U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mass round-ups of illegal immigrant workers at job sites have not made headlines for months, and immigration groups who want President Donald Trump to do more blame Republicans’ ties to Big Business for the hold-up on enforcement.
Trump promised to carry out the “largest-ever” deportation operation in history, while simultaneously going after the “worst of the worst” first. To get to the former, immigration research groups that call for stricter enforcement told the Washington Examiner that Trump needs to go all-in on targeting employers and illegal workers nationwide.
Analysts from the Center for Immigration Studies, Federation for American Immigration Reform, and NumbersUSA told the Washington Examiner that the Trump administration cannot ignore millions of illegal immigrant workers who do not have criminal records — because doing so would sabotage Trump’s goal of carrying out a historic immigration crackdown before he leaves office.
Approximately 60 organizations that banded together as the Mass Deportation Coalition listed “worksite enforcement” as the top priority for Trump.
“There is no chance for a mass deportation program if worksite enforcement is not the centerpiece,” the coalition states on its website. “Enforcement at scale means focusing on physical areas where illegal aliens are concentrated: worksites. This is how President Eisenhower, who President Trump pledged to surpass in terms of enforcement efforts, was able to achieve his success.”
The problem is that not all Republicans, including those in the Trump administration, may want to go after Big Business, according to FAIR spokesman Ira Mehlman.
“That has always been a concern,” Mehlman said. “Obviously, the business lobby in this country is important. They carry a lot of clout. And that has traditionally been a sticking point for a lot of Republicans, but nevertheless, it’s something that they need to do.”
James Beck, co-president of NumbersUSA, said the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 should have been a turning point where the government went after illegal workers and set a new precedent that would deter future illegal immigration.
“The story since 1986 has been that our federal government, administration after administration, Congress after Congress, has declined in the face of the business lobby to fulfill the promise of the 1986 amnesty compromise, which was, ‘We’re going to wipe the slate clean, and we’re going to guarantee that this never happens again, because we are going to crack down on the real core issue when it comes to illegal immigration,’ which is illegal hiring,” Beck said.
The state of illegal workers
During the Biden administration, approximately 5.3 million people who illegally crossed the southern border were admitted and allowed to remain in the country pending court hearings for unlawfully entering. Illegal border crossers who have not applied for asylum are not eligible to work while here, forcing them to work under the table, often for lower wages.
The Center for Migration Studies of New York estimates that “as many as 8.3 million undocumented immigrants work in the US economy, or 5.2 percent of the workforce.”
Approximately 1.5 million are employed in construction, followed by 1 million at restaurants, 320,000 in the agriculture industry, 300,000 in landscaping, and 200,000 in food processing and manufacturing.
ICE goes after workers
Intelligence and tax information may lead investigators at ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations arm to audit a business’s I-9 documents and ultimately raid a job site.
Employers are given notice before ICE shows up on site and told to have workers’ work documents available for federal police to review. If tax records and documents do not add up, employers and employees may be arrested and detained as investigators sort out who is illegally present in the United States or illegally employing workers.
In Trump’s first 100 days in office, HSI arrested more than 1,100 illegal immigrants at job sites.
Raids began with a handful to more than a dozen arrests per location. Last May, more than 100 workers were arrested at a construction site in Tallahassee, and 84 people were nabbed at the Delta Downs racetrack in Vinton, Louisiana.
More recent raids at job sites have resulted in dozens to hundreds of arrests at a time, such as the 475 illegal immigrants from South Korea who were detained at a Hyundai manufacturing plant in Georgia in early September.
ICE also began showing up at farms and detained 361 workers across multiple cannabis cultivation farms.
That was when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins spoke out against arresting farm workers. Within days, the farm raids ended.
“You would assume if there were major work site busts that it would make the news somehow,” Mehlman said. “Look, I’m sure they’re doing some, but, you know, [border czar] Tom Homan has said, ‘We got to do more of this.’”
A former senior DHS official said worksite enforcement is a “taboo subject” within the department.
“It would yield good numbers, but it doesn’t seem like DHS has the stomach to go after the big employees,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
ICE reported arresting 38 construction workers in El Paso, Texas, in January, and more than 130 employees at multiple Washington, D.C., restaurants in February.
The extent to which ICE has arrested illegal workers is unclear. Both ICE and the Department of Homeland Security declined to provide arrest data for Trump’s second term or previous fiscal years.
Why work sites matter
Mehlman said the Trump administration first focused on going after illegal immigrants who have criminal histories upon taking office. As of early March, approximately 457,000 arrests of illegal immigrants had been made, and roughly two-thirds had a criminal history in the U.S.
“They prioritized during the first year catching the worst of the worst and removing them,” Mehlman said. “They’re now moving on to phase two, and worksite enforcement should be a critical element in phase two.”
With well over 13 million more illegal immigrants in the country, at the last available count, ICE has barely made a dent with its arrests to date, even though the number of arrests is far higher than previous annual counts.
But small businesses and corporations are not eager to crack down on their own workers or be forced to do so by the federal government, Beck said.
“There’s a lot of money for some people in illegal labor and controllable labor … exploitable labor. I mean, you don’t just get somebody who might work for less, you get somebody who is less likely to complain,” Beck said.
How Trump should respond
Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, pointed back to the federal government’s focus on arresting illegal workers prior to the creation of ICE, when former federal agency U.S. Immigration and Nationality Service oversaw enforcement.
“Back in the day, worksite [sic] was how INS arrested the vast majority of the people they had deported,” Arthur said. “You’re not going to be able to boost arrests and removals if you don’t do worksite.”
Because ICE and the immigration courts are overwhelmed, given the record-high number of non-U.S. citizens who entered the country during the Biden administration, the experts suggested ICE make a big show and crack down, but also continue to push people to self-deport.
“You want to encourage more people to leave on their own, because you can’t go out and easily find 18 million people who are in the country illegally, but you can discourage a lot of them to leave on their own,” Mehlman said. “Make it clear that you’re not going to benefit by remaining here. And we’ve seen that work to some extent.”
The DHS has claimed that 1.9 million illegal immigrants in the country chose to self-deport.
“You need to get the word out that we’re taking this stuff seriously, but you have to get behind tools like E-Verify. You have to use no-match letters,” Beck said, referring to systems to verify that job applicants can legally work and notifying legal U.S workers when their Social Security number is being used by a fraudulent applicant.
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Mehlman said the best thing for the Trump administration to do “is to go out there and enforce the laws.”
“Trump has never been shy about pissing people off,” Mehlman said.