To critics of the administration's immigration policies, the Department of Homeland Security sent out a strong message this week: Current laws can discourage illegal immigrants and those who hire them.

On Wednesday, federal immigration officials stormed light manufacturing facilities in Atlanta and 41 other US locales, arresting more than 1,100 suspected illegal immigrants as well as people believed to have hired them.

On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced a refocusing of resources that would target employers "harboring aliens for illegal advantages." The initiative is an attempt to go after such employers with the same intensity applied to other criminal organizations.

"[Wednesday's arrests] are symbolically very important and may suggest either a testing of this particular variation of immigration policy or it may indicate a movement in a more punitive direction to try to prevent or limit the inflow of undocumented workers," says Dan Cornfield, a Vanderbilt University sociologist and editor of the "Work and Occupations" journal. "It's a message that the US, right now, won't condone that type of employer behavior."

The massive raids on Wednesday netted 1,187 arrests, more than all illegal immigrants arrested last year.

In 2005, officials arrested 150 suspected illegal immigrants, mostly at North Carolina military installations. Just over 100 people have been arrested this year in smaller stings, one at a Missouri construction site, the other at a New Jersey car wash.

Wednesday's arrests were apparently timed to an announcement by Mr. Chertoff and the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Julie Myers, in Washington on Thursday.

Secretary Chertoff said the effort is aimed at those who are "exploiting illegal aliens" and "who adopt as a business model the systematic violation of immigration laws." The federal government will "make sure we come down as hard as possible."

The hiring of undocumented immigrants was the focus of legislation passed by the House of Representatives last year, including increased penalties for those who break the law and a national system for electronically verifying worker status.

The federal government is making other, quieter efforts to respond to the public outcry over the surge in illegal immigration during the decade.

Atlanta recently saw the arrival of 70 extra federal agents to clear a backlog of naturalization requests, some going back 10 years. It's all part of a quiet movement on the federal government to heed public outcry, some say.

"There's little doubt that something is going to happen, because the public is demanding it now," says Maritza Pichon, executive director of the Latin American Association in Atlanta.

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