Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is directing officials to cease workplace raids targeted at illegal immigrants, according to a new memo.
Mayorkas is directing Tae Johnson, acting director for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Ur Jaddou, the director for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; and Troy Miller, acting commissioner for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, to shift their focus to “exploitative employers” who have hired and taken advantage of illegal immigrants rather than going after the employees themselves, Tuesday’s memo said.
“The deployment of mass worksite operations, sometimes resulting in the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of workers, was not focused on the most pernicious aspect of our country’s unauthorized employment challenge: exploitative workers,” Mayorkas wrote. “These highly visible operations misallocated enforcement resources while chilling, and even serving as a tool of retaliation for, worker cooperation in workplace standards investigations.”
CENSUS: THERE ARE NO JOBS AMERICANS WON’T DO, POOR CITIZENS HURT BY ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
The Department of Homeland Security echoed Mayorkas, vowing in a Tuesday statement that it will “take actions to promote a fair labor market.”
“We will not tolerate unscrupulous employers who exploit unauthorized workers, conduct illegal activities, or impose unsafe working conditions,” Mayorkas said. ” Employers engaged in illegal acts compel the focus of our enforcement resources. By adopting policies that focus on the most unscrupulous employers, we will protect workers as well as legitimate American businesses.”
The targeted agencies must “develop strategies for prioritizing workplace enforcement against unscrupulous employers” and “facilitate the participation of vulnerable workers in labor standards investigations” through “prosecutorial discretion,” among other new protocols outlined in the memo.
The number of workplace enforcement operations resulting in arrests of unauthorized workers and employers spiked more than 700% during former President Donald Trump’s first fiscal year in office, with 2,304 arrests taking place in fiscal 2018.
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Border Patrol agents encountered roughly 212,672 people trying to enter the United States illegally through the southern border during the month of July, the highest number of encounters recorded in nearly 21 years. That number dropped slightly the next month, with 208,887 migrants encountered at the border in August, still marking one of the highest totals in two decades.
