Immigration arrest inside Home Depot sparks protest in rural Oregon town

About 200 people gathered outside the Home Depot in The Dalles on Sunday to condemn what immigrant rights groups have described as an unprecedented immigration arrest inside the hardware store.

The day before, three masked immigration agents entered the store and forcefully arrested a customer. A bystander captured the encounter on a video that circulated on social media, stoking outrage.

Home Depot, the world’s largest home improvement retailer with more than 2,300 North American stores, has remained largely silent as numerous immigration arrests have taken place in its parking lots across the country amid President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown.

A manager at The Dalles location told The Oregonian/OregonLive that employees were not allowed to comment on Saturday’s arrest, and Evelyn Fornes, a public affairs manager for the chain, distanced the company from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“We aren’t notified that immigration enforcement activities are going to happen, and we aren’t involved in the operations,” she said. “We aren’t coordinating with ICE or Border Patrol.”

But that hasn’t quelled community anger with Home Depot — or with elected leaders in the Columbia River Gorge accused by activists of doing too little to protect immigrants. Many big box retailers use surveillance cameras that capture drivers’ license plate numbers, just as police agencies do, and critics have said immigration authorities can access that information to make arrests.

Saturday’s arrest inside the store in The Dalles served only to heighten that tension since agents are required to have judicial warrants to carry out arrests on private property. Either the federal government acted without one — or Home Depot complied with one, activists say. Fornes wouldn’t clarify whether Home Depot was presented with a warrant.

Omar Perez, a volunteer with Latinos Unidos The Dalles, helped organize Sunday’s protest.

“Home Depot will see that the community stands with its people and that what they are doing is not right,” he said. “Any Latinos right now shouldn’t be going there because you don’t feel safe there.”

Destin Ramsey, a second-grade teacher at Colonel Wright Elementary School in The Dalles, was at Home Depot with his 5-year-old daughter when commotion in the store caught his attention. Ramsey said he heard masked agents telling a man to stop, and when he turned around, the agents were already grabbing the man. He didn’t see them display any kind of warrant.

“Then they ushered him out of the store, and while this is all happening … the only thing that I know to do is to just get it on video,” he said.

Family members of the detained man declined to be interviewed. Immigration authorities did not respond Monday or Tuesday to requests for comment from The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Immigration enforcement has continued to increase in Oregon this fall, with masked agents using aggressive tactics to drag people from cars and pull people from their homes, sometimes at gunpoint. Federal authorities have also arrested U.S. citizens, including a woman in Gresham who photographed agents and a 17-year-old high school student in McMinnville. In both instances, agents accused the detained people of threatening violence against them.

The exact number of people swept up in Trump’s Oregon operation isn’t public because federal authorities don’t make arrest figures regularly accessible.

Data from the Deportation Data Project shows a daily average of nine immigration arrests in Oregon for the week leading up to Oct. 15, the latest date available.

But U.S. Border Patrol chief Michael W. Banks touted far more arrests on X and said agents had arrested 560 people in the Portland area alone in October. Officials haven’t provided an updated number.

The Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, which tracks immigration arrests in Oregon, said families and others had reported 373 arrests to them in November.

Amber Rose, a community organizer with Hood River Latino Network, said seven of those arrests happened in the Hood River area on Nov. 10.

“It’s really awful because our communities are absolutely terrified,” she said. “They’re being hunted.”