It wasn’t yet 7 a.m. on a Thursday, but the parking lot at a Las Vegas Home Depot was already starting to buzz with activity.

A few men, hands in their pockets, wearing paint-splattered work shoes and three layers to prepare for whatever task the day might bring, were standing near the planter boxes scattered across the lot. A pickup truck pulled up, and one of the men jumped into the passenger seat, whisked off to the site of some unspecified odd job around town.

This routine, which starts each day with a pre-dawn bus ride to a street corner, has been life for the past five years for Leonardo, an immigrant from Guatemala who crossed the border illegally 10 years ago in search of better work to support his family. He said he’s endured insults and has been reported to the police, but they’ve treated him well because he has a clean record.

“I’m always afraid, but I don’t have any criminal record, thank God,” Leonardo, who did not want his last name published, said in an interview with The Nevada Independent. “You have to feed your family.”

A new resource center holding its grand opening on Friday aims to empower day laborers such as Leonardo who are living life on the fringes, subject to wage theft and other abuses on their under-the-table gigs but often loathe to report the mistreatment because they could be deported. Laborers who visit the Arriba Las Vegas Worker Center in downtown Las Vegas can earn OSHA worker safety certifications, get help filing formal complaints about wage theft and learn extra-legal negotiating techniques to compel employers to fulfill their obligations.

Such worker centers are common in California, but this one is the first in Nevada and the first that the National Day Labor Organizing Network has opened under the Trump administration. It comes as the Nevada economy is picking up — projects including the Raiders stadium, the Las Vegas Convention Center expansion and new homes are in the pipeline — and the state projects a 10,000-person deficit in the construction industry.

As the network’s head and former day laborer Pablo Alvarado puts it, it won’t be the people carrying tiki torches at a white nationalist rally that do most of the work in Las Vegas, or in the cities where natural disasters have wiped out entire neighborhoods. It’ll be immigrant labor, including some from the shadows.

“In Las Vegas as well as the country, most recognize that if they accept the fruits of undocumented people’s labor, that they should accept their humanity,” he said. “And accepting their humanity means giving them their rights, recognizing who they are, protecting them when they are in the workplace, making sure that institutions that are supposed to administer justice are accessible to them."

“You take my labor,” he added, “you give me my rights.”

The market and the challenges

A survey conducted by the network at 18 informal work sites in Southern Nevada — including outside of hardware stores and nurseries — helps paint a picture of the day laborer sector in Las Vegas.

Based on surveys submitted by 188 respondents about their prior week of work, the report concludes that just under half of the people seeking work on a given day will get a job. The most common jobs are moving (37 percent), followed by landscaping (31 percent) and construction (11 percent).

Ninety-four percent of day laborers are immigrants. The median wage for the jobs they take is $20 an hour.

“Overall, average hourly wages for most day laborer jobs in Las Vegas are adequate,” the report concluded. “However, many workers are employed for less than a full day, resulting in poverty-level earnings.”

The report details the ways that employers cheat the people they pick up on street corners, and finds that the practices are common — one-third of respondents said they experienced some form of wage theft in the two months preceding the survey.

Employers sometimes refuse to pay their workers, make false promises that they’ll pay later or at the end of a multi-day job or add additional tasks to the worker’s load without providing additional pay. That’s to say nothing of the risky conditions laborers work under — 28 percent said they have been injured on the job in the past year, and 71 percent said they had not received health and safety training that could have been useful for their work.

Wage theft is something that Leonardo said he’s experienced more than once.

On one occasion, he said he and four other workers accepted a job in which each would receive $60. After they had already packed up a moving van, the person who hired them started to quibble with them and insult them. He lowered the wage to $50 dollars; by the time the workday was over, they didn’t receive any money at all.

Another time, the person who offered him work left him out on his own at the end of the workday.

“I went with a man, I did a landscaping job, and when the work was done, he told me, ‘Look, I don’t have any more money. I’m not going to be able to give you what I promised you.’ He gave me some money and told me, ‘And I’m also not going to be able to drop you off where I picked you up.’”

“I sucked it up,” he continued, “and I had to walk for three hours. It was summer.”

Fear of the police

Las Vegas police say they receive complaints regarding day laborers, although it’s not something they disaggregate and track separately.

“Probably more common has been fraud cases where somebody hires them for a certain amount of money and they end up not paying them,” said Officer Jacinto Rivera. “It’s just simply people taking advantage of them because they feel that they’re undocumented, they don’t have any recourse so they can’t report anything to the police, and that is definitely not the case.”

In fact, 47 percent of survey respondents said they fear if they report a crime to the police, authorities will use that information to nab them or someone they know for an immigration violation.

