New rules for ICE lack safe harbor provisions for employers

Houston Chronicle:

Under new enforcement guidelines, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will now have to build a case against an employer suspected of hiring undocumented immigrants before rounding up workers.

The guidelines, issued by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Thursday, represent a marked shift from the past administration’s work site enforcement strategy, which resulted in a series of high-profile raids across the country in recent years, including in Houston, but relatively few employer arrests.

Matt Chandler, a DHS spokesman, said the guidelines reflect a new “department-wide focus” to target employers by prosecuting them criminally. The guidelines require that field agents have either an arrest, indictment, search warrant — or at least a commitment from a U.S. Attorney’s Office to prosecute an employer — before arresting employees for civil violations at a work site, a DHS official confirmed on Thursday.

Chandler said that, under the guidelines, immigration agents will “continue to arrest and process for removal any illegal workers who are found in the course of these work site enforcement actions.”

The rules met with resentment from some business leaders nationally and in Houston.

“The Obama administration doesn’t want to see any more employees walked out in handcuffs, but they want to see employers walked out in handcuffs,” said Norman Adams, a Houston businessman who founded Texans for a Sensible Immigration Policy, an organization made up largely of members of commercial construction companies.

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This is another example of the Democrats' lack of seriousness in enforcing immigration laws. If both the employer and the employee are equally guilty of violating the law, they should both receive the same lack of empathy for their conduct. It is not like the employee is in a morally superior position.

This follows the Democrats refusal to require E-Verify for jobs covered by the stimulus bill. If they were really serious about immigration enforcement they would have not only required it, but give employers a safe harbor if they use it. The problem was the open borders Democrats want to put employers in a catch 22 by claiming that those who use the program are discriminating. Their position on immigration is perverse. Napolitano's is too.