I’d be delighted if they left the country, never to return. My concern, though, is that they’ll relocate to a different city within the state — or a different state within the country — just as fast as you can cue up the sad walking-away music from the end of a typical episode of THE INCREDIBLE HULK.
I specifically said in my posts, if they were told to accept “whatever documents were presented,” and “not to reject any documents.” And I was refuting your suggestion that it was against the law to reject any documents. Is it your position that it is illegal to reject any documents, or that an employer has to accept all documents presented? Because if it’s not, please don’t make this into a semantics argument.
Only made it six words into my post, did we?
Do you have any basis for that claim at all? You really think that Joseph Grendys’ jet is sitting on the tarmac in case ICE shows up? Any examples of executives of large companies that fled in the face of federal investigations?
Good job with the use of the word federal. But I’m not sure you’re really confused about why, when executing a search warrant at Location A, federal law enforcement did not arrest people at Location B.
There’s an excluded middle here of possibilities. It’s not that they only have the choices of staying put or leaving the country. They might leave the state and travel to another state, perhaps steal another identity, and continue their undocumented presence here in the country while staying one step ahead of the law.
Unfortunately, I was at one point hired by a dishonest employer. I was paid above-board, but she paid a bunch of other people under the table hoping to do exactly what you outline.
Turns out there a BUNCH of things that will be accepted as proof of employment beyond paychecks and tax forms. Did this person ever sign to accept a shipment? Or several shipments? Are there people willing to testify that that person was there, working? Did they ever sign a time sheet? Did they ever sign anything? Are they on your security/surveillance system?
Sure, it’s harder to make that case than for overt things like checkstubs and I-9’s, but all of the above are admissible in court. As my former employer discovered to her dismay.
Seems like a ridiculous standard. How are you ever going to prove that somebody knew the person they were hiring was an illegal alien? Is this a crime that you can’t be convicted of unless you decide to confess your guilt?
If we want to get serious about the hiring of illegal aliens, we need to enact a better legal standard. Something like reasonable grounds or due diligence.
But I doubt this administration really wants to get serious about the hiring of illegal aliens. They’re just targeting Mexicans as political theater.
Yes.
And the lawyers can sort it out later.
First off, ‘flight risk’ is a complete red herring - let a judge worry about that when setting bail, but make the arrests on equal standards. Secondly, the majority of the people picked up had significant ties to the community, like kids in school, so I doubt the claim that all of them were an actual, documented, provable flight risk rather than a ‘they’re brown, so they might run off to Mexico or wherever they’re from, so arrest them’ flight risk. Thirdly, the idea that people with passports and money to travel won’t run when confronted with an actual risk of arrest and prison. Sure, they’re not going to run in this case, but that’s because they know they’re safe from anything more than token fines, and that forms a circular argument.
If there was enough evidence and good reason to round up poor, brown employees even though they couldn’t come up with enough to hold around half of them for a full 24 hours, then there was also enough evidence to hold the rich white guys overnight. If there is enough suspicion for probable cause, and ‘arrest them all, release them later’ is reasonable, then actually arrest ALL of them, not just the poor brown people.
Yes, and people have already cited that ICE claims to have evidence of such multiple times.
OK, so if going to another state counts as “flight”, then are the upper managers who live in a different state already flown?
They need to prove due diligence.
If I suspect a paper bill to be bogus (I handle a lot of cash in my job) I have a series of steps to take to determine whether or not it is legit. If I follow all of those steps and it turns out it’s a new and improved counterfeit I at least have a leg to stand on - see, I followed these steps and it all checked out, I could not know it was fake.
Likewise, IF the hiring manager actually examines the documentation given, uses e-verify, whatever else can be used, and it’s just that good a fake then sure, let the guy/gal off the hook. That’s the reason for copying ID’s, asking for more than one, and so on. If all the steps were followed and a few slipped through out of hundreds of employees I don’t see the company as doing any harm.
But what was happening in this case was HUNDREDS of employees at one location either being unauthorized to work in the US or suspected of being so - that’s not an accident. That’s not one or two really, really good fakes, that, to my mind, is a sign that something is not right.
There should be files on the hiring process for all of those employees. They should be examined to see if there are chronic errors or fraud.
And yes, I am OK with the managers being perp-walked along with the peons in this particular case. As I said, let the lawyers sort it out later. Make an example of a few of these places and you’ll have a hell of a lot fewer hiring managers looking the other way or getting lax.
Otherwise, the current administration are a bunch of bigoted hypocrites more interested in developing a scapegoat and favoring the rich and connected over everyone else in society.
Well, the first problem is that we all know that there’s not going to be any serious federal charges laid against people hiring illegal aliens absent ‘Al Capone’ situations, because it just doesn’t happen. And the executives know that too. So of course they’re not going to flee from immigration law violations, as they know the worst they’ll get is a fine that their accountant will pay off.
As far as executives fleeing prosecution when they expect to go to prison:
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/9055192-181/ameritech-financial-ceo-brandon-frere
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1217641
Here’s some foreign ones just for completeness:
No, I think Joseph Gendy’s jet is sitting on the tarmac because he flies a lot on business. It’s like asking do I have my car sitting in a parking lot just in case I have to flee the state? No, my car is sitting in the parking lot because I use it a lot to travel.
