Aaron Martinez, El Paso Times, Sept. 26, 2024 " Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center is the second El Paso immigration nonprofit to sue Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton , accusing him of violating...
CILP, Sept. 2024 You’ve heard of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, but what about immigration nerds in cars getting coffee?? As we’ve carpooled with our colleagues to the UCLA Law School...
Matt Dougherty, Ithaca.com, Sept. 24, 2024 "Cornell University has become the first university to suspend a student for pro-Palestinian organizing this semester, putting them at risk of deportation...
Muzaffar Chishti and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, MPI, Sept. 27, 2024 "The Democratic Party’s approach to the U.S.-Mexico border has fundamentally shifted, as was illustrated most clearly at...
NIJC, Sept. 20, 2024 "The U.S. government spends over three billion a year on the largest immigration detention apparatus in the world to detain and deport people who have lived in the U.S. for...
"Soccer and football (as well as football’s distant cousin, rugby), are commonly thought to have all descended from the same simple, noble Greek game called Harpastum. However, as each sport evolved, football became reliant on precision and rules, while soccer stayed simple (and “beautiful,” according to the rest of the world).
ICE’s I-9 audit procedure has taken a similar divergence from its original goals. Emboldened by the Obama Administration’s April 2009 directive that it would increase worksite enforcement, ICE has created a back office, whose agents are tasked solely with scrutinizing each I-9 form completed by an employer, with the purpose of finding errors small or large which can be used to ratchet up fines against an employer, regardless of an employer’s general level of compliance and good faith.
ICE will fine an employer for the following, NFL rulebook-style transgressions: Signing the I-9 form in Section 3 rather than in Section 2; failing to ensure that a permanent resident employee filled in his or her Alien number in Section 1, even when the same Alien number appears in List A in Section 2; failing to write the full address of the worksite in Section 2; and listing identity and employment authorization data in the wrong section of the form.
None of these violations has any bearing on whether the employer verified the employee’s documentation of identity and employment authorization. Rather, these are just a few instances of the more than a hundred ways where an employer can make a potentially costly mistake in completing an I-9 form. This type of cat-and-mouse game does nothing to further the main goals of IRCA, and only serves to tie up employer resources at a time when our economy desperately needs increased productivity; results in millions of dollars in needless fines; and prevents ICE resources from finding the true bad actors who exploit unauthorized aliens.
Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect ICE to turn the I-9 audit process into a “beautiful game” of continuous flow until a harmful penalty is committed. Still, I invite ICE auditors, their attorneys and higher-ups in the agency to watch Manchester City play Arsenal, or Real Madrid face off against Valencia, and apply some of the lessons in play to their own game." - John Quill guest blogging for Angelo Paparelli, Jan. 27, 2013.