On April 17, Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., one of the biggest chicken processors in the country, had its facilities raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Despite voluntarily using E-Verify, some 4 percent of the company’s workforce at its processing plants in Arkansas, Florida, West Virginia and Texas was found to have committed identity fraud.
There’s a well thought-out blog entry at Immigration Insider that deals with the Pilgrim’s Pride raid being another example of how good-faith compliance with government regulations doesn’t mean squat to the federal government.
We feel there’s another problem: State laws — the Mississippi law among them — that state they provide “safe harbor” to companies using E-Verify can lull businesses into a false sense of security. Because here’sa quote from the head of ICE’s Dallas office: “We’ll go wherever the evidence leads us … We’re still here. This is not the end.”
The Pilgrim’s Pride incident foreshadows a coming collision between federal laws and rules and the laws that are emerging out of the several states.
Both Arizona and Mississippi guarantee that employers who use E-Verify to hire employers — as is mandated under the Arizona Legal Workers Act and the Mississippi Employment Protection Act — are granted “safe harbor” when it comes to enforcement of the state law. Use of E-Verify = rebuttable presumption.
But despite this fact, and despite the fact that the standard memorandum of understanding between the Department of Homeland Security and any E-Verify user also grants users a rebuttable presumption, the federal government continues to crack down.
ICE did it last year with Swift and this year with Pilgrim’s Pride.
Our worry is that using E-Verify is going to lull employers into a false sense of security. After all, it creates a rebuttable presumption, right? And you can believe that right up to the time the ICE guys arrest 4 percent of your workforce.
