Thread: DHS sues Illinois for blocking immigrant crackdown

DHS sues Illinois for blocking immigrant crackdown
by Frank James

The Homeland Security Department is suing Illinois to undo a new state law the federal agency says would make it more difficult to enforce the nation's immigration laws.

The law is an amendment to Illinois's “Right to Privacy in the Workplace Act" which would make it impossible, says Homeland Security, for employers to participate in a voluntary federal program many currently use to verify whether new employees are legally entitled to work in the U.S.

Called E-Verify, the Internet program allows employers to transmit to the federal government certain identity information which permits immigration officials to confirm (or not) whether the employees can be legally employed.

About 93 percent of such queries come back either immediately or, if a manual check is necessary, the next day, confirming that an employee is eligible to work in the U.S. The rest are categorized as "tentative non-confirmations."

The employee can decide not to contest the non-confirmation. If he does contest it, Homeland Security will further investigate the matter, but that can take weeks.

Here's where the new Illinois law comes in. It essentially says that until Homeland Security can conduct 99 percent of those investigations within three days, it's illegal for all businesses operating in Illinois to participate in the E-Verify program.

Thus the lawsuit which was filed by the Justice Department on behalf of Homeland Security today. It's the first such lawsuit the federal government has filed since no other state has taken on the federal program as frontally as Illinois has.

It would seem that Illinois will have a challenge in persuading a federal court to see things its way since the Constitution's "supremacy clause" generally gives federal law the upper hand over state laws.

In an interview with me, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said:

"The state of Illinois has now made it illegal to comply with federal law. That's not acceptable as a matter of the Constitution and it's not acceptable as a matter of our discharging our federal obligation to enforce the immigration laws."
"There's obviously a lot of concern in certain quarters about our efforts to bring employers into compliance with the law because a lot of employers recognize that they means they may lose illegal workers and they may be depending on illegal workers.
And while I'm in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and I've argued that in many ways we need to find a regularize those illegal workers, that's not what the law is. So we have to enforce the law as it is. The fact that it may hurt business is not an excuse not to enforce the law."


I asked Chertoff if he suspected that this the new law was a ploy by the business community and its allies in the statehouse to block his department's efforts to enforce the immigration law.

"I don't want to impute motives to people... I can tell you the effect of this would be to thwart our efforts and the efforts of those who want to comply with the law, to follow the law.
The irony of this is, this program doesn't make employers join it. It seimply offers employers the opportunity to make sure they're in compliance with law. And yet the state law, the Illinois law here, would actually prevent people from checking to make sure they're in compliance with the law, which is a very strange outcome.


The Illinois law is, for Chertoff, just another example of how many politicians want to have it both ways. They talk about the need to secure the nation's borders but don't want to do what it takes to accomplish that because of the pressure from business or immigrant groups.


"... It's not a matter of personal frustration. It's really frustration on behalf of the 208,000 hardworking men and women. Here's the deal. The public through Congress has said to this agency 'We want you to enforce these laws. We want you take every reasonable, constitutional step to make it more difficult for people to make it more difficult for people to work illegally and to prevent illegals from coming in.

And of course then there's been criticism over the fact that in the preceding 30 years we have not done a good job of enforcing the law.

So now that we are taking the reins and really driving forward on this and really making some progress, we're beginning to see the schizophrenic nature of the way some politicians are looking at it. Which is that they're now coming back and saying 'We want you to enforce the law but we don't want you to do anything that would actually lead to enforcement. So we're going to prevent you from either helping businesses identify who's illegal, or encouraging business to identify who's illegal or arresting people who are illegal. So that the idea is we're going to get on the record saying we want you enforce it then we're going to make sure you can't enforce it."

That seems to me in a nutshell to explain why we have a tremendous wave of cynicism in the American electorate. I think the public looks and they go 'Well, on one hand Congress looks at this and says enforce the law, on the other hand the law doesn't get enforced. The government is obviously playing a shell game with Congress.' "


Homeland Security's has sent me a copy of a "blog post" they attribute to Chertoff. (Didn't know he had a blog.) For anyone interested in more on his view of the matter, here it is:

Could it be that the Illinois state legislature wants to prevent businesses from using the best available tools to determine whether new employees are illegal aliens? I certainly hope not, but that’s precisely what a new state law is poised to do. The recently authorized changes to Illinois’s “Right to Privacy in the Workplace Actâ€

DHS HAS 2 EGGS AFTER ALL>>>>>GO DHS!!!!!!!!!!!ABOUT TIME!!!!!!!!!

I knew this would come one day!!! WOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!

HIP HIP HURRAY, IT'S ABOUT DARN TIME!!!!

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!

YIPPEE.....GO DHS!

AMEN!!
LONG OVER DUE!!
AMEN!!
THANK YOU!! THANK YOU!! THANK YOU!!

GET THEM!!

I’d rather lose my state tax dollar in a lawsuit that fixes the problem then pay it out to the illegal aliens in undeserved benefits.

GET THEM!!

Are we a little happy madinchicago??

Heck yeah. Surely the feds can swoop in and squash this Illlinois bill sooner then later and we can see some real changes.

Unbelievable...

Originally Posted by fedupinwaukegan

Are we a little happy madinchicago??

I guess it kind of shows?

I was just posting yesterday asking "What about us in Chicago - Cook County", then the next thing you know this article shows up.

I’m just happy to hear that anything positive is happening for Illinois and or Chicago. Right now with our Senator DirtBag (Durbin) is making Illinois look real bad with his Dream Act, this positive news is wonderful.

Up until now, it seemed like all the good stuff was happening everywhere else.
Not that I don’t want good things for others, I do, I just wanted our turn.

Department of Homeland Security sues state

(Crain’s) — The Department of Homeland Security sued the state of Illinois on Monday to block a recently enacted state law that prevents Illinois employers from participating in a new federal citizenship verification program.

Illinois was one of five states with high illegal immigrant populations chosen to launch the federal government’s new “E-Verifyâ€