In extreme cases, day laborers — who are often carrying cash after finishing up a job — are killed for their money. In 2003, 48-year-old day laborer Benito Zambrano-Lopez was beaten up by three men on his way back from a Las Vegas store and was fatally shot three times. Police say the motive was robbery.

The most common complaint, Rivera said, is from businesses that ask officers to kick laborers off their property for trespassing.

“We try to educate [laborers] as far as having them know that because they’re there to do work doesn’t give them a right to hang out on private property,” he said. “If you’re in front of a Home Depot and they don’t want you to be there, it doesn’t matter that you’re not doing anything. It’s their property, and it’s private, and they have a right to ask them to move.”

But he emphasized that Metro is not an extension of ICE, and wants people to report if they’re a victim of crime. Police officers are not going to alert immigration officials if they suspect someone is undocumented unless they run their name through a database and find that ICE has a warrant out for that person.

“We treat them like anyone else that we come across. Their immigration status is not relevant. So if it’s a crime that involves city, county or state law, then we’ll get involved, but if it’s simply a report that someone thinks there’s illegal people hanging out, we advise them … to call ICE.”

The story from the surveys, however, tells a different story. Twelve percent of foreign-born workers told surveyors that police officers have asked their immigration status while they’re at a job site; while such a practice violates Metro’s policy, some say officers have asked for their Social Security number — something that report authors argue is tantamount to asking whether they’re in the country legally.

Workers like Leonardo run a clear risk of deportation. He told The Nevada Independent that his journey from Guatemala a decade ago happened mostly by bus, but also included portions where he had to walk, go hungry and endure the insults of the coyotes (human smugglers) he paid for help making the trek.

He lived in Illinois until five years ago, when he moved to Las Vegas, where he lives alone. Here, he does carpentry, masonry and landscaping, skills he learned in his home country and has refined over 40 years.

A tough political outlook

Although Las Vegas has a history of strong labor unions such as the Culinary Union, Alvarado said the Arriba center will help give a voice to a sector that is essentially invisible and whose workers can’t collectively bargain because they have a new employer every day.

It’s already helped Jaime, an undocumented immigrant and father of four from Mexico City who was looking for plumbing, electricity or painting work Thursday at the Home Depot parking lot.

For seven years, he’s been waking up at 5 a.m. and heading to the street corners. It’s not easy — he said employers sometimes turn on the laborers, get angry, verbally abuse them.

In spite of the circumstances, he said he’s always looking for opportunities to better himself. He’s taken English classes at community centers and is also regularly visiting the Arriba center, which had a soft opening in November.

“I went to an OSHA class. I learned things like safety and how you can protect yourself against people who abuse you,” he said. “When you start to go to these classes, you understand that you also have rights as a day laborer.”

The group is also hoping to advocate for changes in Nevada law that would improve the footing of day laborers. Although the Nevada labor commissioner hears wage theft cases from undocumented workers, it wants the commission to expand outreach in both English and Spanish, directly at the worker pick-up sites around town, to educate laborers on their rights.

They also want lawmakers to strengthen statute to make it easier for vulnerable workers to recover stolen wages, and increase penalties for employers who violate the law. And they want Las Vegas to terminate its 287(g) partnership with ICE, which allows local police officers to carry out certain federal immigration responsibilities. (Metro says its goal for voluntarily participating in the program is to allow local officers to turn criminals over to federal authorities and ensure they don’t become repeat offenders.)

But the movement is happening in a difficult climate nationally and locally.

Alvarado said the Trump administration is seeking to “create chaos and disseminate fear” — deporting people so undocumented workers fear the government itself, highlighting immigrant crime so Americans fear immigrants and withholding federal grants to generate fear among voters toward progressive politicians who want to create sanctuary cities.

He wants the community to start pouring money into the center so it can afford more than just one employee, although he doesn’t have much faith that either party will fully embrace the cause. In Nevada, Republican campaigns are using a crusade against sanctuary cities as a rallying cry, but Democrats have been hesitant to push back, and they stepped away from a proposal last spring that would have limited local law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE.

“Both Republicans and Democrats are oppressors of our community. Some of them do it less than others,” Alvarado said, pointing to a high number of deportations during the Obama administration. “I don’t expect the Democrats to come and defend us. They are going to cave in for the political interests.”

But he hopes people can look beyond immigration status and get behind workers in the margins in the name of basic human rights.

“In my view, there is no law, there is no institution, there is no government, there is no military force, that is above the need of a mother or a father to provide for his or her family,” he said. “And that is a sacred God’s mandate. We claim to be a Christian nation. Why don’t we give people that opportunity?”

Day Labor in Las Vegas: Employer Indiscretions in Sin City by Michelle Rindels on Scribd