Thread: AZ: 7 held in crackdown on hiring of entrants

7 held in crackdown on hiring of entrants
Arrests include president, managers of SV drywall firm

By Brady McCombs
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.10.2007

The 44-year-old president of a Sierra Vista drywall company and six others managers who investigators say conspired with fraudulent-document makers to hire and protect dozens of illegal immigrants were arrested Friday.

The arrests culminated a 16-month multi-agency investigation of the 165-employee Sun Drywall and Stucco Inc., with Immigration and Customs Enforcement spearheading the investigation.

On Friday morning in Sierra Vista, nearly 200 law enforcement officers served 11 federal search warrants at 37 locations, including the company headquarters and eight Sun Drywall sites.

Agents arrested president Ivan Hardt, human resources manager Carol Hill, 42, and four others at company headquarters. They arrested another manager Friday afternoon on a Southern Arizona highway

Another manager charged in the investigation remained at large Friday. The eight could serve up to five years in prison if convicted on federal criminal charges of hiring and harboring illegal immigrants.

Agents arrested 10 Mexican illegal immigrants Friday — seven who worked for the company, one who was at the work site who worked for a different framing company, and two women who were illegally in the country but didn't work for any company, said Lauren Mack, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman. During the course of the investigation, agents arrested 32 other people who were illegally working for the company.

The bust, which marks the first criminal charges brought against an employer in Arizona, illustrates the new work-site enforcement strategy being carried out by ICE.

"We believe this is far more effective than the deterrence of fines," said Alonzo Peña, ICE special agent in charge in Phoenix, at an afternoon press conference in Tucson at the Evo DeConcini Federal Courthouse. "The prospect of serving prison times carries sharper teeth."

In the past three years, the agency has shifted its focus from employer fines — which many businesses considered no more than a cost of doing business — to criminal prosecutions that can result in prison time and asset forfeitures.

After the 2001 terror attacks, the government's employment enforcement efforts centered primarily on work sites with implications for national security — nuclear plants, military bases, airports and chemical plants.

The number of criminal arrests at work sites has increased from 25 in 2002 to 716 in 2006, officials said.

Friday's bust follows a string of crackdowns on employers across the country in the last 11 months since the Department of Homeland Security announced in April 2006 that it would target employers.

The arrests have a sent a message that the government is serious about immigration enforcement and put employers on notice, said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that advocates for comprehensive immigration changes.

"What stings is when they try to put the president or the owner behind bars," Papademetriou said. "It doesn't mean that the next employer is going to fire all of their undocumented workers, but what it does it mean is they are going to be more vigilant."

Politically, the nationwide crackdown on employers also gives the Bush administration capital in its quest to pass immigration laws that include a path to legalization for some of the estimated 10 million to 12 million illegal immigrants, said Papademetriou and Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based organization that seeks to halt illegal immigration.

"The administration is trying to show it's serious about enforcement to get its amnesty or legalization," Camarota said.

The culture of acceptance for illegal workers won't change until the agency systematically goes after employers who are hiring illegal immigrants, whether it be five or 500, he said.

"The little fish are in the sea in which the big fish swim," Camarota said. "It's the general contempt for the rule of law, the widespread acceptance of illegal immigration at the small employers that allows the spectacular cases to happen."

The investigation of Sun Drywall began in November 2005 after officials spotted a trend of deported illegal immigrants who claimed to have worked at the company, Peña said.

In December 2005, during an audit of the company's employee records, agents found 11 workers who were using fraudulent green cards, according to the criminal complaint against the company.

ICE agents told Hardt and Hill to get rid of the workers, but they continued to employ them, the complaint reads. Investigators also found other workers using fraudulent green cards with numbers that belonged to other people.

Three people were arrested Friday on state charges of making and selling fraudulent documents in connection with the case.

The Pew Hispanic Center has estimated that 10 percent of all workers in Arizona's economy are illegal immigrants, a figure that federal officials have called conservative.

Officials hope busts such as Friday's motivate employers to stop hiring illegal immigrants.

"Those who don't, we will come looking for you," Peña said. "We have other cases that are already in the pipeline."

The Cochise County Sheriff's Office, Sierra Vista police and the Border Patrol assisted with the arrests.

Last year, the Star published a four-day special series on illegal labor enforcement. Read the series at go.azstarnet.com/illegallabor

● Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com. ● The Associated Press contributed to this article.

