Migrants hired inMiss. despite federal law
Despite a state law requiring employers to use a federal system to check whether workers are legally eligible towork in the United States, five companies operating poultry plants in Mississippi that were raided last week have for years managed to hire undocumented immigrants, investigators say.
The federal raids, which ensnared 680 workers, exposed a weakness in the government’s online E-Verify tool that President Donald Trump promoted during his campaign but which his own businesses did not broadly use until this year. That followed revelations that Trump’s golf clubs have long employed undocumented immigrants.
The federal employment verification system checks the personal information new hires submit against existing government records and flags any mismatches. But it doesn’t detect when the new hire is using someone else’s identification to elude the check — a significant weakness, say critics of the program.
“As soon as E-Verify went into effect, people realized they could still get a job by taking or borrowing other people’s identities,” said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “E-Verify is easy to fool because it approves the document, not the worker.”
Employers often turn a blind eye, he said, by knowingly hiring immigrants who borrowed relatives’ Social Security numbers or stole the identities of the dead.
Nor do employers always use the E-Verify system, even when it’s required by state law.
Only about half of new hires in Mississippi were screened through E-Verify in 2017, according to separate analyses by Cato and Pew.
“E-Verify has been sold as a silver bullet fix to illegal immigration, but it has never been able to deliver,” Nowrasteh said. “E-Verify is barely used half of the time in states where it’s mandated, and punishments are rarely meted out to businesseswho fail to comply. If conservative states like Mississippi won’t enforce E-Verify, what hope is there in the rest of the country?”
In Mississippi, the companies— Koch Foods, Peco Foods, PH Food, A&B and Pearl River Foods — intentionally hired a stream of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants who are not authorized to work in the U.S, “for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain,” according to search warrant affidavits unsealed in federal court after the Aug. 7 raids.
Investigators allege that numerous employees at Pearl River Foods had submitted stolen names and Social Security numbers, including those belonging to the dead.
At times, companies did not even appear to bother checking certain workers’ information in the online E-Verify system, according to the affidavits.
Pearl River employed 337 workers at its Carthage plant, but immigration authorities found only 306 employees in the E-Verify search records, according to the affidavit. Pearl River did not respond to requests for comment.
Immigration officials also found that the names of 25 PH Food employees had not been processed using E-Verify despite the company having run 1,000 other names through the system.
Investigators found that PH in Morton and A&B in Pelahatchie, both owned by Huo You “Victor” Liang, “do not verify the authenticity of their documents,” according to the affidavit. Neither does the Louisiana payroll company they use to verify employment records, PMI Resource, the affidavit said.
A woman who answered the phone at PMI on Friday declined to comment.
At Peco Foods, a former employee acting as an informant recorded a conversation with a human resources employee at the Bay Springs plant that revealed that multiple employees were hired on two occasions under different identities, the affidavit said.
Peco issued a statement Aug. 7, when its plants in Bay Springs, Sebastopol and Canton were raided, saying the company was cooperating with federal authorities.
“We adhere strongly to all local, state and federal laws including utilizing the governmentbased E-Verify program which screens newhires through the Social Security Administration as well as the Department of Homeland Security for compliance,” the statement said.
The company did not respond to requests for comment.
At the Koch Foods plant in Morton, a Guatemala n woman told investigators that she first worked at the plant illegally, under a different identity, in 2017. A year later, when the Homeland Security Department granted her permission towork, she asked a co-worker if she should talk to human resources about changing her employment documents to reflect her real name. Instead, she took her co-worker’s advice to quit and reapply. She was hired the same day at a different Koch plant, with no questions about her identity.
Koch spokesman Jim Gilliland said the company never knowingly employed people who presented false documentation.
“Forms of identification can look completely authentic and jibe with the personwho is sitting in front of us,” Gilliland said. “So you take what you’re given, and you enter that into the E-Verify system.”
Nationally, 10 percent of U.S. employers are enrolled in E-Verify, which started more than 20 years ago. Eight states require nearly all employers to use the system: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.
A 2012 audit commissioned by Citizenship and Immigration Services, apart of the Homeland Security Department that maintains E-Verify, found that the system had erroneously cleared nearly half of unauthorized workers because of document fraud.
CIS officials acknowledge the system’s shortcomings and have begun linking to photos from state driver’s license databases in an effort to make it easier for employers to spot fraud.