Trump administration officials have vowed to hold companies accountable for employing people who are in the country illegally — no matter which industry they are in or how big or small they might be.
But the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement operations have overwhelmingly focused on arresting workers rather than punishing employers.
Since the start of the year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has posted news releases regarding approximately two dozen raids on the “
Worksite Enforcement” section of its website. Local news outlets have documented dozens more. The Washington Post was able to identify only one employer charged after the raids ICE has publicized. The Post reviewed court filings and searched for records involving individuals named in corporate records of businesses DHS has raided.
[But they are not enforcing worksite rules, just using the locations as a means to hit those quotas.]
The raids immigration officers are conducting have largely targeted small businesses such as car washes. Some are carried out in a
span of minutes. Two business owners said officers did not show a warrant, even when asked for one, raising questions about whether immigration agents are violating constitutional rights in their effort to drive up migrant arrests.
“The difference about these raids of the last six weeks is that this is not principally an action against employers,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “This is principally an action in pursuit of mass deportations. When they could not produce the number of arrests that they had been hoping for, they suddenly said, ‘Let’s raid employers.’ It was not, ‘Let’s penalize employers.’”
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Trump is also still looking to give a pass to farmers and hotels. Faced with the reality of the business models that currently exist, he's offering amnesty, to the disgruntlement of his most nativist supporters.
And as usual, this is because their ill-conceived Plan A is leading to consequences that absolutely were foreseen, necessitating later makeshift corrections.
Also, if there had been any good faith in pursuing the bipartisan immigration bill, an allowance could have been made for additional guest worker visas.
The president's comments mark the latest shift in his administration's approach to immigrant workers in certain industries.
“What we’re going to do is we’re going to do something for farmers, where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows. He’s not going to hire a murderer,” Trump said. “When you go into a farm and he’s had somebody working with him for nine years doing this kind of work, which is hard work to do, and a lot of people aren’t going to do it, and you end up destroying a farmer because you took all the people away, it’s a problem.”