The Battle Inside 7-Eleven

The company has been fighting with its store owners for years. It seems to have found a new tool: U.S. immigration authorities.

- Lauren Etter

The sun hadn’t yet risen over Gurtar Sandhu’s 7-Eleven store near downtown Los Angeles on Jan. 10 when four plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swarmed inside. The place was busy; a lot of Sandhu’s customers are day laborers and other working people who start early. As dozens of customers poured themselves coffee and lined up to pay for morning snacks, the agents flashed badges and told employees to stay put. Three other agents, wearing dark ICE jackets, guarded the entrance, blocking anyone from coming in. The tension was heightened when one cashier darted out the back door into the dawn.

The night manager, Billy Davenport, watched from near the coffee urns. One of the agents handed him paperwork giving Sandhu 72 hours to produce records about every person who’d worked there in the past three years. Then the agents fired questions at Davenport and the other four employees left in the store: Do you have identification? Where were you born? How long have you been in America?

As the raid unfolded, Sandhu was on his way to another of his three 7-Elevens, in the nearby city of Carson. The 48-yearold father of three had built a life around 7-Eleven Inc., a retailer with almost 9,000 stores in the U.S., most of them operated by independent franchise owners. His own father had done the same: After fleeing violent ethnic conflict in northern India, he brought his family to the U.S. and found work behind a 7-Eleven counter. Years later, Sandhu and his dad bought their own franchise, then another, then two more. (They sold one in 2016.)

Sandhu was at the Carson store doing paperwork when the phone rang. Davenport was on the line. “They did what?” Sandhu responded. A few days later, two of the federal agents returned and Sandhu handed over a thick file of employee records, mostly copies of federal immigration forms called I-9s.