The Wall Street Journal reports that Homeland Security is reining in a Bush Administration program to authorize state and local law enforcement to make immigration violation arrests. It writes, “Opponents said the program, known as 287g, was intended to identify criminal aliens but instead has led to racial profiling; it allowed local police to identify and arrest illegal immigrants for such minor infractions as a broken tail light. In the past two years, more than 120,000 suspected illegal immigrants were identified through the program, and most ended up in deportation proceedings. By comparison, ICE removed 356,739 illegal immigrants from the U.S. during the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2008 — a 23.5% increase over the 2007 total.”
The article in full:
New Curbs Set on Arrests of Illegal Immigrants
By Miriam Jordan
The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2009
The Department of Homeland Security said Friday it was revising a program that authorized local police to enforce federal immigration law — a controversial aspect of U.S. border policy.
Opponents said the program, known as 287g, was intended to identify criminal aliens but instead has led to racial profiling; it allowed local police to identify and arrest illegal immigrants for such minor infractions as a broken tail light. Program supporters said it has been an effective tool for combating illegal immigration.
The new guidelines sharply reduce the ability of local law enforcement to arrest and screen suspected illegal immigrants. They are intended to prevent sheriff and police departments from arresting people ‘for minor offenses as a guise to initiate removal proceedings,’ according to Homeland Security. The program will instead focus on more serious criminals.
‘In a world of limited resources, our view is that we need to focus first and foremost on people committing crimes in our community who should not be here,’ said John Morton, Assistant Secretary of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mr. Morton said his agency would sign new contracts with local law enforcement that would bolster federal oversight.
In the past two years, more than 120,000 suspected illegal immigrants were identified through the program, and most ended up in deportation proceedings. By comparison, ICE removed 356,739 illegal immigrants from the U.S. during the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2008 — a 23.5% increase over the 2007 total.
The most active local enforcer has been Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County. He said Friday he would continue pursuing illegal immigrants, arguing that state laws allow neighborhood crime sweeps and worksite raids.
‘If I’m told not to enforce immigration law except if the alien is a violent criminal, my answer to that is we are still going to do the same thing, 287g or not,’ said Mr. Arpaio. His deputies have identified in jail or picked up on the streets more than 30,000 illegal immigrants in the Phoenix area. ‘We have been very successful,’ said the five-term sheriff.
The Department of Justice is investigating whether Mr. Arpaio’s deputies have used skin color as a pretense to stop Latinos suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Mr. Obama’s policy change is expected to bolster his standing with Latinos and some Democratic legislators. The administration is seeking to set the stage for a sweeping overhaul of immigration legislation that could put millions of illegal workers on the path to U.S. citizenship.
President George W. Bush pursued a similar goal. After the efforts failed in Congress, his administration stepped up enforcement with raids and the expansion of such programs as 287g.
The provision was created by Congress in 1996 and designed to train local police to help federal immigration authorities locate criminal aliens. It took six years for the first state, Florida, to sign on to the program.
The Bush administration promoted the program among sheriffs and police chiefs, turning it into a symbol of his crackdown on illegal immigration.
Since January 2006, more than 1,000 state and local law-enforcement officials have been certified. Many jurisdictions used those officers in jails, where they could sort through many inmates in a single shift.
Southern states account for more than 40 of the 66 existing participants. There are 42 applications pending, most of them in the South. Both Virginia and North Carolina, where the Latino immigrant population has grown, each have nine 287g agreements, more than other states.
‘I think the program is working great,’ said Wake County, N.C., Sheriff Donnie Harrison. ‘If the highway patrol brings someone to our jail, and they say they are foreign born, then they are flagged for 287g. They have committed a violation of some sort to be brought to our jail…from broken tail lights to murder and rape.’
Raleigh, N.C., resident Maria Hernandez was booked into a Wake County jail after failing to show up for her 6-year-old son’s truancy hearing, according to her account and that of her attorney, Marty Rosenbluth.
Ms. Hernandez, a cleaning lady who came to the U.S. illegally nine years ago, is now in deportation court. ‘I don’t understand why they come after people like me,’ she said.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a comprehensive review of 287g shortly after taking her post earlier this year. Members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office had raised concerns the program was being used ‘to process individuals for minor crimes, such as speeding, contrary to the objective of the program.’
The shift on 287g follows other recent modifications to immigration policy by the Obama administration, reflecting an effort to shift the burden of immigration enforcement to employers, while making it difficult for illegal immigrants to get hired.
In the past two weeks, Ms. Napolitano said federal contractors would be required to check the identity of new hires against a federal database. DHS also will audit hundreds of companies to verify whether their employees are eligible to work.

