The Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested more than 1,000 illegal alien workers and is proposing fines against businesses that have used illegal labor.
ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced Wednesday that they have taken historic actions against illegal alien workers, and against the businesses profiting from illegal alien labor.
“This is the highest rate of arrest in HSI’s history,” HSI acting Executive Associate Director Robert Hammer explained. “We’ve subpoenaed the business records of about 1,200 businesses, and as part of our review, we’ve proposed close to $1 million in fines.”
He also railed against businesses that use illegal labor. “Businesses that exploit and hire illegal workers are harming the American public,” Hammer charged. “ICE’s statutory duties include protecting Americans and enforcing more than 400 laws that relate to immigration, so there are two aspects to our worksite enforcement operations.”
The agency says it has increased its workplace enforcement efforts in the past two months.
“On April 2, we filed a civil complaint against a Chinese money laundering organization that orders the multimillion-dollar seizure of 14 properties, seven bank accounts and 15 vehicles,” ICE Detroit acting Special Agent in Charge Jared Murphey said. The agency alleges that the money laundering ring operated a staffing company that supplied illegal alien labor to an Ohio factory.
ICE also recently captured 37 illegal aliens working at a roofing company in Washington state. The federal agency says that the aliens “fraudulently represented their immigration status and submitted fraudulent documents” in order to gain employment.
That raid came after ICE and HSI arrested eight illegal aliens at a workplace raid at a bakery in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. The raid also resulted in the arrest of the two owners of the business, who allegedly hired the employees despite knowing that they were in the country illegally.
Immigration experts have also explained that a national E-Verify mandate could prevent illegal aliens from obtaining jobs, thus encouraging them to self-deport en masse.
“It would make it much more difficult to get work. It would mean that a significant number of people would…opt not to come here illegally or even decide to go home,” Mark Krikorian, the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Daily Wire.
Ira Mehlman, the Media Director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), explained that an E-Verify mandate would remove the biggest incentive that illegal aliens have to come into the country.
“The vast majority of illegal aliens — especially the ones who arrived during the Biden administration — are economic migrants. Their strongest motivation for coming here was the ability to find a job and better wages,” he said. “If employers were mandated to use E-Verify and the government demonstrated the resolve to hold employers accountable, that would go a long way toward drying up the supply of jobs for illegal aliens, thereby eliminating the biggest incentive to come or remain here illegally.”
One recent FAIR study estimated that there are 18.6 million illegal aliens present in the United States, presenting a seismic challenge for immigration enforcement authorities. “There’s no question that a large part, and maybe most, of any reduction in the illegal population has to come through self deportation,” Krikorian noted.
