The Glenn Valley Foods raid by ICE on June 10 sent shockwaves through the meat processing industry, and led to Trump suspending raids on meat processing plants. It also exposed the limitations of the e-Verify system. Failure of the e-Verify system in the context of aggressive ICE action puts employers who depend on immigrant workers at extreme risk of sudden and potentially catastrophe disruption of operations. the Trump administration nor Congress appear to have no plans to upgrade e-Verify.
The massive increase in DHS’s budget going through Congress appears to reduce staffing for e-Verify and not increase its budget, which is currently $122.5 million a year.
On the morning of June 10, federal immigration authorities, with support from the FBI, DEA, U.S. Marshals, and local police, executed a search warrant at the meat processing plant of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, Nebraska. Some 75 persons, about half the workforce, were detained.
Workers were separated in the plant’s cafeteria. Those with documentation proving their legal status were cleared, while those without were led out of the facility with their hands zip-tied and loaded onto buses. The majority of those detained were later taken to the Lincoln Detention Center. Some were deported or relocated out of state.
Company officials said that they had followed federal hiring regulations and used the E-Verify system. Federal agents reportedly told executives that the E-Verify system is “broken” and that the company was a victim of individuals using stolen identities or fake documents to circumvent verification. (Sources include here, here and here.)
The e-Verify system
The e-Verify system has in operational since the mid 2000s. A few states mandate its use. Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi and South Carolina require all private sector employers. Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah require employer over a specified size (such as 15 workers).
The system does not include biometric data, such as a photo of a person, nor does it challenge the person by asking challenging questions. While the system will lock a social security number used in multiple states it has limited capacity to interrogate a specific one time use.
In “E-Verify has been the cornerstone of immigration reform negotiations for a quarter-century. But does it work?” by DW Gibson published in Nov. 2022, Gibson says that it is both easy for would be employees to evade detection as unauthorized and easy for employers to evade its use by hiring workers as independent contractors. It also could be used by landlords and others wanting to, or required to, learn about the legal status of an individual. Therefore upgrading the e-Verify system as imnplications well beyond employee verification.