Immigration Officials Promise More Worksite Enforcement

President Donald Trump’s Immigration enforcement agencies will step up their efforts to exclude illegal immigrants from Americans’ workplaces, officials told Breitbart News today.

“We’ve got to get rid of the magnets,” said Thomas Homan, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Illegals will keep migrating into the United States “if they think they can come here and get a job.”

Officials also will go after the business executives who illegally hire illegals, Homan said. “We’re talking about employers who knowingly hire people who are not authorized to work.”

The recent news that a Chicago bakery had raised wages for Americans and for legal immigrants after it was forced to fire 800 illegals is “a perfect example of how worksite enforcement works,” said Francis Cissna, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. Worksite enforcement is “for the good of the American workers,” he said.

In the Cloverhill bakery case, the Swiss-owned bakery argued that a labor broker was responsible for the illegal hiring, so excusing its own executives for the law-breaking. The company was forced to raise wages for American employees after the illegals were dismissed, dropping its profit by almost half. 

In September, the Asplundh Tree Expert Co. agreed to pay a $95 million fine for hiring illegals. That fine is a small payment for a 30,000-person company with revenues of $3.5 billion per year, but three company managers pled guilty to crimes. 

Homan said the agency would prosecute company executives instead of labor brokers if the enforcement officials find suitable evidence. “It is case-by-case basis …We’re going to run every one of these investigations to the ground and hold people liable for breaking the law,” he said.

“I want to see at least a 400 percent increase in worksite operations” during 2018, he said.

Nationwide, roughly 8 million of 21 million illegal immigrants are working in U.S. jobs, forcing down wages for Americans stoking discrimination and leaving millions of Americans unemployed in the nation’s urban and rural districts.