CEO’s have the resources to fly out of the county. Hell, I have the resources to do so and I’m just a lowly cashier at a big box store. Albeit a cashier who also happens to have a pilot license good for anywhere in the world. I’m not talking about booking a commercial flight, I’m talking about either a company that owns a jet or rents a jet doing so in order to fly out of the country. It is easy. And quicker than you might think.
I can definitely imagine a CEO in, say, Wisconsin, hearing that his plant in Mississippi is being raided by Federal agents being in the air within an hour and out of the country within another hour. There is the detail that you have to get through customs on the other end - hence the reason that people are sometimes asked to surrender their passport when they’re accused of a crime. (There are ways to evade that, but not only is that off topic here they’re all illegal and thus not something to be discussed here. Or really anywhere.)
Except the CEO’s don’t do that because they never expect to be arrested or held responsible for this sort of thing - that’s what lower level managers are for, to be the fall guy(s).
I’d say not holding the rich and powerful to the same standards as the poor and powerless is one of the reasons.
There’s no legal bar to serving simultaneous warrants at multiple locations - it’s been done before. There’s some additional logistical work, but it’s not rocket science.
That doesn’t follow.
Come up with a hypothetical of your own, if you like, but consider this one: let’s say there was some evidence that illegal aliens were working at that location, and that the evidence didn’t merely seem solid, but in fact was pretty solid, in that roughly half of the employees who got rounded up turned out to be worth holding on to. Let’s also say there was no evidence, at all, that they were employed by folks who knew that these were illegal aliens. What follows?
Right before the raid, it sounds like a reasonable cop could honestly say he’s got a probable-cause suspicion about each employee he’s going to round up; he has good reason to think it’s, what, around 50.1%? He has good reason to believe he’s more likely right than not about each such employee being an illegal alien? And if you ask him, right before the raid, about arresting the employers, he’ll honestly say that he has good reason to believe — what, exactly?
When completing the Form I-9, employees need to bring in valid documentation establishing their identity and their authorization to work in the United States. Most people bring in their state issued driver’s license as well as their Social Security Card. There are a wide variety of forms one can bring in to establish identity & work authorization and you can find a list at the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services website.
The employer (or an individual authorized by the employer) is responsible for completing Section 2 of the I-9. The employee needs to present original documents (No copies!), or in the case of lost or damage documents a receipt, and the employer is responsible for examining those documents, entering that information onto the Form I-9, and may or may not choose to save a copy of those documents. If an employer chooses to save those documents they must do the same for all employees.
It beggars belief to think that an employer could employee 680 undocumented workers. I imagine the company’s defense might plead ignorance but I don’t think a jury or a judge would buy it.
Every time I fill out a Form I-9 I put my signature on it attesting that I have examined the documents presented to me. You can pin the Form I-9 irregularities to specific individuals.
You could have reported him for that. A employer cannot dictate a specific form of identification for the purpose of completing a Form I-9. The employer must accept any of the document(s) authorized by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Asking for specific document(s) can be viewed as a form of discrimination.
Let me tell you, us white Americans are not gonna do field work. We wont and more importantly- can’t. Lettuce will not get picked, except by the about 50% legals/naturalized.
Chickens? They’d have to increase the pay and working conditions. Chicken would get more expensive.
Speaking as someone who has worked on a large-scale I-9 audit for a company that actually tried to comply with the law, and as someone who was the I-9 point person for a Fortune 100 company for a while, I doubt there is a single company in the United States that has perfect I-9 compliance, even the ones who try. Most HR staff simply aren’t well-trained enough.
For example, someone at my current job just did a smaller internal I-9 self-audit for a client. If an employee presents proper documents indicating an immigration status that doesn’t expire, the I-9 does not need to be reverified for as long as the person works there. This employer’s HR person would literally redo I-9s every couple of years for naturalized citizens. That’s blatantly illegal. How much do you want to bet that this employer illegally turned away prospective, legally present employees because they were not born in the U.S.?
When I was the I-9 point person at my job, I finally started having the HR people around the country fax me copies of the docs presented so I could tell them how to complete the I-9. One of the items in Column A is a passport with I-94 and entry stamp indicating a work-authorized status. One of the lines to fill out is “issuing authority.” The HR person faxed me a copy of an Indian passport with an H-1B visa and I-94 in it with a 3-year validity period. Under “Issuing Authority,” she wrote “U.S. Government.” The U.S. government issues Indian passports? Who knew?
Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal
It’s not even a hypothetical, in the real raid ICE’s own documents state that the arresting officers believe “that the companies were “willfully and unlawfully” employing undocumented immigrants.” I already quoted this earlier, it’s not some big surprise that I was holding in reserve. The fact that your and ICE’s standard of probable cause for an arrest is 'eh, maybe they did it, grab 'em all and sort ‘em out later’ for brown people and ‘oh no, we couldn’t possibly arrest them without an ironclad case, which we essentially never prosecute anyway’ for others is pretty troubling.