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In the split second before the immigration agent tackled him, Target employee Jonathan Aguilar Garcia darted through the entrance to his suburban Minneapolis store. He wrongly assumed he’d be safe in his own workplace.
The agent pinned Aguilar Garcia to the floor with a knee on his neck before shoving him and another employee into an unmarked SUV. Hours later, they dumped out the men — both U.S. citizens — in a parking lot in a different suburb.
As agents dragged Walmart worker Suban Noor from her car in the Minnesota town of Willmar, her shoes fell off, leaving the high school student barefoot in the January cold. Her Somali refugee family, in the United States legally, did not know where she was until her release five days later.
Immigration agents have shot two DoorDash drivers in the last year, killing one in Maine and wounding another in Minneapolis.
How have the chief executives of these and other leading low-wage corporations responded to the threats against their workers? Largely by looking the other way.
Also worth noting: Some of the companies that have quietly accepted the harassment of their workers are among the “Low-Wage 100,” the Standard & Poor’s 500 corporations with the lowest median pay. And the gap between median pay and CEO compensation was wider than average at some of the firms whose employees have been ensnared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Walmart paid its CEO 958 times as much as the retailer’s median-paid worker in 2025. Target’s pay gap: 794 to 1. DoorDash’s CEO enjoys billionaire status while his drivers earn about $12.43 per hour.
In other words, these corporate leaders are truly living on an alternate economic planet. And that may explain their silence even as their own workers are targeted.
After immigration agents killed two protesters in Minnesota, Target and other locally based corporations did sign an open letter urging “de-escalation of tensions.” But the letter did not directly denounce federal agents’ violence, and Target leaders have declined to comment on the treatment of their own employees. When a pastor managed to get the retailer’s CEO on the phone during a faith leader sit-in at company headquarters in January and the pastor raised the topic with him, he hung up on her.
Among other Low-Wage 100 CEOs, the public response has been crickets. These corporations have enormous political power, including a combined army of 1,282 registered federal lobbyists. But instead of using that power to defend their employees, over the last year they prioritized reforms for the rich — most notably the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
We reviewed statements about this 2025 budget legislation from Low-Wage 100 firms and the corporate lobby groups that represent them. Each of them jubilantly applauded the law’s tax cuts, which will overwhelmingly benefit CEOs and other wealthy Americans.
Not one expressed concern about the gutting of Medicaid and SNAP — public assistance programs on which millions of low-wage workers rely — or the law’s nearly $75 billion in increased ICE funding.
The shredding of the safety net and ICE’s reign of terror are devastating for affected workers. They’re also bad for business. Low-wage service industries rely heavily on immigrant labor, and workers are obviously more productive when they have access to healthcare and nutritious food.
But for CEOs living in distant financial galaxies, it must be next to impossible to fathom the fear of not being able to feed your family, much less the terror of being detained and unable to even go home to your family.
Such extreme disparities make our country weaker in the face of national challenges, from the affordability crisis to threats against our basic rights.
We need government action to both lift worker wages and pull top executives into the orbit of ordinary Americans. Polls show strong support across the political spectrum for doing so. One survey, for instance, found that 80% of likely voters favor a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEOs more than 50 times more than their median pay.
Cracking down on excessive CEO pay must be part of any plan to unify and revive our troubled democracy.
Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article portrays a series of recent ICE encounters with workers at large retail and delivery companies as evidence of a pattern of excessive and dangerous enforcement that has swept up even U.S. citizens and lawful residents, highlighting the detentions of Target and Walmart employees in Minnesota and the shooting of DoorDash drivers as emblematic cases of abuse.
It argues that corporate leaders at companies such as Target, Walmart, and DoorDash have responded to these incidents with silence or vague, indirect statements, noting that while Minnesota-based executives signed an open letter calling for “de-escalation of tensions,” the statement did not explicitly criticize ICE or defend specific workers who were detained or harmed, leaving affected employees feeling abandoned.[8][10]
The piece links this lack of outspoken corporate advocacy to extreme CEO-to-median-worker pay gaps at low-wage firms, citing data on the “Low-Wage 100” S&P 500 companies with the lowest median pay, where average CEO compensation exceeds $17 million and pay ratios run into the hundreds or thousands to one, with Walmart and other large retailers among the firms posting some of the widest disparities.[1][2][3][4][5]
Drawing on these pay-gap figures, the article contends that CEOs at low-wage corporations effectively live on a separate “economic planet,” which makes it difficult for them to grasp the everyday insecurity of workers who rely on programs like Medicaid and SNAP or who fear sudden detention, and thus helps explain why executives have not used their political clout to confront ICE or defend frontline employees.[1][2][3]
The article criticizes the political priorities of these corporations, asserting that while they collectively deploy more than a thousand federal lobbyists and have enthusiastically backed major tax-cut legislation that disproportionately benefits wealthy individuals and large firms, they have not publicly opposed the same law’s deep cuts to safety-net programs or its substantial increase in ICE funding, despite the direct impact on their own low-wage workforce.[3]
It emphasizes that the combination of a weakened safety net and aggressive immigration enforcement is not only devastating for workers and their families but also ultimately bad for business, because low-wage service industries depend heavily on immigrant labor and are more productive when employees can access healthcare and adequate nutrition, a point echoed by labor advocates and legal groups urging employers to prepare for and mitigate workplace immigration raids.[7][9][11]
The piece argues that extreme pay inequality erodes social cohesion and weakens democracy, citing polling that shows strong bipartisan support for policies such as tax penalties on corporations whose CEOs earn more than 50 times the pay of typical workers, and concludes that any serious effort to rebuild U.S. democracy and address affordability must both lift worker wages and curb excessive CEO compensation through government action.[2][3][6]
Different views on the topic
Some corporate responses highlight steps they say have already been taken to address employee concerns, with Target indicating that it has circulated information on personal safety and ICE-related protocols to store and corporate staff and its CEO delivering an internal video message stressing that leadership is doing everything within corporate control to prioritize the safety of workers and customers.[8]
In public statements, executives at large retailers such as Target and Home Depot have stressed that they do not coordinate with ICE and have suggested there are legal limits on how far companies can go to keep enforcement agents away from stores and parking lots, with a Home Depot representative stating that the company cannot interfere with enforcement agencies or prevent them from entering retail premises.[8]
Business leaders and corporate advocates frequently defend high executive pay by emphasizing market competition for top talent, arguing that CEO compensation packages reflect the scale of responsibility, shareholder expectations, and performance metrics at global companies rather than simple greed, and warning that aggressive caps on pay could push skilled executives to rival firms or markets.
Critics of policies that would tax or penalize firms with very high CEO-worker pay ratios argue that such measures risk distorting labor and capital markets by intruding on private-sector pay decisions, suggesting that existing disclosure rules and shareholder oversight already provide tools to rein in compensation without additional government intervention.
Supporters of broad corporate tax cuts, including those embedded in major budget legislation, argue that reducing business tax burdens is essential for investment, innovation, and job creation, contending that lower taxes enhance U.S. competitiveness, ultimately benefiting workers through expanded employment opportunities and potential wage gains even if executives initially capture a large share of the financial windfall.
Advocates of robust immigration enforcement defend increased funding for agencies like ICE as necessary to uphold the rule of law and maintain public safety, and maintain that while employers should ensure workers know their rights and are treated fairly, companies are obligated to comply with lawful requests from federal agents and cannot obstruct enforcement actions, a stance reflected in corporate comments emphasizing noninterference with government operations.[8]
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