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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