Trump will target US employers in next phase of immigration crackdown, Homan says

Federal authorities have generally avoided targeting companies for a range of reasons, including the high burden of proof under laws that require showing that employers affirmatively knew the workers they hired lacked legal status.

Unlike most developed economies, the US has no standardized national requirement that employers use its system for checking workers’ papers, known as eVerify — and many workers evade that system by using a different legal worker’s identity.

Trump’s first term saw some stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement action against employers, with a two-step nationwide audit in 2018 and a record-setting $80 million civil settlement against the giant Asplundh Tree Experts over an investigation that began in the Obama years.

Allies had expected the enforcement, which typically comes as much as a year after worksite raids, to ramp up before the coronavirus pandemic derailed immigration enforcement.

Employer enforcement “makes sense, but it has political impact on both sides,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told Semafor. “Many entrepreneurs who are Republican by inclination would protest mightily. They can’t have it both ways.”

Such a move “would reverberate through Congress,” he said.

A concerted focus on employer enforcement would also shake huge segments of the US economy. Almost a quarter of construction workers lack legal status, a 2021 survey found, and as many as half of meatpacking workers.

A focus on those industries could also undercut two of Trump’s campaign promises: to make housing more affordable and bring down food prices. “I won on the border, and I won on groceries,” he told NBC’s Kristen Welker in December.

President Trump suggested in April that he would propose a guest worker program for some of those businesses: “We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to need people.”

But ICE raided a Nebraska meatpacking plant this week. “Congress has a job to do,” Homan said. “We’re going to do worksite enforcement operations until there’s a deal made.”

When I first asked Homan about employers’ role, he turned to talking points about sanctuary cities and the importance of sending agents in to arrest “bad guys” who municipal authorities wouldn’t turn over. Are employers, I asked, “bad guys” in his view?

“Depends,” he replied. “I know some employers don’t know a fraudulent document from a legal document. But I truly believe that nobody hires an illegal alien from the goodness of their heart. They hire them because they can work them harder, pay them less, and undercut their competition — that hires US citizen employees, and drive wages down.”

And yet, if and when the Trump administration moves past the popular, theatrical pursuit of alleged gang members and criminals, the White House and Congress will need to make hard decisions about how America sees its vast migrant workforce.

Even the most dedicated restrictionists, like Homan, acknowledge that criminals are a tiny minority.

“Most illegal aliens are regular working stiffs,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “If you’re not going after those people, you’re not going to change the fundamental calculus.”

(Krikorian is a longtime leader of the US anti-immigration movement — a figure who was so marginal in the Republican Party 20 years ago that when I, as a young reporter for the conservative New York Sun, tried to quote him, my editor told me he was beyond the pale. Now he’s the intellectual architect of White House policy.)

Gallego’s comment suggests that Democrats, flailing for an affirmative policy on the border and immigration, may also see employers, rather than workers, at the center of the debate. The “magnet” of migration is a decades-long, tacit agreement that meatpackers, construction companies, and farmers can employ migrants without any real penalties, and without the kind of tax and regulatory enforcement that’s common across other developed countries.

The US has struggled for decades to reach an agreement to regularize that system. Restrictionists have long dreamed of trading the legalization of immigrants who arrived illegally as children, known as Dreamers, for broad use of employment authorization.

But many in Trump’s movement simply want fewer immigrants, pitting them against big American business and Democrats alike, and while the outlines of a deal have been clear since the early 2000s, the prospect of a bipartisan agreement seems as remote as ever.

The mixed signals toward employers have fed cynicism among those who like Trump’s economic nationalism.

“The contradiction at the heart of the administration’s approach reveals a fundamental tension between populist rhetoric and pro-business reality. While cameras roll for dramatic deportation footage, the industries dependent on illegal migration are maintaining business as usual. This disconnect could ultimately undermine the economic nationalism that propelled the Trump campaign to victory,” Lee Fang wrote on Substack.

Burgess Everett contributed.