The Home Depot and U.S. Department of Homeland Security are denying a widely-shared claim — primarily circulating on the social media platform Threads — alleging the home improvement chain signed a lucrative deal with DHS. According to the rumor, the purported agreement said Home Depot would receive $250 million to allow DHS's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to stake out the company's parking lots for immigrant arrests. As Snopes previously reported, some of Home Depot's co-founders showed past support of President Donald Trump, whose administration has led a broader push for stricter immigration enforcement.
This matter made the rounds as masked federal immigration agents continued arrests across the country, including in Southern California. Agents carried out some of those arrests in Home Depot parking lots, where immigrants have for years waited during the day for people to hire them for work, as well as at car washes and farms. The Associated Press reported the widespread arrests stoked fear among immigrant communities.
As an example of the rumor, on July 27, a popular Threads post featured the claim with a misspelling of the word "immigrants." The post (archived) read, "Soooo…. Home Depot signed a deal that pays them $250 million with DHS, allowing ICE agents to stake out their parking lots and arrest immgrants. F*** Home Depot." In response to the Threads post, a person managing the official Home Depot account replied (archived) to that user, as well as other users, saying in part that the rumor was false.
(@rrhorrho/Threads)
In an email to Snopes, Home Depot spokesperson Beth Marlowe shared a company statement reading, "This story is false. We don't have contracts with DHS or ICE. We aren't notified that ICE activities are going to happen, and we aren't involved in them. In many cases, we don't know that arrests have taken place until after they're over."
Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin also responded to our email asking about the claim. She said, in part, "FALSE. The Department of Homeland Security does NOT have a contract with Home Depot. We certainly don't notify businesses of targeted enforcement operations." Additionally, she called the claim "ridiculous" and said it amounted to "just another attempt to smear our brave ICE law enforcement."
Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo located no news media outlets confirming the rumor about a deal regarding Home Depot, DHS and ICE.
The oldest-known post spreading the claim, which we located after performing the aforementioned searches of search engines, resided on the Threads account @thatoneguy2point0. That since-removed post, with Google search results displaying it on one line with a July 25 date, read, "Breaking News: The Home Depot signed a deal that pays them $250 million with DHS, allowing ICE agents to stake out their parking lots and arrest immgrants. Forget The Home Depot." As of this writing, the user's account displayed the message, "Sorry, this page isn't available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed." We have not yet located any posts sharing the rumor that were created prior to the user's Threads post.
Snopes contacted @thatoneguy2point0 via the user's Instagram account to ask if they deleted their post and account, and if they did so after receiving a response from Home Depot. We also inquired about how many views, likes and other metrics their post earned prior to deletion, seeing as no archived page capture of their post existed on webpage-archiving websites. Within hours, that Instagram user's page displayed a message indicating they had deleted or disabled their account. That message read, "Sorry, this page isn't available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed."
Other users also shared the unsubstantiated rumor on Bluesky (archived), Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived) and X (archived). One TikTok video (archived) received nearly 150,000 views, though that user has since updated their text caption to read, in part, "I'm failing to find credible sources."
For further reading, a previous fact-check article examined a made-up rumor from early 2024, claiming 100 migrants attacked security officers at a Home Depot location in Chicago.