Trump targets workplaces as immigration crackdown widens

Boston Globe

4 hours ago

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The high-profile raids appeared to mark a new phase of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, in which officials say they will increasingly focus on workplaces — taking aim at the reason millions of people have illegally crossed the border for decades. That is an expansion from plans early in the administration to prioritize detaining hardened criminals and later to focus on hundreds of international students.
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'You're going to see more worksite enforcement than you've ever seen in the history of this nation,' Thomas D. Homan, the White House border czar, told reporters recently. 'We're going to flood the zone.'
It remains to be seen how aggressively Trump will pursue sectors like construction, food production and hospitality. Raids are sometimes directed based on tips, but otherwise appear to be distributed without a clear pattern, hitting establishments large and small.
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A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to an email seeking details about the government's plans, including an explanation about why the administration is ramping up worksite arrests now.
Police detained a man during a protest in the Paramount section of Los Angeles on Saturday, after federal immigration authorities conducted operations.
Eric Thayer/Associated Press
Over the past month, though, the White House has pressured immigration officials to increase deportations, which have fallen short of the administration's goals.
The number of arrests has risen sharply in the past week, according to figures provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
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Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for Homeland Security, said 2,000 immigrants per day were arrested over the last week, up from 600 earlier in the administration. It was not clear how many of those arrests were made at raids of worksites.
More than 4% of the nation's 170 million-person workforce was made up of immigrants lacking permanent legal status in 2023, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs, making job sites a prime setting for agents to find people.
The number of immigrants who could be subject to such sweeps increased by at least 500,000 at the end of May, as the Supreme Court allowed the administration to revoke the temporary status that had allowed many Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans to work.
Workplace raids require significant planning, can be costly and draw on large teams of agents, but they can yield more arrests than pursuing individual targets. The raids may have become feasible in recent weeks, experts said, as personnel from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have been enlisted on immigration operations.
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'Goosing the numbers is a big part of this because it's so much more efficient in manpower to raid a warehouse and arrest 100 illegal aliens than it is to send five guys after one criminal,' said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates less immigration.
Workplace raids also send a warning to a far broader group of people lacking permanent legal status, most of whom have not committed crimes. 'If you want to get people packing up and leaving, that isn't going to happen if you're just focusing on the criminals,' Krikorian said.
In interviews, migrants and employers expressed alarm about the toll a sustained crackdown could take on the workforce. Immigrants lacking permanent legal status are concentrated in a few American industries, making up 19% of landscaping workers, 17% of farmworkers and 13% of construction workers, according to the estimates from Goldman Sachs.
During his first term, Trump — whose own businesses have employed workers without papers — sent mixed messages about his eagerness to crack down on undocumented labor. Early on, his administration carried out several workplace raids and conducted more audits of worker eligibility paperwork than the Obama administration had.
But Trump's Justice Department prosecuted relatively few employers for hiring workers lacking permanent legal status. And in 2017, the president commuted the sentence of an Iowa meatpacking plant executive convicted in the Obama era after a jury found that he knowingly hired hundreds of workers lacking permanent legal status and paid for their forged documents.
The COVID-19 pandemic halted efforts to go after workers lacking permanent legal status. 'These were people who were processing our food, making our food, delivering our food so we could all live in the comfort of our Zoom existence,' said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. 'That was not lost on people.'
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President Joe Biden, who began his term facing a beleaguered economy and a severe labor shortage, never prioritized workplace immigration enforcement.
Still from video of people that were detained and removed from Nantucket last week in a immigration raid by ICE and FBI agents.
Jason Graziadei/Nantucket Current
The system that gave rise to this shadow workforce dates to 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed a bill granting amnesty to nearly 3 million immigrants lacking permanent legal status, allowing them to pursue citizenship. The bill also criminalized hiring people without legal status and required that employers collect an I-9 form from every new hire, substantiating their work authorization with identification.
In 1996, the IRS created an alternative to a Social Security number that allowed immigrants to file federal tax returns on their earnings.
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Over the years, raids at farms, meatpacking plants and construction sites have grabbed headlines, but employers have seldom faced severe consequences. Many subcontract to avoid liability, and managers have long asserted that it is difficult to identify fake documents.
'They have plausible deniability for just about any hires,' said Daniel Costa, an immigration labor expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. 'The system was kind of rigged against workers and in favor of employers from the beginning.'
Immigrant workers tend to be younger, while the U.S.-born population is aging into retirement. Millions of people who arrived between 2022 and 2024, largely from Latin America, Ukraine and Afghanistan, were generally eligible to work, since the Biden administration granted most of them some kind of temporary legal status.
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For those reasons, the share of the labor force that is foreign-born rose to 19.7% in March, the highest on record.
That is why a serious worksite crackdown could severely affect some industries, especially if employers begin preemptively firing people known to lack permanent legal status. Employers also must balance verifying a worker's status with risking accusations of discrimination on the basis of race and national origin, which is also illegal.
'If you've done your due diligence as an employer, your own doubt or suspicion isn't going to be enough for me to say, 'Yeah, fire that person,'' said Eric Welsh, an attorney with Reeves Immigration Law Group, which helps individuals and companies with visa issues. 'You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.'
After Trump's election, employers started performing more internal audits to verify employees' identification documents and work permits, immigration attorneys said.
Chris Thomas, a partner with the firm Holland & Hart in Denver, said his business clients had seen more notices of investigation and letters from the IRS flagging Social Security numbers that don't match the agency's records.
Protesters gathered after federal immigration authorities conducted an operation on Friday in Los Angeles.
Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
The Department of Justice raised the stakes in early February with a memo that directed attorneys to use 'all available criminal statutes' to enforce immigration laws.
'If you know you have undocumented workers, and you're not severing ties with them at this stage, you're in a position where they're coming pretty soon,' Thomas said. 'If you wait until they arrive on the scene, it's probably too late.'
Greg Casten, who co-owns several restaurants, a fish wholesaler and a few other hospitality businesses in Washington, D.C., has watched the government's shifting approach for more than 40 years. Many of his 600 employees are immigrants. He has found Salvadorans in particular to be skilled at cutting fish.
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Every year, he gets a list from the IRS of Social Security numbers on his payroll that don't match official records, and every year, he goes through to try to address any gaps. Still, it's not perfect.
'I do have some people who work for me who can barely speak English, and I find it hard to believe sometimes when they're giving me paperwork,' Casten said. But since he puts in the necessary effort, he doesn't worry much about punishment.
In early May, the Department of Homeland Security served inspection notices to 187 businesses in Washington, though none of Casten's.
'Right now, as fragile as this industry is, if they came in and took 20% or 10% of someone's work staff, they would be out of business,' he said.
This article originally appeared in
.