During the Bush Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shifted its enforcement philosophy to emphasize criminal sanctions over fines. Julie L. Myers, then Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for ICE, compared fines for unlawful hiring practices to an “average traffic ticket,” and noted that under the new enforcement strategy, offending employers “now face jail time and risk significant asset forfeiture.” During the Bush era, criminal arrests for worksite enforcement increased by more than 600%, increasing from 176 in 2005 to 1,103 in 2008.
The Obama Administration continued the trend toward criminal enforcement with a focus on the criminal prosecution of employers who knowingly employed unauthorized aliens, rather than the employees who are working without proper authorization. Under the Obama Administration, the number of I-9 audits increased steeply, but the number of criminal prosecutions for knowingly employing undocumented workers ranged from a low of 116 in 2009 to a high of 194 in 2014.
ICE has continued to use administrative audits to identify employers who are violating federal immigration laws. In October 2017, ICE announced that it would quadruple to quintuple the number of ICE audits it would conduct...
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