While ICE raids have gotten a lot of attention during the second Trump administration, a business immigration lawyer recently tried to reassure local companies that ICE likely will not raid employers who are trying to comply with the law.
Lewis M. Francis of Parsons Behle & Latimer noted during a recent gathering in Salt Lake City that immigration enforcement “was really a big issue a few weeks ago … but it seems to have been pushed off a bit.”
“There’s a lot in the press and people get really emotional and sometimes manipulated by what’s going on,” Francis said during the 38th annual Employment Law Symposium in Salt Lake City, presented by PBL in partnership with Salt Lake SHRM.
But large ICE raids of workplaces have never been commonplace — not even attention-grabbing “showcase” raids, he said.
“Those have really not been happening with employers,” Francis told the crowd. “That’s not to say they couldn’t, but if they do, they’ll just be these big showcase ones for [bad] actors, just to, like, create the sensation that everyone needs to comply with the law.”
ICE raids, he predicted, likely will continue to be rare, but other workplace enforcement actions — I-9 audits, administrative subpoenas and other actions — “do happen quite a bit and will probably happen more. … Or at least the threat of them.”
Francis acknowledged that fears of ICE raiding workplaces or schools are real and have caused people to go “underground.” The Trump administration’s approach has been that heavier enforcement of immigration law will lead to more self-deportation.
“I don’t know that that really happens much because the people who are least likely to leave are the ones that are probably the ones you most want to leave — the ones that don’t care about the law anyway,” he said.
Complicating matters is that workers in the U.S. illegally have no process to become legal, and if a foreign national leaves after being in the U.S. illegally for more than a year, that person cannot return to the U.S. for 10 years.
“So, nobody’s going to leave because if they leave, they can’t come back. Nobody can change their status from an illegal status to a legal status, and there’s no way in the world that we could deport all the workers that are in the U.S. … So we’re kind of in this weird political quagmire that has been going on for years and years, where nothing really changes, but there’s a lot of political grandstanding but nobody’s willing to fix the underlying problems,” Lewis said.
Talking to a group of employer representatives such as lawyers and human resources officials, Lewis said the focus of enforcement actions is on undocumented workers rather than companies.
“I don’t get the sense, and I’ve never had the sense, that the U.S. government wants to punish employers,” he said. “Employers are taxpayers. Employers have lobbyists. Employers know government officials. They’re not going to crack down on all employers. What they’re doing is they’re trying to crack down on unauthorized workers.
“So, if they come into your place of employment to audit you, they’re not trying to punish you. They’re just really trying to find out if you’ve got unauthorized workers —unless you’re a really bad actor, and then you can get nailed.”
Francis also discounted the idea that the federal government will collect all 15 million to 20 million undocumented workers in the nation.
“Just on that scale alone, there’s no way in hell that any administration could round up and deport all of the undocumented workers in the United States. It’s just not even feasible. It would be a big shot to the economy, all the people that rely on those workers,” he said.
Instead, showcase or targeted raids could occur. “But the thought of the National Guard or the U.S. military going through the U.S. and rounding up all of the undocumented workers and deporting them, is likely never going to happen,” he said.
Lewis touched on several other immigration compliance matters, including the fact that a large warehouse in Salt Lake City could become an ICE detention facility.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s going to be increased enforcement in Utah. That’s just where they can be housing people in the western United States,” he said. “So I wouldn’t freak out about that as an indication that there will be increased enforcement.”