Briefing on Immigration Enforcement and Border Security Efforts

Excerpted from press release:
Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Attorney General Mukasey at a Briefing on Immigration Enforcement and Border Security Efforts

Release Date: February 22, 2008

Secretary Chertoff:

In fiscal year 2007, ICE made 863 criminal arrests including 92 individuals who were in the employer/supervisory chain. We also made over 4,000 administrative arrests. Most of these arrests are for identity theft. And identity theft is not only a crime with respect to immigration laws, but it is a crime that hurts real people.

Let me give you some examples, some specific real-life examples of what we have done in the last year with respect to employer and employee work site enforcement actions. On February 7 of this year, 57 illegal aliens were arrested during a work site enforcement operation conducted at Universal Industrial Sales in Lindon, Utah. ICE forwarded roughly 30 cases to the Utah County Attorneys Office for criminal prosecution for offenses such as identity theft, forgery and document fraud. And the U.S. Attorney also unsealed two indictments charging a company and its human resources director with harboring illegal aliens and inducing or encouraging them to stay in the U.S. illegally.

In January of this year, a federal jury convicted a former human resources director at a poultry plant in Butterfield, Missouri of harboring an illegal alien and inducing an illegal alien to enter or reside in the U.S. Under federal statues this person faces up to 10 years in prison without parole. Another formal employer recently plead guilty to aggravated identity theft. A total of 136 illegal aliens were arrested as part of this investigation into identity theft, social security fraud and immigration-related violations at the plant.

In March of last year, 2007, a textile product company in New Bedford, Massachusetts was raided, and the owner and three other managers were arrested and charged with conspiring to encourage or induce illegal aliens to reside in the U.S. and to hire illegal aliens. Another person was charged in a separate complaint with knowing transfer of fraud human identification documents. Approximately 320 illegal workers were arrested on administrative charges as well.

And also in March of 2007, the owner of an Indiana business that performed construction services in seven Midwest states plead guilty to violation relating to the harboring of illegal aliens and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He also forfeited $1.4 million. These are the kinds of cases that have high impact on those who would hire and employ undocumented and illegal aliens often facilitated through identity theft and document fraud.

I am delighted to say as part of our effort to continue to make it less appealing for people to break the law, we will soon publish a regulation with the Department of Justice to increase civil fines on employers as we announced last August. This is again, a way to keep that pressure up to make sure people are compliant with the law.

A couple of other brief things before I turn it over to the Attorney General. As important as it is to punish law breaking, we have got to make it easy to follow the law. There has got to be a path to legality as well as punishment for illegality. And so we want to continue to move forward, to get our no-match regulation out there. We are very close to publishing our new no-match rule, which we think will address the issues raised by the court as a consequence of an ACLU lawsuit last year, which was designed to make it impossible for us to tell employers a very simple, common sense principle that when you get information that someone may have something questionable about their social security number/identity, you should inquire further, and that you cannot hire illegal aliens. And we are looking forward to getting this issue resolved in the very near future.

Likewise, we are continuing to promote the use of E-Verify. The state of Arizona, I think, in the last couple of days had its new rule requiring E-Verify use sustained by the federal courts, and we are beginning to see that illegal workers are picking up and leaving, because they recognize this system is an impediment to their continued illegal activities and illegal employment in this country.

Nationally, we are adding 1800 new E-Verify users every week, that is the marketplace speaking. That is employers saying they want to get on board with this. We have over 53,000 employers now using E-Verify, which is more than double what we had fiscal year 2007. And more than 1.7 million new hires have been queried this fiscal year under the system. This is a good news story.

Now the federal government needs to lead by example, and in the coming weeks we are going to issue a proposed rule requiring federal contractors to use E-Verify. This will significantly expand the use of E-Verify, and continue to build capabilities that will help people comply with the law and make it harder to violate.

Finally, we need to talk about continuing to focus on those illegally in the country who are fugitives, criminals, and gang members, which we do through targeted enforcement operations again, in cooperation with the Department of Justice.

In fiscal year 2007, our fugitive ops teams arrested 30,000 individuals, double what was the case in fiscal year 2006. These teams, which we have quadrupled to 75 teams since fiscal year 2005 focused on people who have violated a judges removal order or who have criminal records. We have also expanded our criminal alien program initiating formal removal proceedings against 164,000 illegal aliens who are serving prison terms for crimes they have committed here in the United States. We don’t need to import criminals into America, we need to have them go back where they came from.

In fiscal year 2007, ICE arrested 3,302 gang members and their associates as part of operation community shield, including 1442 arrests for criminal activity. And this year we have arrested a further 723 gang members and their associates. This is focusing on people who are a threat to the safety and security of American citizens.