Hyundai battery-factory raid reveals new Trump target: Employers who hire illegal workers
The federal E-Verify system is supposed to help employers determine whether their workers are legal, but its use isn’t always required.
Behind the shocking sight of hundreds of South Korean workers being chained and detained at a Georgia battery factory is the Trump administration’s other target: companies that hire illegal workers.
While President Donald Trump has launched sweeping immigration raids on a promise to deliver the largest mass deportation in history, administration officials are also taking a harder line against employers they say cheat American workers by hiring undocumented immigrants.
Since 1986, employers have been required to verify workers’ eligibility to work, and can be fined or jailed if caught knowingly breaking the law. But enforcement has typically focused on the workers, not those who hire them.
Because company owners and managers have rarely been prosecuted or penalized, Trump officials say some employers are too willing to exploit desperate workers through lower pay and dangerous working conditions – and then pocket the savings. Some employers argue there aren’t enough willing American workers to do the toughest jobs, at the wages they’re offering.
Since January, the Trump administration has targeted workers at raids of California car washes and marijuana farms, a Louisiana racetrack, a Florida construction site and a Nebraska meatpacking plant. And while those enforcement actions have not yet translated into criminal cases or fines against the employers, the raids themselves in some cases significantly disrupted business operations.
But the administration has also fined two Colorado cleaning companies millions of dollars for hiring dozens of undocumented workers and won criminal indictments in two other schemes to employ illegal labor in Arizona and Ohio.
Officials declined to comment on what they said is an active criminal investigation at the Georgia plant, sparked in part by local labor unions’ complaints that foreign workers were filling jobs.
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Hyundai battery-factory raid reveals new Trump target: Employers who hire illegal workers, source
