James D. Reid, owner of Consistent Cleaning Service, was fined $22,880 after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigators said he failed to check identification and work documents and fill out required I-9 verification forms for employees who turned out to be illegal immigrants. Why is this news? Well, because five of these undocumented workers were part of crews who cleaned the home of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff for nearly four years, presenting their identification for screening to the Secret Service each time they returned.
Reid admitted to The Washington Post that he made mistakes, but said the fine was excessively large and may put him out of business. He also raised a common objection among employers: it is unreasonable to expect businesspeople to distinguish between fake and real driver’s licenses and Social Security cards.
Apparently forgeries have gotten so good that even the nation’s top security officers can’t ferret out the fakes.
"Our Homeland Security can't police their own home," said Reid. "How can they police our borders?"
A Secret Service spokesman declined to discuss specific screening practices, but did emphasize that the agents use the workers’ IDs to conduct security checks, not immigration checks.
A DHS spokesman said that Chertoff is not to blame for the hiring of illegal immigrants to clean his home. Contractors bear the responsibility of ensuring that their workers are legal and that as soon as Chertoff learned that Reid might have hired illegals, he fired him.
The same defense cannot be made for Lorraine Henderson, the Boston Port Director for the Customs and Border Protection agency - a division of DHS. Henderson was arrested last week for hiring a housekeeper who she knew to be an illegal immigrant. The most damaging evidence is a tape of her telling her cleaning woman, who was cooperating with ICE officials and wearing a wire, that she needed to be “careful’ not to get detected by immigration officials when trying to obtain citizenship documents for her newborn.
These cases illustrate the complexity and the hypocrisy inherent in our current immigration enforcement situation. As long as Americans want cheap labor and immigrants want to make a better life for themselves and their families, illegal immigrants will have a place in America. Comprehensive immigration reform might provide stronger border protections and better tools for determining immigration status of workers, but it will not address the root economic and human issues.
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