So, we had some massive ICE raids recently, where hundreds of workers were rounded up and taken into custody.
Why weren’t any of the employers/managers cuffed and perp-walked along with this? Hiring undocumented workers is illegal. If a company has hundreds of employees and one or two such people without permission to work in the US are on the payroll I can believe it was a matter of one or two slipping through the net intended to keep them out. But these companies had HUNDREDS of undocumented workers, that’s not a particularly clever person evading the rules, that’s blatantly breaking the law.
If the current administration was REALLY interested in dealing with illegal immigration they’d target the employers offering jobs just as aggressively as the people taking those jobs. If no one was hiring undocumented workers there would be less incentive for people to cross the border without permission.
But they don’t.
Any takers on why?
Yes, I have my own theories, but I’d really like supporters of the current administration and its immigration stance to have a go at it. Please, explain why one set of lawbreakers were arrested and another set allowed to walk free.
No, knowingly hiring undocumented workers is illegal.
You seem to be assuming, there, that it takes a particularly clever person to do this without the employer knowing their status. I have no need of that hypothesis; possibly it’s easy for folks to do this without the employer knowing their status.
Near as I can tell, two sets of folks are being discussed; you seem to grant that some of them are people who are here illegally (making them, as you say, lawbreakers). If the rest are people who employed them? Doing that knowingly is illegal; prove they did it knowingly (making them, as you say, lawbreakers) and I’ll then be right there with you, agreeing they should be “cuffed and perp-walked”.
I guess, as part of the hiring process, there is no background check, no social security card requirements and, in fact, no anything that would show that the candidate is not a citizen. But, they didn’t KNOW, so they are perfectly free to immediately hire more illegals at skimpy wages because they don’t legally KNOW that they are illegals.
For the employer to have not knowingly hired illegal aliens, they should have the required paperwork on hand. That would include an I-9 for form every single employee which states that the employer physically looked at (and/or made a copy of) their original ID and a document that proved they were eligible to work in the US. Most people born and raised in the US, would present their driver’s license and SS card for example. Some employers use e-verify. I’ll bet none of the employers caught up in the recent round of ICE raids used it.
If a few slipped through the cracks, I can understand that. Hundreds, however, don’t slip through the cracks, someone on the inside is letting it happen or even encouraging it.
My question is, how many of the people arrested were eventually let go because it turns out they were legal to work here, they just got caught up in the raid. If it’s more than a small amount, it means ICE was arresting everyone with the intention of sorting it out later. So why not arrest the employer (or at least the hiring/HR person that should have been preventing this), charge them and let the judge figure it out.
In the midst off all this, Seth or Noah or one of those guys made the comment that if this was truly about making sure companies didn’t skirt the law and not just about racism, they’d work on putting the employers in jail. If they’d put a handful of rich, powerful, white men in jail for hiring illegal immigrants, a lot of other employers would quickly stop the practice as well. The way things stand, it’s very clear you can hire them if you want and at most you’ll get a slap on the wrist.
I haven’t kept up with the news, but I imagine whether or not this was done knowingly won’t be difficult to prove.
What should happen to the employers, I don’t know. I also don’t know what should happen to the employees. What I do know is that if you deport hundreds of people for illegally working and don’t punish the people that hired them, you make your stance on the situation clear.
That’s true. And I never liked that in the face of a scandal you’ll hear that someone near the top stepped down, but (at least I think) sometimes that person had nothing to do with it, they’re just taking the fall.
However, in a case like this, they can look at the I-9 forms. Someone that works for the company (should have) signed each one of them. They signed on the line that says:
“Certification: I attest, under penalty of perjury, that (1) I have examined the ocument(s) presented by the above-named employee, (2) the above-listed document(s) appear to be genuine and to relate to the employee named, and (3) to the best of my knowledge the employee is authorized to work in the United States”
Know if they A)forgot to sign it and/or B)didn’t make copies of the documents, that will make things a bit muddier, but if I were the government, I’d certainly start by pinpointing the person that signed the I9 forms, expand to the HR department as a whole, and then go after the CEO.
Personally, I’ll have a very hard time believing that at least one of those people/groups didn’t know this was happening.
Another thing you could do is ask the people they arrested who they presented their documents to, and if they never presented any documents, who was the person that hired them.
Like I said, I agree that it can be hard to pinpoint a single person in a scandal, but I don’t think it’ll be hard in this case. It’s not like it involves layers and layers of coverups. Hiring illegal immigrants is so common because it’s so easy to do and places get caught because it’s just as easy to prove they were doing it.
This is a different standard than is used for other people.
When I was on Grand Jury, our standard was probable cause. We did not need proof of anything. We simply needed to believe that a crime was committed and this person was likely the one who did it. Add to that, the GJ is what happens a month or two after the perp walk.
If you get caught with a little baggie of white powder that in the officer’s “training and experience” is cocaine, you will be cuffed, perp walked, processed, held until you make bail, then the GJ is going to charge you with possession of cocaine, all without anything resembling proof that the powder is actually cocaine.
“The buck stops here.”
The person at the top who doesn’t bat an eye making 5,000 times as much money as the guy at the bottom can have just the slightest, or even 5,000 times as much responsibility for every thing the corporation does. It doesn’t happen, of course, because as previously mentioned, wink wink.
(I’m not arguing with you, BTW, we’re obviously on the same page here.)
Fair enough. Let’s say a cop explains that he’s about to arrest-and-perp-walk a guy for, y’know, being an illegal alien; I ask him for his proof, and he sneers and says, not proof; I have belief, and I have probable cause; and there’s some evidence, and reason to think a GJ will eventually back me up on this. Is that enough?
