Illegal Workers
Swept From Jobs in ‘Silent Raids’
Published: July 9, 2010 - New York Times
BREWSTER, Wash. — The Obama administration has replaced immigration
raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending
federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers.
While the sweeps of the past commonly led to the deportation of such workers,
the “silent raids,” as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers
being fired, but in many cases they are not deported.
Over the past year, Immigration
and Customs Enforcement has conducted audits of employee files at more than
2,900 companies. The agency has levied a record $3 million in civil fines so far
this year on businesses that hired unauthorized immigrants, according to
official figures. Thousands of those workers have been fired, immigrant groups
estimate.
Employers say the audits reach more companies than the work-site roundups of
the administration of President George
W. Bush. The audits force businesses to fire every suspected illegal
immigrant on the payroll— not just those who happened to be on duty at the time
of a raid — and make it much harder to hire other unauthorized workers as
replacements. Auditing is “a far more effective enforcement tool,” said Mike
Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, which includes
many worried fruit growers.
Immigration inspectors who pored over the records of one of those growers,
Gebbers Farms, found evidence that more than 500 of its workers, mostly
immigrants from Mexico, were in the country illegally. In December, Gebbers
Farms, based in this Washington orchard town, fired the workers.
“Instead of hundreds of agents going after one company, now one agent can go
after hundreds of companies,” said Mark K. Reed, president of Border Management
Strategies, a consulting firm in Tucson that advises companies across the
country on immigration law. “And there is no drama, no trauma, no families being
torn apart, no handcuffs.”
President
Obama, in a speech last week, explained a two-step immigration policy. He
promised tough enforcement against illegal immigration, in workplaces and at the
border, saying it would prepare the way for a legislative overhaul to give legal
status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. White House
officials say the enforcement is under way, but they acknowledge the overhaul is
unlikely to happen this year.
In another shift, the immigration agency has moved away from bringing
criminal charges against immigrant workers who lack legal status but have
otherwise clean records.
Republican lawmakers say Mr. Obama is talking tough, but in practice is
lightening up.
“Even if discovered, illegal aliens are allowed to walk free and seek
employment elsewhere” said Senator Jeff
Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “This
lax approach is particularly troubling,” he said, “at a time when so many
American citizens are struggling to find jobs.”
Employers say the Obama administration is leaving them short of labor for
some low-wage work, conducting silent raids but offering no new legal immigrant
laborers in occupations, like farm work, that Americans continue to shun despite
the recession.
Federal labor officials estimate that more than 60 percent of farm workers in
the United States are illegal immigrants.
John Morton, the head of the immigration agency, known as ICE, said the goal
of the audits is to create “a culture of compliance” among employers, so that
verifying new hires would be as routine as paying taxes. ICE leaves it up to
employers to fire workers whose documents cannot be validated. But an employer
who fails to do so risks prosecution.
ICE is looking primarily for “egregious employers” who commit both labor
abuses and immigration violations, Mr. Morton said, and the agency is ramping up
penalties against them.
In April, Michel Malecot, the chef of a popular bakery in San Diego, was
indicted on 12 criminal counts of harboring illegal immigrants. The government
is seeking to seize his bakery. He has pleaded not guilty. In Maryland, the
owner of two restaurants, George Anagnostou, pleaded guilty last month to
criminal charges of harboring at least 24 illegal immigrants. He agreed to
forfeit more than $734,000.
But the firings at Gebbers Farms shocked this village of orchard laborers
(population 2,100) by the Columbia River among sere brown foothills in eastern
Washington. Six months after the firings, the silence still prevails, with both
the company and the illegal immigrants reluctant to discuss them.
Farm worker advocates said the family-owned company, one of the biggest apple
growers in the country, did not fit Mr. Morton’s description of an exploiter.
“The general reputation for Gebbers Farms was that they were doing right by
their employees,” said Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant
Rights Project.
The Gebbers packing house is the center of this company town, amid more than
5,000 acres of well-tended orchards, where the lingua franca is Spanish.
Officials said public school enrollment is more than 90 percent Hispanic.
Throughout last year, ICE auditors examined forms known as I-9’s, which all
new hires in the country must fill out. ICE then advised Gebbers Farms of Social
Security and immigration numbers that did not check out with federal
databases.
Just before Christmas, managers summoned the workers in groups. In often
emotional exchanges, managers immediately fired those without valid documents.
“No comment,” said Jay Johnson, a lawyer for Gebbers Farms, expressing the
company’s only statement.
Many workers lived in houses they rented from the company; they were given
three months to move out. In Brewster, truck payments stopped, televisions were
returned, mobile homes were sold, mortgages defaulted.
Many immigrants purchased new false documents and went looking for jobs in
more distant orchards, former Gebbers Farms workers said. But the word is out
among growers in the region to avoid hiring immigrants from the company because
ICE knows they are unauthorized.
“Many people are still crying because this is really hard,” said M. García,
41, a former Gebbers packing house worker who has been out of a job since
January.
There was no wave of deportations and few families left on their own for
Mexico. “They are saying, what’s going to happen to their kids?” said Mario
Camacho, an administrator in the Brewster school district. “To those kids, this
is their country.”
After the firings, Gebbers Farms advertised hundreds of jobs for orchard
workers. But there were few takers in the state.
“Show me one American —just one — climbing a picker’s ladder,” said María
Cervantes, 33, a former Gebbers Farms worker from Mexico who gave her name
because she was recently approved as a legal immigrant.
After completing a federally mandated local labor search, Gebbers Farms
applied to the federal guest worker program to import about 1,200 legal
temporary workers — most from Mexico. The guest workers, who can stay for up to
six months, also included about 300 from Jamaica.
“They are bringing people from outside,” Ms. Cervantes said, perplexed. “What
will happen to those of us who are already here?”
Immigrant advocates said they are surprised and frustrated with Mr. Obama,
after seeing an increase in enforcement activity since he took office. “It would
be easier to fight if it was a big raid,” said Pramila Jayapal, executive
director of OneAmerica, a group in Seattle. “But this is happening everywhere
and often.”