a safe and secure work and shopping environment for our associates and customers."

Walmart declined a request to comment on the controversy.

Complicating the issue: the properties that Walmart and Home Depot sit on are owned, respectively, by different companies, which also could have asked police for increased enforcement.

Contacted later about the responses from the police and Home Depot, Reza said the police could be backtracking but that the boycott was still on for now.

Bad old days

The shopping center has been an immigration flashpoint for at least two decades, with minutemen and nativists showing up to square off with day laborers and their supporters. Fists sometimes flew.

Just west of the Home Depot, at 34th Street and Thomas Road, Pruitt's Furniture is covered in going out of business signs. But in the early 2000s, the business was a battleground between the Reza-led jornaleros and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose deputies were patrolling, trespassing and arresting day laborers and anyone who got in their way.

Arpaio's targeting of day laborers and his sweeps of Hispanic communities led to the class-action lawsuit Melendres v. Arpaio, in which the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office was found guilty of widespread racial profiling and ordered to comply with a laundry list of reforms. Instituting those reforms has cost taxpayers more than $250 million so far.

Joel Cornejo, an activist with the nonprofit group Semillas Arizona, claimed those bad old days are back again.

"You see how ICE, the police, the state is practicing violence against our community everywhere in the nation," he said, adding, "We need all our community to defend each other. So we're calling for the boycott."

Reza said that if the police trespass the jornaleros, they can still legally seek work while standing on the sidewalks.

That’s a right the day laborers won in 2013 with the 9th Circuit's decision in Valle del Sol v. Whiting. The suit challenged provisions of Arizona's infamous anti-immigration Senate Bill 1070, which would have criminalized seeking work as a day laborer from passing cars. The court found that these parts of the statute violated the First Amendment.

"If they order (the jornaleros) off the property, they can always be on the sidewalk," Reza said.

But Thomas Road is "a very fast-moving street," he observed, nodding at the traffic. If police force the jornaleros onto the sidewalk, it would make seeking work a potentially life-threatening scenario.