This month, two vastly different companies Home Depot and AT&T found themselves pulled into the same overheated field.
At Home Depot stores across California and other cities, protesters staged a quiet but persistent form of disruption. They lined up at checkout counters, bought 17-cent ice scrapers, immediately returned them, and repeated the cycle repeatedly. The message was symbolic and unmistakable: scrape ICE out. The tactic drew attention to immigration raids targeting day laborers who regularly gather in Home Depot parking lots—spaces that have become informal hiring halls over decades, not by corporate design but by lived reality.
At the same time, AT&T storefronts across Chicago and Illinois were surrounded by demonstrators. Faith leaders, students, labor organizers, and community coalitions called on the company to end multimillion-dollar contracts with the Department of Homeland Security contracts that support ICE and CBP operations. Protesters framed AT&T’s communications infrastructure as part of the machinery that makes detention and deportation possible.
Neither situation began as a marketing issue, a communications issue, or an HR issue.
They are immigration stories, policing stories, labor stories, and corporate governance stories all at once.
This report builds on a theme I introduced earlier in “The Field Is Hot”: leaders today are navigating emotional temperatures they didn’t choose. Here, that dynamic goes further. When the field overheats, the boundaries between politics, society, and organizations collapse. There is no longer a clean separation between them. They now share a single emotional and power field.
The Signal: Storefronts as Stages
What matters most in both cases is not the specific protest tactic, but where it unfolded.
At Home Depot, a parking lot became a site where federal immigration enforcement, informal labor markets, and corporate space converged. Protesters didn’t block entrances or disrupt operations outright. Instead, they used consumer rituals checkout lines, return counters to create symbolic friction inside an everyday commercial environment.
At AT&T, retail stores became staging grounds for a broader argument about infrastructure and power. Organizers pointed to a long-term DHS contract worth roughly $146 million that provides “mission-critical communications services.” In the eyes of protesters, those systems form the digital nervous system of detention and deportation.
In both cases, the storefront became a public theater where national policy, local fear, and corporate infrastructure collided.
What the Companies Are Saying—and How It Lands
Home Depot
Across multiple outlets, Home Depot offered a consistent message:
“We are not coordinating with ICE or Border Patrol… We are not notified that immigration enforcement operations are going to happen and often do not know if they have taken place until after they are over. We are required to follow all federal and local rules and regulations.”
Translated into field language, the company is signaling:
We are not an intentional actor. We are a neutral platform. We follow the law.
But neutrality reads differently from inside the field. For day laborers, neighbors, and activists, the parking lot has become a predictable enforcement zone regardless of corporate intent.
AT&T
AT&T has not issued a protest-specific response. The clearest language comes from its DHS contract announcement, which frames the work as supporting national security and emergency preparedness.
In field terms, AT&T positions itself as critical infrastructure—essential for safety, resilience, and continuity.
Activists, however, read the same infrastructure as enabling the machinery of detention and deportation.
This is the familiar pattern the field keeps producing:
Corporate narrative: “We are neutral. We follow the law.”
Community perception: “Your infrastructure enables the harm.”
The gap isn’t about facts alone. It’s about who gets to define what a signal means in a contested field.
One Field, Three Faces
From a quantum perspective, this is not three separate arenas. It is one intertwined field wearing three faces at once.
Politics shows up through federal enforcement, contracts, and policy decisions that land in everyday places parking lots, storefronts, sidewalks, telecom networks.
Society shows up through immigrant communities, worker centers, faith leaders, students, and neighborhood organizations. These groups do not experience a meaningful separation between government action and corporate infrastructure. Both appear in the same lived environment.
Organizations show up through brands, assets, and systems designed for commerce and connectivity but positioned, intentionally or not, as structural actors in enforcement ecosystems.
As the field heats up, distinctions collapse.
A parking lot becomes a job site, a community square, and an enforcement zone.
A telecom network becomes a lifeline, a business asset, and an enforcement backbone.
That’s the quantum point: roles superimpose. Politics, society, and organizations occupy the same coordinates at the same time.
How the Ripples Move
Once you see the entanglement, the ripple pattern becomes clear.
Federal enforcement actions and long-term contracts shape fear, behavior, and trust at the local level. Corporate infrastructure—parking lots, retail space, communications networks creates predictable points of contact with state power. Communities respond by repurposing consumer rituals into symbolic resistance. And those actions convert political conflict into reputational, economic, and operational risk.
No one is “in their lane.”
Every move propagates across the field.
Quantum Take: There Are No Clean Lanes Anymore
Step back far enough and a few truths crystallize.
Corporations are now perceived as co-authors of public policy when their assets enable state power even unintentionally. Communities increasingly use consumer spaces as political instruments. Neutrality itself is read as a stance.
In a hot field, statements like “we follow the law” or “we support national security” do not cool the system. They signal alignment with the existing enforcement environment.
Politics, society, and organizations are no longer separate domains. They are phases of the same field. Signals launched in one raids, contracts, protests immediately refract through the others.
Leaders who still talk in “lanes” are already behind the field.
Leadership Reflection: Where the Work Begins
The leadership challenge here isn’t messaging it’s perception.
Where does your organization’s physical footprint or digital infrastructure intersect with state power? Who experiences those intersections as safety, and who experiences them as threat?
What is your official story about government relationships and how does that story land for people who live inside the consequences of enforcement?
And where are your real choice points? Where could you move beyond “we follow the law” toward intentional decisions about how your assets are used data, space, partnerships, access?
Possible moves are not abstract. They include naming entanglement rather than denying it, co-designing safeguards with affected communities, reevaluating quiet revenue streams framed as “neutral,” and signaling differently through concrete commitments to dignity, privacy, and safety.
Thanks for reading.
If you’ve seen a moment where a corporate space became a political or social flashpoint, share it below. Let’s keep mapping the field together.