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/border/172965

This story was huge local news yesterday, but I senced some adgitation due to the fact that it took 16 months to complete this project until they made arrests. They used a huge amountg of resources and it still took 16 months. They also said that while this projectg was going on, they actually told the people from the company what they were doing (feds gave themselves away) and the company still continued their practices. The company tried to hide the illegal workers from the feds by having formen talk to each other on 2 way radios and move the illegals around on the worksites to avoid detection. This info was reported on a TV newscast.

Let's hope this is the first of many raids in which illegal employers are charged.

Defendants in Sun Drywall immigration case make initial court appearances

By Jonathan Clark/Wick News Service



BISBEE - The last of eight people accused of conspiring to hire illegal workers at a Sierra Vista drywall company made his initial appearance yesterday in U.S. District Court in Tucson.

Santiago Trejo-Ramirez, a crew supervisor at Sun Drywall and Stucco Inc. stood before a federal judge a day after turning himself in to Sierra Vista police. He had spent the previous three days eluding arrest on a federal warrant. Seven other people accused in the case, including Sun's 44-year-old president, Ivan T. Hardt, were arrested during a series of raids Friday in Sierra Vista. They made their initial court appearances on Monday, said Ann Harwood, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona.

Following the appearances, Hardt was released and given one week to raise $20,000 cash or a corporate surety bond, Harwood said. The others were released on their own recognizance.Hardt, a resident of Sierra Vista, was granted permission to leave the state to see his stepson graduate from a Naval Academy in Chicago and to attend his son's baseball games at New Mexico State University, Harwood said. More than 200 federal agents fanned out across Sierra Vista early Friday morning, raiding Sun's offices, a foreman's home, the home of a suspected document counterfeiter and eight worksites.

In addition to arresting Hardt and his employees, the agents confiscated dozens of boxes of documents from the company's East Cooper Street headquarters and detained eight undocumented Mexican workers.

Speaking at a press conference later that afternoon, Daniel Knauss, U.S. Attorney for the district of Arizona, said Sun had been warned as early as December 2005 to stop hiring illegal workers. But instead, Knauss said, Hardt and seven of his managers conspired with fraudulent document vendors to obtain phony work visas for their Mexican laborers.

Reached for comment Tuesday, Hardt's attorney, Michael Piccarreta, said the charges against his client would be "vigorously defended."

"It looks like, from the way this matter was handled, that it was more of an attempt by the federal government to gain publicity than it was a traditional investigation," Piccarreta said.

"I think that when everything comes out," he said, "we're going to see a much different story than the one that was presented through the federal government propaganda machine."

Speaking at Friday's press conference, Alonzo Pena, special agent in charge of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement in Arizona, called Sun the largest drywall and stucco contractor in southeastern Arizona and said the company employed as many as 165 workers during ICE's preceding 16-month investigation.

Piccarreta said yesterday that the company was still operating, despite the arrests. "Ivan Hardt's business is open, will continue to be open, and has been and will be operating in a lawful manner," he said.

However, one Sun employee who did not wish to be named, said the bad publicity resulting from the raids had already caused some contractors to quit doing business with the firm.

A preliminary hearing in the case is set for today at 10:30 in U.S. District Court in Tucson, though both Harwood and Piccarreta indicated that it would likely be continued.

http://www.douglasdispatch.com/articles ... /news5.txt

Eight employees charged in hiring case pass on hearing

By Jonathan Clark

Herald/Review

BISBEE — The eight employees of a Sierra Vista drywall contractor accused of conspiring to hire illegal immigrants waived their rights to a preliminary hearing Friday at U.S. District Court in Tucson.

Wyn Hornbuckle, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said prosecutors will now ask a grand jury to return indictments against Ivan T. Hardt, president of Sun Drywall and Stucco, and his seven co-defendants.

Hornbuckle said indictments must be returned no more than 30 days after a criminal complaint is filed, though that deadline could be extended with the defendants’ approval.

The complaint in the case was filed March 8.

In addition to Hardt, those named in the complaint include Carol Hill, Sun’s human resources manager; Jose Gutierrez Tapia, foreman; Joaquin Neave, manager; Omar Reyes, worker; Edward Ramirez Durgin, foreman; Santiago Trejo-Ramirez, worker; and Efrain Silvain-Avechuco, manager.

All eight defendants are accused of conspiring to hire and harbor illegal workers, and all but Hardt have been released from custody on their own recognizance.

Hardt was released on the condition that he file a $20,000 cash or corporate surety bond by Monday.

A conviction for conspiracy to knowingly hire illegal aliens, a misdemeanor offense, carries a maximum penalty of six months in prison, a $3,000 fine per illegal worker employed, plus other possible fines. A conviction for conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens, a felony offense, carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, or both.

http://www.svherald.com/articles/2007/0 ... /news7.txt