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Stiff Charges To Owners Of Chinese Employment Agencies That Supply And Restaurants Using Their Services to Obtain Undocumented Workers Part of New Obama Enforcement Plan.

USICE and the FBI now appear to be targeting the Chinese restaurant industry's employment agencies which provide illegal workers and their client restaurants which employ them as part of a new push by the Obama administration to use immigration prosecutions to intimidate and criminally punish employers hiring undocumented workers.

Criminal charges are being filed against the owners/operators of such employment agencies and Chinese restaurants. The government no longer appears to be satisfied with just going after the corporations or handing out fines for hiring illegal workers. It is raising the stakes to higher levels against owner/operators of these businesses.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reported on June 15, 2010, that immigration prosecutions have returned to the high levels of last summer, and that there were 8,287 immigration prosecutions in March 2010, up 30% from February and more than in any month since July 2009. According to the Texas Tribune's article of June 16, 2010, "The New ICE Age," the paper obtained a copy of ICE's strategic plan, "Strategic Priorities for Fiscal Years 2010-2014," which has been sent to ICE employees but has yet to be released to the public; that part of ICE's objective is to "create a culture of employer compliance," which involves "aggressive criminal and civil enforcement against those employers who knowingly violate the law," with an emphasis on employers who exploit and abuse workers and "engage in egregious conduct. "

USICE announced in early June that five persons were indicted by a federal grand jury in three separate indictments on charges of conspiring to induce undocumented aliens to enter and remain in the United States by providing them with employment, predominantly at Chinese restaurants, all for commercial gain. Also that three additional individuals had been arrested on criminal complaints.

Three of those indicted, Lin, Fu, and Chen owned three employment agencies, all in Chamblee, Ga., and were alleged in the indictments to have conspired with others to transport and provide jobs to the illegal aliens, primarily in restaurants in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia.

Alan Lee, Esq. for Immigration Daily

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