And then he explains he’s looking to arrest-and-perp-walk a guy for hiring an illegal alien. I ask for his proof; he sneers and says, not proof; just belief, and probable cause, and some evidence: reason to think a GJ will eventually back me up. And so I ask him if hiring an illegal alien is a crime, and he says ‘no’.
And so I ask him if he’s got — well, not proof, you understand; just evidence-backed probable cause, and the stuff of GJs, showing that it was done knowingly.
Every company I’ve worked for in the last decade (at least) has required that I fill out Form I-9 to attest that I’m a US Citizen (or green card holder), with one or two forms of legal ID as proof. Is it just white collar employers who are required to do I-9’s?
Every company in the US has to have every employee fill that out present documents proving their identity and eligibility to work in the US and it has to be kept on file the entire time the employee works there and for several years after.
The I9 has to be shown to the DOL if they ask to see it. But in general, after the employee fills it out and the employer signs it, it’ll never see the light of day again. It doesn’t get sent to any government department to be verified or even looked at, it just sits in a filing cabinet forever.
I’ve always been surprised that e-verify isn’t required more than it is.
The agents involved in this raid seem to have seen enough evidence to believe they probably did it willingly, I presume they could convince a grand jury similarly. Perhaps that will come in time, perhaps not.
The level of proof required is a matter of the law, the law written by lawmakers to manage this exact problem. They could make the level of proof whatever they want.
With cocaine, the fact that you have cocaine (or something reasonably believed to be cocaine) is proof enough to arrest you and charge you with a felony, you didn’t have to knowingly anything. They could similarly make hiring an illegal alien a strict liability offense. They didn’t.
The question becomes: Is the fact that ICE is only able to arrest the poor brown folks associated with this crime a bug or a feature?
Well, look, if you presume right, that’s one thing. But if they arrest-and-perp-walk an employer, and the whole thing gets thrown out because there’s no evidence that this was done knowingly; and they later arrest-and-perp-walk another, who’s also let go when there’s no evidence it was done knowingly; and then it happens a third time? Would there come a point when they can no longer say they have reason to believe sufficient grounds exist, because, hey, in their experience, it’s not enough?
Let’s say there’s an employer who (a) is hiring, and (b) genuinely doesn’t know if a guy is an illegal alien: how do you want him to proceed? How will he proceed if we make it a strict-liability offense?
I’m not sure if you actually wanted any sort of “factual” answer by putting this in GQ originally, but it’s worth understanding what happened, at least in Mississippi.
ICE obtained a series of judicial search warrants to search for and seize evidence that these companies were knowingly hiring illegal workers. I don’t do immigration cases, but I’ve worked on a number of corporate criminal investigations. A search warrant of this sort ending in an arrest would be exceedingly rare. The purpose is to find (and, more importantly, preserve) the evidence. Even if you found a file in HR titled “Illegal Aliens We’ve Knowingly Hired,” you’re going to seize that file and continue to build the case. I don’t know the statistics, but a pre-indictment warrant-less arrest is uncommon in these types of corporate cases and largely unnecessary – these companies aren’t going anywhere. The point of these “shock-and-awe” search warrants is to avoid the destruction (or fabrication) of the evidence. Will this result in any further action? No idea. And the lack of enforcement directed at those who employ illegal aliens is a fair criticism (although, of course, not unique to this administration). But my point is that you would not expect any “employers/managers cuffed and perp-walked” along with this type of search warrant.
The warrants also ordered the seizure of any illegal aliens (and, I believe, that ICE also used its administrative detention warrants simultaneously, which are inherently limited to the detention of removable aliens). Obviously, the risk of flight is heightened for individuals (particularly those here illegally and, according to the search warrant affidavits, engaged in widespread identity fraud). And, of course, the presence of illegal aliens working in the factory is evidence itself against the employers. But fundamentally, ICE had authority to detain these people, but would have had to make a warrant-less arrest of anyone else. (Tangentially, it’s fairly common to hear people claim that “illegal aliens” aren’t really engaged in “illegal” activity because immigration enforcement is generally handled as a civil/administrative matter. Whatever the merits of that distinction, one outcome is that removable aliens are more easily detained – and have fewer rights – than criminal defendants).
Putting out these clean, neat ‘law and order’ phrases to justify assaults on brown and/or poor people but not rich and especially white people. But actual equal application of the law is not consistent with what happened; ICE came in and started arresting (or ‘detaining’ or whatever term you want to use for locking people up) brown people willy-nilly without regard to whether there was any indication of them working illegally other than their skin color. I say this because they released almost half of the people that they seized within a day of the raid (first story below). At least one of the people was an American citizen who was subject to taser torture for telling them that he was (second story).
It’s pretty obvious that if the same standards of ‘well they might have done something, we’ll throw them all in a cage and sort it out later, and it doesn’t matter that we’re ICE and they’re American citizens’ was applied to executives at these companies that they’d spend at least a night locked up and probably get beaten and/or shocked in the process. But ICE declined to ‘treat them accordingly’ despite the fact that there is as much evidence that they hired knowingly as there was for several hundred of the people arrested, but for some reason the ‘law and order’ crowd always finds excuses for the people on top. “Oh, there wasn’t enough evidence” falls flat when discussing a sweep where ICE doesn’t have enough evidence to hold half they people they arrested for a full day. If nothing else, the fact that these raids targeted factories where workers are organized and recently won a a lawsuit against Koch Foods for various discrimination and sexual harassment issues is itself very strong circumstantial evidence that this retaliation for the lawsuit.