ICE raids renew complaint about employer status

In Mississippi case, owners yet to be charged

The images of children crying after their parents were arrested in a massive immigration raid in Mississippi revived a long-standing complaint: Unauthorized workers are jailed or deported, while the managers and business owners who profit from their labor often go unprosecuted.

Under President Donald Trump, the number of business owners and managers who face criminal charges for employing unauthorized workers has stayed almost the same, even as almost every other enforcement measure has surged.

Last week’s raids at seven chicken-processing plants were the largest worksite operation conducted under the Trump administration. The operation led to 680 arrests of people in the U.S. illegally, with expected criminal charges to follow for some. But no plant owners or top managers were immediately charged, following the pattern of other recent sweeps.

Lawyers and experts agree that investigating managers takes longer and is far more difficult than arresting workers. A key hurdle that predates the Trump administration is that federal law makes it a crime to “knowingly” hire workers who are in the U.S. illegally.

“The ‘knowingly’ term has proved to be a huge defense for employers,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “The employer says, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know they were unauthorized.’”

In a statement Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Matthew Albence said that anyone found to have broken the law in the Mississippi case would be held accountable, including “the employers who profit off their crimes.” Warrants unsealed after the Mississippi arrests allege that managers at two processing plants participated in fraud.

After Trump took office, then-Acting Director Thomas Homan declared that ICE would try to increase all worksite enforcement actions by 400 percent.

ICE succeeded almost across the board in just one government fiscal year. According to statistics the agency released in December, it quadrupled the number of investigations it opened and audits of paperwork submitted by employees to get hired. And it made 2,304 arrests in worksite cases, seven times as many as the previous year.

The major exception was for managers. ICE arrested just 72 managers in the 2018 fiscal year, compared with 71 the year before. And 49 managers were convicted of crimes, down from 55 the previous year.

Congress first created criminal penalties for employers in 1986. According to researchers at Syracuse University, prosecutions under the law banning employers from knowingly employing unauthorized workers have rarely exceeded 15 a year since then. Between April 2018 and this March, just 11 people were prosecuted in seven cases.

Employers can also be charged with other crimes. The former owner of a meat-processing plant raided in Tennessee last year was sentenced in July to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion, wire fraud and employing unauthorized workers.

Trump himself has been accused of employing unauthorized workers at his hotels, golf courses and other businesses.

A common outcome in workplace cases is a settlement where the offending company pays a fine and agrees to adopt measures like checking every new hire in the federal E-Verify program, which examines personal information submitted to an employer.

“On paper, there is a lot of enforcement of law, but in reality, people are constantly abusing the law,” Chishti said.