A manufactured crisis plays out daily in the parking lots of LA’s Home Depot stores. Day laborer centers, seven city-contracted hubs often nestled on private commercial property, have become battlegrounds.
And, no surprise, the NGOs now want more of your hard-earned dollars.
Nonprofit organizations like CARECEN demand millions in local taxpayer dollars not to help workers find jobs, but to shield illegal aliens from lawful federal enforcement by ICE.
LA City Hall bears primary responsibility for escalating this needless conflict. Mayor Karen Bass’ administration included these day laborer centers in her preliminary budget at flat funding levels, then meekly responded to advocates’ outrage by promising to “work with the City Council on any potential solutions to support immigrant communities further.”
This is classic Bass equivocation: maintaining the status quo while signaling openness to the very demands that undermine federal enforcement. She knows full well that immigration policy is the exclusive domain of the US government.
Yet she continues to operate and fund these centers on a patchwork of public, state, and private land, many adjacent to Home Depots.
This is not compassionate outreach; it is brazen obstructionism, subsidized by Angelenos. At a time when Bass proposes a $14.9 billion budget that already strains under homelessness, crime, and basic services, groups like CARECEN have the audacity to testify before the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, begging for a $2 million boost, from $1 million to $3 million, to install cameras, reinforce doors, and train staff on “making it harder” for US Border Patrol to enforce immigration law.
This is not public service. It is a direct subsidy for evading the Supremacy Clause.
Ironically, the fact that these centers exist is likely why ICE goes right to Home Depots across the Southland.
CARECEN and its allies frame these centers as lifelines for “exploited day laborers.” In reality, they are the exploiters, and operate their centers as de facto safe zones for individuals who have no legal right to work in the United States.
Home Depot never asked for this role. Yet CARECEN’s own executive director, Maegan Ortiz, used the April 2026 Los Angeles budget hearing to call for boycotting the company while simultaneously demanding more city money to “defend” against raids.
This is not advocacy; it is extortionate hypocrisy.
These nonprofits do not merely provide know-your-rights pamphlets or job matching. They lobby openly for expanded funding to deter federal agents, turning taxpayer-supported facilities into obstacles to the rule of law.
Jorge Nicolas of CARECEN demands City Hall hand over more of Angelenos’ hard-earned dollars so they can better frustrate the federal government’s sovereign authority over immigration.
Even more culpable are the elected officials who actively platform and amplify this agenda.
Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, presides over hearings where CARECEN and IDEPSCA (another NGO) openly testify for raid-defense dollars.
Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, a vocal member of the same committee and longtime ally of these groups, has joined coalitions explicitly linking day-laborer funding to “protecting immigrant communities” amid ICE actions.
Hernandez and her colleagues treat federal raids as an attack on the city rather than the lawful exercise of national authority. By entertaining these requests in public budget deliberations, complete with calls to boycott a major local employer like Home Depot, they do not resolve exploitation; they manufacture it.
Instead of enforcing rules that would protect vulnerable U.S. citizens and legal residents, City Hall subsidizes the very system that perpetuates the problem. The ordinance that conscripted Home Depot’s parking lots into this fight only deepens the resentment: A private company complying with local permitting rules now finds its property turned into a federal enforcement hotspot, while nonprofits profit from the chaos they help create.
This is fiscal malpractice wrapped in moral posturing.
By pouring local money into “defense” against lawful raids, CARECEN and others are not defending the exploited; they are exploiting public sympathy and public coffers to prolong an immigration crisis.
LA City Hall’s complicity turns a straightforward federal matter into a local culture war. Mayor Bass, Chair Yaroslavsky, Councilwoman Hernandez, and the rest of the council have a choice: Respect the constitutional line between local services and national sovereignty or continue funding activist nonprofits that treat ICE enforcement as the enemy.
The day laborer centers were never about humane job matching. They became, under this leadership, taxpayer-financed outposts of “resistance.”
Enough. It is time to defund the defiance and let federal law prevail.
Richie Greenberg is a political commentator based in San Francisco.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