As I have already posted, the Obama Administration’s ICE enforcement policy has shifted, in two ways. First, to focus on the employer rather than the employee. Second, to work more constructively rather than go for red-meat news headlines. The Los Angeles firm of American Apparel employs 5,600 workers, 1,800 of whom are probably illegal. The firm has been fined $150,000 but there have been no raids, which can destroy communities and jar the conscience. In this case, the economy being what it is, the city government wants these jobs to remain filled. A campaign was launched with a clever title of “Legalize L.A.” I do not have figures in hand, but I would not be surprised in 25% of low wage jobs in southern California are filled by illegal workers.
The New York Times article in full:
July 3, 2009
U.S. Shifts Strategy on Illicit Work by Immigrants
By JULIA PRESTON
Immigration authorities had bad news this week for American Apparel, the T-shirt maker based in downtown Los Angeles: About 1,800 of its employees appeared to be illegal immigrants not authorized to work in the United States.
But in contrast to the high-profile raids that marked the enforcement approach of the Bush administration, no federal agents with criminal warrants stormed the company’s factories and rounded up employees. Instead, the federal immigration agency sent American Apparel a written notice that it faced civil fines and would have to fire any workers confirmed to be unauthorized.
The treatment of American Apparel, which has more than 5,600 factory employees in Los Angeles alone, is the most prominent demonstration of a new strategy by the Obama administration to curb the employment of illegal immigrants by focusing on employers who hire them — and doing so in a less confrontational manner than in years past.
Unlike the approach of the Bush administration, which brought criminal charges in its final two years against many illegal immigrant workers, the new effort makes broader use of fines and other civil sanctions, federal officials said Thursday.

Continue reading The Obama policy: no more showboat raids

www.globalworkers.org
This NY-based public interest group advocates for the labor rights of immigrant workers. It focuses on building up the capacity of immigrant workers to protect their rights, for example for fair pay, even while back in their country of origin. The Alliance has worked in Mexico and other Central American countries.
Its recent news letter profiles one project involving immigrant workers who worked in planting pine trees in the South:
Partnering with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Global Workers and one of its Defenders in Guatemala ensured that hundreds of workers who planted pine trees in the southern US recovered wages stolen from their paychecks. After SPLC won a lawsuit for the failure to pay minimum wages (which is far less than the wage set by the government for guestworkers) the contractor continued to violate the law.
The contractor was charging exorbitant and unlawful fees to work in the United States, such as a fictitious $500 hotel “security deposit.” SPLC asked Global Workers to help them collect testimonies about these illegal charges from the guestworkers who had returned to Guatemala. According to the Director of SPLC’s Immigrant Justice Project our “amazing” help secured 50 testimonies and the court held the contractor in contempt ordering the workers to be reimbursed.

The Obama Administration has been promoting E-Verify, the now-voluntary program for employers to ascertain the legal status of employees and job applicants to work in the country. A recent news article reported that “in prepared remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee in May, Napolitano said E-Verify’s accuracy was continually improving, and more than 122,000 employers use the system.”
“She defended the system’s accuracy by explaining its statistics this way: The most recent surveys found that 96.1 percent of cases queried through the system automatically authorized the employees for work, and 3.9 percent showed a mismatch or a tentative non-confirmation. Also, only 0.4 percent of the total number of candidates had successfully contested an adverse initial decision about their eligibility, while the other 3.5 percent remained ineligible.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerse has sued to stop the federal government from requiring use of E-Verify by federal contractors.

