ICE sets quotas to deliver on immigration crackdown on emplo

[cng]

WP: ICE sets quotas to deliver on immigration crackdown on employers

The Trump administration has ramped up investigations of companies suspected of employing undocumented immigrants, directing officials to meet audit quotas for such reviews to accelerate deportation efforts.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement division has ordered its 30 regional offices to meet quotas on inspections of employers’ documentation of their workers’ immigration status, according to three immigration lawyers and a former Department of Homeland Security government official familiar with the agency’s operations. The number of notices of inspection, known as I-9 audits, has increased “tenfold” since January, three lawyers said.

The inspections can be a precursor to workplace raids and have recently been used by the Trump administration as a method for detaining undocumented workers without judicial warrants, according to immigration advocates and lawyers. Often, undocumented workers never return to work after ICE agents serve an employer an inspection notice.

The directives have resulted in an explosion of immigration enforcement across industries and regions, according to four immigration lawyers.

This month, ICE officials have detained hundreds of workers, including at a meat-processing plant in Omaha, gas stations in Phoenix, construction sites in Tallahassee and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, and a pallet manufacturer in Pennsylvania.

ICE has ramped up arrests broadly in an effort to follow through on a directive from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to make a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day. Those heightened efforts were on display last week in Los Angeles when ICE agents descended on a women’s clothing manufacturer with a search warrant and also arrested day laborers at a Home Depot parking lot. The raids sparked protests that led President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard and U.S. Marines.

Chris Thomas, a partner at Holland & Hart, a law firm that represents employers across the United States, said he is “seeing audits at the usual suspects: hospitality, construction and food processing. And with the same frequency in red states as blue states.”

“Employers all over are panicking,” said Amy Peck, a lawyer at the firm Jackson Lewis in Omaha, following Tuesday’s raid on the Nebraska meat-packer. “Workers are not showing up for work.”

The acceleration of the employer crackdown follows a recent declaration from Trump’s border czar Tom Homan that there would be “more worksite enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation.” Some workplace raids in recent weeks have been assisted by the FBI; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Internal Revenue Service, as well as local law enforcement, according to recent ICE communications.

Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, responded to questions about the quotas and increased worksite enforcement, saying: “If you are present in the United States illegally, you will be deported. This is the promise President Trump made to the American people and the Administration is committed to keeping it.”

A DHS spokesperson said that “worksite immigration enforcement protects workers from exploitation and trafficking.”

“These operations protect not only American workers but also illegal aliens,” the spokesperson added. “President Trump will not allow criminals to abuse and exploit workers for profit.”

The former DHS official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations about the quotas, said that agents were being “pushed for this weeks ago” but that the pressure to investigate workplaces has increased recently. Quotas may vary by region, the official added.

As part of this effort, DHS has also recently reassigned more law enforcement agents from human trafficking and other transnational crime investigations to target U.S. employers, according to the former DHS official and two of the immigration attorneys.

“They’re being pushed to basically work civil immigration and not do any criminal work,” the former DHS official said.

The I-9 audits are used to collect evidence that can later be used to obtain warrants for workplace raids, such as those that roiled communities in the South and Midwest during the first Trump administration.

This year, ICE agents have sometimes been arresting workers while delivering employers with inspection notices. In early May, ICE agents arrested 200 workers while serving inspection notices to 187 businesses in D.C. during a four-day sweep.

The crackdown on undocumented workers and employers arrives as the White House has applied enormous pressure on ICE to ramp up its deportation statistics. The administration previously set a goal of 1 million deportations in 2025, though it appears unlikely that it will meet this target.

It’s unclear how many worksite arrests ICE has made so far. But during the first 100 days of the Trump administration, agents arrested about 1,270 undocumented immigrants on worksites and proposed nearly $1 million in fines on businesses that employ them, according to its website.

Those numbers appear to be rising quickly as ICE agents descend on employers in nearly every sector.

“Notices of inspection are increasing exponentially,” Dawn Lurie, a lawyer at the firm Seyfarth Shaw, which represents major employers. Earlier this year, DHS targeted small businesses — including mom-and-pop restaurants — but more recently, audits have branched out “in both scope and strategy,” targeting company headquarters, including in the retail, finance, real estate and tech industries, Lurie said.

The construction industry has also faced enforcement activity, stoking widespread fear among laborers about showing up to work, notably after more than 100 undocumented immigrants were arrested while working on Tallahassee construction sites last month.

Brian Turmail, spokesman for Associated General Contractors of America, said there is “huge anxiety” about how to support and maintain the current workforce. The organization has been coaching its 27,000 members about what to do if ICE shows up to a site or starts inquiring about paperwork. The group is also exploring ways to help people who have lawful status secure citizenship or other protections since “lawful status today might not be lawful status tomorrow.”

Since January, agriculture had been one of the few sectors that has weathered less enforcement action, comparatively, the immigration lawyers said. More than 40 percent of laborers employed by agriculture are undocumented, according to 2022 estimates by the Agriculture Department.

The director of policy at the California Farm Bureau, Bryan Little, who is regularly in touch with farmers throughout the state, said he had not heard of a single enforcement action targeting the state’s farmers since Trump retook the White House. But on Tuesday, word spread of raids on some farms in Southern California.

Natalie Allison contributed to this report.

[pathdream]

ice太惨了 完不成任务 都疯了