The Obama administration has largely abandoned efforts to enforce the laws against hiring illegal workers, according to internal ICE statistics. In the first five months of this fiscal year, ICE conducted just 181 workplace audits and brought charges against j
ust 27 employers. This is a small fraction of the worksite activity ICE completed in 2013, when more than 3,000 companies were audited and 179 employers were arrested.
The number of employer fines collected by ICE also has dropped by more than half since 2013. The administration’s near discontinuation of worksite enforcement means that employers now face very little risk in hiring illegal workers and have little incentive to abide by the law.
One of the first immigration enforcement policy changes undertaken by the Obama administration was to shift away from conducting worksite raids of employers engaging in egregious illegal hiring practices in favor of inspecting the personnel records of select employers. This significant policy change was articulated in an April 2009 memo to top ICE investigations personnel in the field.1 Managers were instructed in conference calls to cease the successful program of raids on scofflaw employers, which caught them in the act of employing illegal workers, sometimes exposed other types of workplace violations, and resulted in the arrest and removal of thousands of illegal workers, immediately freeing up jobs for legal workers.
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