Many illegal immigrants work for companies who cheat by not taking out workers compensation insurance. These include farms, construction firms, and restaurants. When the worker has an injury, she or her is left in legal limbo to get coverage for medical treatment and disability payments.
While this is a pretty small issue for workers as a whole, it is a very real problem for illegal workers as they are naturally afraid to seek legal help. To help low income immigrant workers in the country, one has to address access problems in the workers comp system.
A California coalition, which I had a hand in launching several years ago, has brought about a new policy which will provide legal assistance to workers even if they are undocumented.
The coalition, the Workers Compensation Enforcement Collaborative, was put together by activist organizations, such as the Watsonville Law Center, and main stream workers comp experts, such as Bill Zachry, the risk manager of California’s largest private sector employer, Safeway. Also, law enforcement organizations are involved.
Below is the press release dated 5/28/09 of the new policy.
Department of Industrial Relations partners with community based organizations to provide extra assistance to injured workers
Pilot project in Salinas will help identify illegally uninsured employers
The Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) and the Division of Workers’ Compensation (DWC) have teamed up with the Watsonville-based Workers’ Compensation Enforcement Collaborative (WCEC) to overcome hurdles faced by injured workers seeking benefits when their employers are illegally uninsured. The DWC’s Information and Assistance (I&A) Unit in Salinas has been planning with WCEC members and others and, on June 1, will launch a “customer service initiative” pilot project designed to help these injured workers get benefits while shining a spotlight on their illegally uninsured employers.

Continue reading New California program to assist in workers comp benefits

Thanks to Risk & Insurance Magazine: here is how DHS summarizes its change of policy towards more focus on employers:
Fact Sheet
April 30, 2009
Contact: DHS Press Office, 202-282-8010
Worksite Enforcement Strategy
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a vital responsibility to enforce
the law and engage in effective worksite enforcement to reduce the demand for
illegal employment and protect employment opportunities for the nation’s lawful
workforce.
An effective, comprehensive worksite enforcement strategy must address both
employers who knowingly hire illegal workers as well as the workers themselves.
Of the more than 6,000 arrests related to worksite enforcement in 2008, only 135
were employers.
This week, updated worksite enforcement guidance was distributed to
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which reflects a renewed
Department-wide focus targeting criminal aliens and employers who cultivate
illegal workplaces by breaking the country’s laws and knowingly hiring illegal
workers.
Effective immediately, ICE will focus its resources in the worksite enforcement
program on the criminal prosecution of employers who knowingly hire illegal
workers in order to target the root cause of illegal immigration.
ICE will continue to arrest and process for removal any illegal workers who are
found in the course of these worksite enforcement actions in a manner consistent
with immigration law and DHS priorities. Furthermore, ICE will use all available
civil and administrative tools, including civil fines and debarment, to penalize and
deter illegal employment.
ICE officers will be held to high investigative standards including:
ICE will look for evidence of the mistreatment of workers, along with
evidence of trafficking, smuggling, harboring, visa fraud, identification
document fraud, money laundering, and other such criminal conduct.
ICE offices will obtain indictments, criminal arrest or search warrants, or a
commitment from a U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) to prosecute the
targeted employer before arresting employees for civil immigration
violations at a worksite.
Existing humanitarian guidelines will remain in effect, impacting worksite
enforcements involving 25 or more illegal workers. This reflects a change from
the previous threshold of 150.
DHS is committed to providing employers with the most up-to-date and effective
resources to comply with our nation’s laws.
DHS will continue to work with partners in the public and private sectors to
maintain a legal workforce through training and employee verification tools like
E-verify, which improve the accuracy of determinations of employment eligibility
and combat illegal employment
As a former border state Governor, Napolitano signed into law one of the toughest
employer sanctions laws in the country in 2007 to target employers who
knowingly hired illegal workers.

