U.S. Ends Undocumented Immigrant Stings
Mar 29 2:01 PM US/Eastern
The Bush administration has stopped using fake health and safety
meetings at job workshops to snag illegal immigrants.
Marcy Forman, director of the Homeland Security Department's Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) divison, said in a letter to the United
Food and Commercial Workers union, that it had stopped using sting
operations for rounding up undocumented immigrants.
ICE arrested 49 illegal immigrant workers at North Carolina's Seymour
Johnson Air Force Base last summer by luring them with a flier to what
was advertised as a mandatory Occupational Safety and Health
Administration meeting.
Those arrested were contract workers and largely laborers, such as
carpenters, with no access to military files.
"The use of the OSHA ruse by ICE agents in North Carolina at the Air
Force Base was not coordinated with OSHA," Dean Boyd, an ICE spokesman
said Wednesday. "It was a mistake and should not have happened. ICE has
since taken corrective action to ensure it doesn't happen again."
The sting drew immediate criticism from unions, immigration advocates
and the North Carolina's Occupational Safety and Health Division.
Neither the state agency nor federal OSHA officials were involved in the
sting.
OSHA "is the agency charged with keeping people safe on the job," said
Jill Cashen, spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers
Union. "To use it as a trap is outrageous and undermines safety on the
job."
The union made the March 17 letter from Forman public as the Senate
plunged into a debate over tightening borders and fining employers who
hire undocumented immigrants. It also is deciding whether to provide
some kind of legal status to the rouhgly 11 million illegal aliens now
living in the United States as an alternative to deporting them.