ICE Is Cracking Down on Illegal Hiring — Congress Must Finish the Job with Mandatory E-Verify

The Trump administration has launched the most aggressive worksite enforcement campaign in decades — and in doing so, has exposed a fundamental flaw in immigration law that only Congress can fix.

Worksite Enforcement — Inconsistently Tried

The history of workplace audits in the United States is a history of starts and stops, driven entirely by which administration holds the White House. The data tells the story clearly.

Under the Bush administration, ICE conducted just 250 I-9 inspections in fiscal year 2007. The first Obama administration dramatically ramped up audits as part of a push for comprehensive immigration reform — inspections rose to roughly 1,400 in FY 2009, 2,000 in FY 2010, 2,500 in FY 2011, and more than 3,000 in FY 2012 and FY 2013. 

Then the second Obama term arrived and enforcement collapsed — audits fell by more than half, employer arrests dropped from nearly 200 per year to fewer than 70, and fines collected plummeted. 

The first Trump administration reversed course, quadrupling inspections to more than 5,200 in FY 2018 and reaching a peak of 6,456 in FY 2019. 

Under Biden, the bottom fell out again — just 203 inspections in FY 2021, the lowest on record. 

Now, in the second Trump term, ICE’s audit rate is at least ten times the rate of the prior year, with more than 40 publicly reported worksite enforcement actions and over 1,100 arrests.

Removing the Jobs Magnet

Worksite enforcement doesn’t just hold employers accountable after the fact — it removes the jobs magnet that draws people here illegally in the first place. As former Congresswoman and civil-rights icon Barbara Jordan told the House Judiciary Committee: 

“Employment continues to be the principal reason illegal aliens come to this country. As long as U.S. businesses benefit from the hiring of unauthorized workers, control of unlawful immigration will be impossible.” 

The current administration’s own data bears this out. The White House reports that more than three million illegal aliens have left the country since January 2025 — the largest reduction in the unauthorized population in modern history. Voluntary departures have increased 28-fold compared to the prior administration. When people know that the jobs won’t be there, many choose to leave on their own. That is exactly what effective worksite enforcement, paired with mandatory E-Verify, would achieve on a permanent basis.

A Broader Enforcement Infrastructure

The current enforcement surge goes well beyond audits. ICE’s rate of Notices of Inspection in 2025 was at least ten times the rate of the prior year, and the agency has publicly reported more than 40 worksite enforcement actions resulting in over 1,100 arrests since the start of the administration’s second term. In March 2026, ICE also reclassified dozens of common I-9 paperwork errors from correctable technical violations to substantive violations carrying immediate fines of $288 to $2,861 per form — eliminating the correction window that employers relied on for decades.

The tools behind this surge are expanding rapidly — and they reach far deeper than street-level arrests ever could. ICE now has access to 1.28 million employer tax records through an IRS data-sharing agreement, and DHS has requested access to the Federal Parent Locator Service — a federal employment database covering virtually every worker in the country. The One Big Beautiful Bill funded 10,000 new ICE officers, representing the largest personnel increase in agency history. Unlike street operations, which remove one person at a time, worksite enforcement strikes at the infrastructure of illegal employment itself. A single audit can identify dozens or hundreds of unauthorized workers at once, trigger removal proceedings for all of them, and impose criminal charges on the employers who created the market for illegal labor in the first place. Street arrests treat the symptom. Worksite enforcement treats the cause.

The Gap That Won’t Close Without Legislation

All of this enforcement activity is welcome — but it highlights a core problem that no amount of auditing, fining, or raiding can solve on its own.

Under current law, an employer’s legal obligation at the point of hire is to visually inspect an employee’s work authorization documents and determine whether they “reasonably appear to be genuine.” That’s it. There is no requirement to check those documents against a government database. There is no electronic verification. An employer who accepts a convincing forgery in good faith has, in the eyes of the law, done everything required.

That standard is why illegal hiring persists even under the most aggressive enforcement campaign in memory. ICE can audit I-9 forms, levy half-million-dollar fines, and access a million tax records — but it is investigating fraud after the fact in a system that does not require employers to prevent it at the point of hire.

Legislation would close that gap. The Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 251) in the House and the Accountability Through Electronic Verification Act (S. 1151) in the Senate would require all employers to electronically verify the work authorization of every new hire against government records, and require government action to reduce identity theft. E-Verify is already used voluntarily by more than one million employers, and the system processes the vast majority of queries within seconds.

The economic case is straightforward. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that removing unauthorized workers from the labor market would raise wages for authorized low-skilled workers by approximately 5 percent. Mandatory E-Verify achieves this by removing the jobs magnet — the ability of unauthorized workers to obtain employment using fraudulent documents — rather than relying solely on costly, after-the-fact enforcement operations.

Executive Action Alone Is Not Enough

The administration deserves credit for building the most comprehensive worksite enforcement infrastructure in American history. The I-9 reclassification, the IRS data-sharing agreement, the 10,000 new ICE officers, the criminal referrals — these are significant, meaningful steps.

But every one of them is an executive action that a future president could reverse with the stroke of a pen. A future USCIS director could reclassify those substantive violations back to technical. A future attorney general could terminate the IRS data-sharing agreement. A future administration could simply stop auditing.

Mandatory E-Verify is the only reform that makes employer verification the permanent law of the land — not dependent on who sits in the Oval Office, not subject to annual appropriations fights, not vulnerable to a future administration’s enforcement priorities. It is the common-sense complement to everything the administration is already doing: the stick of enforcement paired with the structural fix of prevention.

Congress has the bills. The House has H.R. 251. The Senate has S. 1151. The enforcement infrastructure is in place. The case has been made. It is time to act.