When voters elected President Trump they expected that his first order of business would be to close the southern border and deport illegal immigrants.
The problem is that it negatively impacts agriculture operations because immigrants — both legal and illegal — predominantly hold these jobs.
I don’t think that should stop immigration officials from raiding ag operations and detaining illegal immigrants, but I think that congress could step in to help those who are truly here for a better life and do not have a criminal record to stay in the U.S. to work.
The U.S. does have programs that allow immigrants to work in the U.S. but those programs limit the time that these people can work here, have become so expensive and are riddled with too many rules and regulations that most farmers can’t afford to use them. I believe this can and needs to be fixed.
The scary part of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at Glenn Valley Foods in Nebraska is that the company said it followed the hiring rules and used E-Verify, a federal database used for checking employees’ immigration status before hiring workers. Supposedly these workers had fraudulent paperwork that allowed them to be hired legally in the U.S. This is unsettling for the farms or companies who hire these people and for people who may have had their information stolen and provided to illegal immigrants.
Again, this needs to be fixed and congress should be working on this as we speak so that farmers and ag companies don’t inadvertently fun afoul of the law and to protect Americans from identity theft.
According to an article by First Alert 6 in Omaha, “More than a week after 76 people were detained by federal immigration enforcement agents, ICE said more than 100 identity theft victims have been tied to employees of a south Omaha business detained in last week’s raid; and shared details about cases in five states.”
“The criminals who stole these identities didn’t just break the law they up-ended lives,” Mark Zito said. “These victims aren’t faceless statistics; they’re real people who are being denied healthcare and have lost educational opportunities.”
Zito is the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations Kansas City, which also covers Omaha.
Unfortunately, you won’t read stories about these identity theft victims in the mainstream media, because they are more concerned about the illegal immigrants who stole these people’s identities.
You can read more about these people whose identities were stolen at https://tinyurl.com/598ftazf.
What I’m trying to convey, is that congress should educate themselves on the damage that is being done to the constituents who elected them.
And instead of congress arguing whether schools should serve whole milk, their time would be better spent making sure that the dairies who produce that milk can stay in business.
Or, instead of lawmakers trying to get their names in the news by interfering with ICE agents just doing their jobs, they should be spending their time trying to figure out how to allow illegal immigrants who do not have criminal records and who just want to work here to do just that.
