US authorities hold tougher line on hiring illegal immigrants

Criminal arrests, often of executives, quadrupled in a year. But is it a tactic to pass a guest-worker program?

from the March 20, 2007 edition

Page 2 of 3

Page 1 | 2 | Page 3

Seizure nets more than years of fines

Seizures of property are also on the rise. In drug busts, for example, the federal government can take property related to a crime, requiring the property owner to prove in a hearing that it's not part of a crime. Such seizures often end up with owners forfeiting the property. Now the ICE is using the tactic. In FY 2005, it got $15 million from a single forfeiture case – more money than the total the government collected in immigration-related workplace fines in the previous eight years.

The result: a rising tide of criminal convictions. In FY 2005 (the latest numbers available), there were 127, up from 46 in 2004. In a recent case, the owner of a Baltimore sushi chain pleaded guilty to money-laundering and harboring illegal workers and agreed to settle for $1 million.

ICE officials say agents are, in effect, carrying out the enforcement measures promised but never delivered after the 1986 amnesty of some 4 million illegal workers. A nearly $100 million boost in its budget last year has allowed ICE to hire 67 new agents and add nearly 2,000 detention beds, laying the groundwork for the crackdown, officials say.

"We're doing a lot of sophisticated targeting," says ICE spokeswoman Pat Reilly. "It's one thing to remove people, but the magnet [for illegals] is getting a job. If you can make that a little more risky both for the employer and the person who takes the job, then hopefully it stems the flow somewhat."

Tipped off by a company insider, ICE sent an undercover informant to an IFCO Systems plant in Guilderland, N.Y. Pretending to look for work, the informant showed an executive a green card with someone else's name and face on it. "This will probably work – it looks like you to me," the executive replied, according to a federal indictment. When the informant later came back with a batch of fake green cards, forged by ICE's own documents lab, the management asked for more and thanked him for his service to the company, the indictment says.

A follow-up ICE investigation found that managers at IFCO, a large Houston-based manufacturer of pallets and containers, recruited illegal workers in Texas and brought them to facilities across the country. The company put them up in company-owned houses and drove them to and from work. Last April, ICE conducted a multistate raid, netting more than 1,000 illegal workers at IFCO and seven current and former managers.

Last month, five of them pleaded guilty in Albany, N.Y., to federal charges of conspiracy to hire illegal workers, with each facing up to two years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

1 | Page 2 | 3 | Next Page