When it comes to protesting immigration enforcement raids, advocates say their “money is power.”
Hundreds gathered at a recent August protest in Los Angeles to show support for a 24-hour boycott of several companies they say have enabled the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
But amid advocates’ outcry that corporations have been complicit in President Trump’s immigration crackdown, a question emerged: Have boycotts been effective in the U.S.? The answer is mixed.
The “Summer of Resistance,” an L.A.-based immigrant rights coalition formed in June in response to increased ICE raids throughout Southern California, hosted the day-long rally on Aug. 12. The coalition — which consists of 30 non-profits, labor unions, community organizations and artists — called on activists to boycott Target, Walmart, Home Depot and McDonald’s, companies it says have enabled the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics and anti-diversity agenda.
The protesters also called for an end to ICE raids and deportations, and the release of detained immigrants.
Following Trump’s executive orders, authorities have cracked down on immigration enforcement across Southern California since the summer, arresting over 2,700 immigrants in June and July alone. Officials, including Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director Todd Lyons, have said that federal agents in Los Angeles are targeting reported gang members and rapists, as well as people in worksites who are “trafficking drugs and humans” — and they say the actions are working.
But activists have argued the detentions are inhumane, that most undocumented immigrants are not the hardened felons officials believe they are, and that the administration has used unlawful tactics — such as racial profiling and ignoring due process rights — to expedite deportations.
“These corporations, whether implicitly or not, have allowed their facilities to be used as places where federal agents violated workers’ rights and have inflicted pain and terror in our community and families,” said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesman for CHIRLA. “These corporations benefit on a daily basis from our hard-earned dollars and yet remain silent in light of the attacks against Angelenos and workers.”
But if history is any judge, boycotts can have mixed results. Whether boycotts actually put economic pressure on companies is disputed.
Boycotting has been used in America since the colonial era, when colonists refused to buy British products to protest taxation, said Emily E. LB. Twarog, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.
In the Civil Rights Era, the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s — sparked by Rose Parks’ refusal to surrender her seat in a bus to a White man — culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring segregation on buses unconstitutional. A young Martin Luther King Jr. was a key leader in that movement.
Also in the 20th century, food boycotts occurred more frequently in the U.S. — including the meat boycotts of 1902, 1910 and 1973, which came in response to rising meat prices, and the Cesar Chavez-led 1965 grape boycott against poor working conditions for farmers.
The grape boycott was successful, with around 10% of Americans refraining from purchasing the fruit. But these earlier boycotts had a more “specific and targeted message” than today’s immigration boycotts — and therefore may have been more effective, Twarog said.
Twarog added that today’s organizers can make their boycotts more effective by redirecting and narrowing their focus. She noted that current boycotts organized through social media are often “too diluted.”
The Summer of Resistance’s day-long action was just one example of a nationwide boycott on companies associated with Trump since his January re-election. A Feb. 28 nationwide “economic blackout” organized by the People’s Union USA gained heavy traction on social media, and participants were encouraged to refrain from spending to “resist corporate greed,” while working-class Americans are struggling to get by. The group has continued to call for boycotts of individual corporations since then.
On the Feb. 28 “economic blackout,” web traffic was down 6% on the top 100 e-commerce sites on the day of the blackout, according to Similarweb, a digital marketing intelligence company.
Tying these movements to calls “for civil rights legislation — just like with the farm workers who called for union contracts to improve workers’ conditions, or legislation that would protect farm workers historically excluded from labor law protections — that’s what’s missing today,” Twarog said. “You can’t just go ahead and call for a general economic boycott. That doesn’t have any actual leverage.”
Twarog added that, generally, a one-day economic boycott would not impact companies’ sales enough to be truly effective. But any strategies that would stop or slow down the transit of goods can be more successful — and advocacy groups should look into how they can build alliances with day laborer networks and labor unions to do so.
“If you have warehouse workers go out on strike for the day, nothing gets moved — that has a financial impact,” she said. “If you’re able to shut down the transit of those goods, then you begin to have a real impact, even if that’s just for one or two days.”
Politically motivated boycotts can also backfire, a 2022 study by researchers from Cornell University, Imperial College and Northwestern University showed. The research concluded that activists’ calls for a boycott of Latin food brand Goya — after its CEO showed support for Trump in July 2020 — actually led to higher sales for the company.
Nearly 17% of consumers in the two-week period following the CEO’s comments were first-time buyers of Goya products, the research showed. Around 56.4% of those shoppers lived in heavily Republican counties.
But Angelica Salas, CHIRLA’s executive director, warned that corporations should not underestimate the economic power of Latinos, a community organizers say immigration enforcement efforts have targeted. Salas noted an April study from researchers at UCLA and Cal Lutheran, which found that the U.S. Latino population has a GDP of over $4.1 trillion. If ranked as its own nation, U.S. Latinos would be the fifth-largest economy in the world.
“We have to learn how to start using our economic power,” Salvas said. “Now they have billions of dollars to go after our community — this is only going to get worse if we don’t stop it now.”
Salas said that the coalition chose to specifically boycott Home Depot because of frequent immigration raids happening in its stores’ parking lots across Southern California. She highlighted a recent operation on Aug. 6 involving the arrest of 16 undocumented immigrants in a Home Depot parking lot near MacAuthur Park, where agents arrived in an unsuspecting Penske rental truck to catch them off guard.
The coalition members also boycotted McDonald’s, Target and Walmart, corporations which have rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and donated to the Trump administration.
“Most of the people who are their consumers are immigrants,” Salas said. “It’s not right that we have corporations that take our money and then use those dollars, those profits, and then give it to Trump and support his anti-immigrant agenda.”
George Lane, a spokesperson for Home Depot, said in an emailed statement that immigration enforcement agencies do not inform the company ahead of time if they plan to conduct raids.
“We aren’t involved in the operations,” Lane said. “We’re required to follow all federal and local rules and regulations in every market where we operate.”
Spokespersons from McDonald’s, Target and Walmart did not respond to requests for comment on the boycott. However, Target CEO Brian Cornell announced Wednesday that he would step down amid weak sales. Target’s sales slipped in the first quarter of 2025, which it attributed to consumers’ concerns about tariffs and boycotts related to the company’s retreat on diversity initiatives.
Twarog said she still, though, would not consider boycotts to be a “major contributor” in Target’s falling sales, adding that the declining trend has existed since the pandemic. Target saw a surge in sales during the beginning of the pandemic as shoppers stocked up on home goods, which continued when evacuation restrictions were first lifted — but the rush eventually subsided as inflation spiked in 2022.
Rosa Salas, a demonstrator who participated in the recent boycott, said working immigrants are the “fabric of the county” — and that the community stoppage, to her, means “boycotting the idea that you don’t consider us humans.”
She called on others to shop at locally-owned stores and small businesses, instead of companies run by billionaires. If they deem it necessary to shop at big corporations, to instead support ones like Costco — which defended its diversity policies amid Trump’s call for companies to dismantle them.
Pedro Trujillo, CHIRLA’s director of organizing, said he hopes the resistance-themed boycotts help corporations “wake up to the idea that our money is power.” Advocates “ought to get curious” about coming together and leveraging their consumer power, as a means to “fight back” against immigration enforcement activity.
“Our collective power needs to be really coming out right now,” Trujillo said. “We really want to tell folks that if we organize ourselves, our money, then we can make a difference.”
Correspondent Julianna Lozada and City News Service contributed to this report.