‘Code Adam’

I have been watching reports of ICE raids on stores with both personal and professional interest.

Some of this has been national news — such as the massive, spontaneous protest that erupted when armed, masked men without badges or uniforms attempted to abduct day laborers in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Los Angeles County. Hundreds of everyday people got in between the masked men and their intended targets, preventing the abductions. ICE responded by tear-gassing a Home Depot parking lot and everyone stuck in traffic on the adjoining streets that the apparent federal deputies had blocked off.

My main, and overwhelming reaction to all of that was personal and visceral — a sense of horror and anger as a citizen, a human, a neighbor, and a patriot.

But I also work in retail. I work at a store — at precisely the kind of big box retail chain store that ICE has been instructed to target with its 1850s-slavecatcher-style raids. So it is impossible for me to watch this news without thinking about what we would or should or could do if this same sort of thing happened at our store.

This seems unlikely, mind you, given that the specific location where I work is out on the western end of the affluent Main Line and our parking lot is more likely to be filled with ladies buying flowers for some Devon Horse Show event than with undocumented day laborers.

Still, given that this has already happened at several of our stores, surely the big brains at corporate HQ have some plan or official instructions for us — some idea of Here’s What We Want You To Do if masked men with guns and no uniforms come screeching into the parking lot looking to rough-up and carry off some of our customers and/or co-workers. But if any such official instructions have been given, I haven’t seen them yet.

And I suspect that my counterparts at other big retail outlets are similarly without instruction or guidance too.

Consider, for example, the recent raid by unidentified and non-uniformed “federal agents” at a Walmart last week in Pico Rivera, California — “Video captures immigration agents detaining man in parking lot of Pico Rivera Walmart.”

Dozens of protesters gathered Tuesday in Pico Rivera to call for the release of a man who was detained by federal agents in the parking lot of a Walmart earlier in the day.

A video captured several armed agents arriving in the parking lot of a Walmart shopping center. They were seen shouting in an argument with some bystanders as three agents shoved a man in a Walmart vest to the ground then took him into custody. Other agents were seen yelling at bystanders who were recording them.

The man beaten and abducted — the only person detained in this apparent ICE “raid” — was a 20-year-old Walmart associate and U.S. citizen named Adrian Villareal. After two days of his detention, the only explanation for it was offered by tweet:

In a post Thursday on X, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said the 20-year-old man is accused of punching a border patrol agent in the face after “he attempted to impede their immigration enforcement operation.”

There is video of this raid — a lot of video, as half of the people in that Walmart parking lot pulled out their phones and started recording from the moment ICE arrived until they left. That video shows Villareal, wearing his blue Walmart vest, approaching the agents and asking them questions. That video shows the agents mobbing him, throwing him to the ground, and hauling him away. But if there’s video of his “punching a border patrol agent in the face,” nobody’s seen it yet.

Villareal was just a kid who worked at Walmart. I don’t know if he was a lot guy or some kind of supervisor or manager, but in either case he was wearing the vest out there in the parking lot and I’m sure there had been many previous times when that was the case for him where it was his job — his work responsibility — to approach someone in that parking lot to tell them, “Hey man, this is the Walmart parking lot … you can’t be running wild out here.” That’s what the company wanted him to do and told him to do and trained him to do if he came across kids horsing around out there, or somebody tailgating, or setting off fireworks, or whatever else (lot guys could tell you some stories).

I would guess Walmart workers get the same kind of de-escalation training we get in our stores. Ours isn’t bad (LAT-model stuff for dealing with irate customers, and they even hired decent actors for the videos) and I’m sure theirs is similar. Was that the sort of thing that Walmart wanted and expected Villareal to do when a half-dozen angry armed men drove recklessly into their parking lot and began shouting abusively at every customer present? Did they want and expect him, as a blue-vested Walmart associate, to approach those men while exhibiting open, non-confrontational body language, to listen to their concerns, acknowledge those concerns, and then calmly offer to take action to help address them?

I don’t know what Walmart’s higher-ups wanted or expected him to do. I don’t think he knew either. And I’m not really sure what my higher-ups would want me to do if the same sort of thing were to happen at our store.

But there is one SOP that we have — and that I know Walmart has because it started there — that I think directly applies for this new era of potential ICE raids in stores. It’s called “Code Adam.”

This is an official policy and procedure that was designed for exactly this kind of thing. And it’s already in place and part of every worker’s training, at almost every major retail chain in America. This is, for most retailers, our official corporate policy on abductions and potential abductions:

Code Adam is a missing-child safety program in the United States and Canada, originally created by Walmart retail stores in 1994. This type of alert is generally regarded as having been named in memory of Adam Walsh, the 6-year-old son of John Walsh (the host of Fox’s America’s Most Wanted).

Adam was abducted from a Sears department store in Hollywood, Florida in 1981. …

Today, many department stores, retail shops, shopping malls, supermarkets, amusement parks, hospitals, and museums participate in the Code Adam program. Legislation enacted by Congress in 2003 now mandates that all federal office buildings and base or post exchanges (BX or PX) on military bases adopt the program. Walmart, along with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the departments of several state Attorneys General, have offered to assist in training workshops in order for other companies to implement the program.

If these thugs show up at your store, get on the PA and call a Code Adam. Station somebody at every exit. And, above all: If the would-be victim is located with an adult that is not their parent or guardian, employ all reasonable efforts to delay the departure of the adult without endangering staff or customer.

That’s the official anti-abduction policy at Walmart, and at my store, and — interestingly — also at all federal office buildings.