Last week, according to the NY Times, the Department of Homeland Security issued internal guidelines which put higher priority on enforcing immigration laws by targeting employers instead of workers. In effect, the large worker raids of the last few years – in New Bedford MA and Postville IA and against Swift – are not going to continue, in favor of catching executives who break the law.
The Bush Administration’s focus on round-ups actually made it more difficult to indict executives. Per the article, “Under the Bush administration, the officials said, most raids were conducted largely on the basis of tips that an employer was hiring illegal workers, rather than on information gleaned from audits of employer records or undercover investigations. As a result, agents rounded up thousands of illegal immigrants but rarely developed the evidence necessary to show whether businesses were knowingly using illegal labor.”
The times quotes the guidelines: “ICE must prioritize the criminal prosecution of actual employers who knowingly hire illegal workers because such employers are not sufficiently punished or deterred by the arrest of their illegal work force.”
The article in full:
Immigration Agents to Turn Focus to Employers
By GINGER THOMPSON
Published: April 30, 2009
WASHINGTON — In an effort to crack down on illegal labor, the Department of Homeland Security intends to step up enforcement efforts against employers who knowingly hire such workers.
Under guidelines to be issued Thursday to Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices, agents will be instructed to take aim at employers and supervisors for prosecution “through the use of carefully planned criminal investigations.”

Continue reading DHS shifts enforcement focus onto employers

After the Postville, IA raid on May 12, 2008, Immigration and Law Enforcement pressed criminal charges against 300 illegal workers for identity theft, asserting that these workers had criminally stolen the identity of the social security card holders whose numbers they used. The defendants were railroaded through a court. One of the workers, now in federal prison, appealed. The Supreme Court yesterday in a unanimous decision threw out the conviction and in doing so forbad ICE from using this overkill tactic. The court’s reasoning: the workers had not idea the numbers were for actual people.
According to the NY Times, “The Obama administration has said that it will shift the focus of immigration enforcement to employers who intentionally hire unauthorized immigrants in order to pay lower wages or otherwise lower costs. But last week the administration said agents would continue to detain illegal immigrants found in raids.”
The article in full:
By ADAM LIPTAK and JULIA PRESTON
Published: May 4, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a favorite tool of prosecutors in immigration cases, ruling unanimously that a federal identity-theft law may not be used against many illegal workers who used false Social Security numbers to get jobs.
The question in the case was whether workers who use fake identification numbers to commit some other crimes must know they belong to a real person to be subject to a two-year sentence extension for “aggravated identity theft.”
The answer, the Supreme Court said, is yes.

Continue reading Supreme Court: ICE can no longer use identity-theft charges

On October 7, 2008, as reported by the New York Times, “the Weld County, CO, Sheriff’s Office, armed with a search warrant, seized thousands of confidential tax returns from Ms. Cerrillo’s business. They told her they were looking for people with fraudulent Social Security numbers, commonly used by illegal immigrants to get work.”
This raid set off a legal fight over creative enforcement of immigration laws by state and local police. Under the so-called 287G program, the Department of Homeland Security contracts with non-federal agencies to enforce immigration laws. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s head of DHS, has launched a review of the program.
Below is a March 11 article by the Times on an ACLU suit in a state court to prevent the tax returns from being used by law enforcement. Following that is the original Times article from February 9.
Amalia’s tax service Judge Puts Halt to ID Theft Inquiry Focusing on Immigrants

Continue reading Colorado local police raid tax practice to nab illegals

I missed this one – the Postville plant which was raided in May this year (see prior postings) filed on bankruptcy on November 4. It is still operating at a much lower volume. Below is the article about the bankruptcy filing by the Des Moines Register.
Agriprocessors files for bankruptcy after bank seeks to foreclose
ERIN JORDAN • ejordan@dmreg.com • November 5, 2008
A kosher meatpacking plant in Postville filed for bankruptcy Tuesday, blaming a May 12 immigration raid for financial difficulties.
Agriprocessors Inc. filed for Chapter 11 protection in New York, where the headquarters are located. The Postville plant is listed as the company’s principal asset.
The company says it owes between 200 and 999 creditors $50 million to $100 million, according to records filed in U.S. District Court. Agriprocessors lists assets of $100 million to $500 million.
The company’s board of directors met Tuesday and decided to file for bankruptcy a day before a scheduled hearing on a lawsuit from the company’s largest lender, First Bank of St. Louis.

Continue reading Agriprocessors declared bankruptcy in November