Feds Going After Fast-Food Chain Employing Illegal Immigrants ICE is investigating allegations that the company paid the workers less than the minimum wage, says report
Photo: BuzzFeed.com
Before CKE Restaurants started using the voluntary E-Verify system, 40 percent of the workforce would not show up when managers announced that ICE was coming.
lifezette.com
By Brendan Kirby | Updated 28 Nov 2017
Feds Going After Fast-Food Chain Employing Illegal Immigrants
ICE is investigating allegations that the company paid the workers less than the minimum wage, says report
Lost in the Thanksgiving shuffle last week was a potentially important story that federal investigators are preparing a case against a fast-food restaurant chain accused of hiring illegal immigrants and paying them less than the minimum wage.
The Daily Beast, which broke the story and cited an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) document, did not name the company. If it is true, it would represent the first major immigration workplace enforcement action since President Donald Trump took office.
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Reuters
“If ICE really does this operation, it will be a sign that things are changing,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies. “This would be a very important move to restore workplace enforcement.”
Vaughan and other immigration hawks long have complained that enforcement at job sites has been a glaring deficiency in Trump’s immigration efforts, which otherwise have shown marked progress over his predecessor’s.
“It almost begs the question, why they did they wait almost seven months to begin doing it?” said Chris Chmielenski, director of content and activism at NumbersUSA.
Related: ICE Chief: Shame on Those Who Criticize Us for Enforcing Immigration Laws
Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan, whom Trump has tapped to lead the agency permanently, acknowledged last month at a Heritage Foundation event that there has been little workplace enforcement. But he pledged to correct that.
The Daily Beast report quoted an unnamed ICE official as saying that the operation would target restaurants across the country and likely would result in charges of “harboring illegal aliens.” The official added that the workers were “basically being used as slave labor.” More HERE