In what may be the most bizarre protest of the year, nearly 100 anti-ICE activists flooded a Home Depot in Monrovia, California, over the weekend to stage what they proudly labeled a “buy-in.” Their master plan? Buy 17-cent ice scrapers… and immediately return them.
The goal wasn’t savings—it was sabotage. Protesters clogged checkout lines, staged disruptions around customer entrances, and even blocked vehicles in an effort to accuse Home Depot of being too friendly to immigration enforcement.
The activists—who also staged coordinated stunts in Charlotte, NC, and Burbank, CA—said they wanted to “scrape ICE out of their stores,” according to Erika Andiola of the left-leaning National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
For years, some Home Depot parking lots in Southern California have doubled as informal job hubs for day laborers, many of them in the country illegally. Recently, ICE has stepped up enforcement in these areas—exactly what immigration hawks have wanted for years.
But that was more than enough to send the activist crowd into a frenzy. Protesters marched around banging on orange Home Depot buckets like makeshift drums and wore aprons scrawled with “ICE Out of Home Depot.” One organizer, Pablo Alvarado, dramatically claimed the home improvement chain had become “ground zero for… cruel, vicious immigration enforcement.”
Home Depot strongly rejected that claim, with spokesperson George Lane clarifying the company has no involvement whatsoever with ICE operations:
“We don’t coordinate with ICE or Border Patrol… we’re not notified before enforcement activities, and often we don’t know anything happened until afterwards.”
TikTok personality Bobbi Althoff inserted herself into the saga last month, claiming a family friend—Felix Morales Gomez—was swept up in one of the ICE arrests. She admitted he was in the country illegally but insisted, “He’s not a criminal… he was just trying to find work.”
Critics have pointed out that illegally crossing into the country is, in fact, a criminal offense, though that detail was avoided during the protest.
The protests come as the Trump administration continues to re-intensify immigration enforcement. ICE, now overseen within DHS under Secretary Kristi Noem—but guided operationally by Trump’s hand-picked border czar Tom Homan—reports that two million illegal immigrants have already been deported or self-deported since Trump returned to office.
Roughly 400,000 were removed outright, while an estimated 1.6 million chose to leave on their own.
Behind the scenes, a dispute reportedly brewed within DHS:
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Homan and ICE Director Todd Lyons want to focus on criminal offenders and those with final deportation orders,
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Noem and adviser Corey Lewandowski want broader sweeps to boost raw deportation numbers.
Trump, for his part, has been firm that Homan is in charge of “all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin.”
As if the ice-scraper circus wasn’t enough, activists even erected two altars topped with 24 white crosses each, claiming they represented people who died during immigration enforcement this year.
According to organizers, the “buy-in” was designed to show Home Depot that day laborers “benefit the store financially.” But by the end, all they really did was create headaches for regular shoppers who just wanted to buy lumber or grab a box of screws.
What began as a left-wing protest against ICE turned into a public spectacle of petty retail harassment, leaving many Americans asking the obvious question:
Who do these activists think they’re persuading by buying and returning 17-cent ice scrapers?
