While federal agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) are running up on migrant workers in Home Depot parking lots, the home improvement corporation has decided to take a stand — against the migrant workers.
Reporting by The Guardian reveals a cruel new initiative being rolled out to one high-traffic Home Depot location in Los Angeles’ Cypress Park: high-pitched noise machines meant to shoo away day laborers.
The Intituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (Idepsca), an advocacy group for migrant workers, is calling for the removal of three sonic devices they say are causing migrant workers to suffer headaches and nausea.
In some areas, it’s common for day laborers to congregate outside home improvement stores like Home Depot, where they can find new gigs, catch rides to job sites, and quickly buy new equipment or material. It’s all part of the informal gig economy, a system which exploits poor and working class people for cheap labor.
Home Depot’s sound devices, advocates say, are punishing these folks at the bottom of the ladder.
“They chose to weaponize sound,” Los Angeles city councilwoman Eunisses Hernandes said at a conference. “Devices like these are used as torture against our people.”
One worker described to The Guardian how he has to wear ear plugs to block the excruciating noise, saying it “penetrates your bones.”
Hernandez also said that the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has begun using the devices on its property.
“This is the people’s land,” she said. “This is Caltrans land that is owned by Californians who pay taxes. The people’s land is being used to torture the people.”
The noise machine evokes tales of a mythic weapon supposedly responsible for the ailment known as “Havana syndrome,” which specifically seems to effect US intelligence officers stationed in Havana, Cuba.
No direct evidence of Cuba’s supposed sonic weapon has ever surfaced, though the Home Depot ear blasters do have another precedent: riot control weapons. In situations like the Ferguson uprising of 2014 or the Dakota Access Pipeline protest of 2016, police have deployed “sound cannons,” mobile arrays capable of incapacitating people with high-amplitude noise.
In other words, the same tactic has been refined from a tool of police control to a mechanism to protect corporate property. In both cases, sound is deployed as a weapon to repel unwanted people from a space, closing any chance for a dialogue.
The timing of the Home Depot deployment is significant, coming on the heels of a high number of brutal ICE raids in which Latino-looking workers are rounded up at random, stuffed into cars, and brought to deportation centers.
So far, Home Depot has been silent about the raids happening on its property. But given the chaos these agents cause, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Home Depot is trying to wash its hands of the whole thing — “you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”
Asked for comment on the sonic warfare, Home Depot told The Guardian that the machines are a “safety initiative… intended to deter and prevent illegal overnight parking in the area,” with no connection to any “immigration enforcement.”
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