Perp Walk Requested

After raids carried out Wednesday in Michigan in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested approximately 680 allegedly illegal immigrants working in poultry processing plants, President

Trump told reporters at the White House that the raids dissuade immigrants from entering and residing in the country illegally.

“I want people to know that if they come into the United States illegally, they’re getting out. They’re going to be brought out. And this serves as a very good deterrent," he said.

Four days later on CNN's State of the Union, Acting Director of the US Customs and Border Protection Mark Morgan was interviewed by Jake Tapper, who beginning at 13:01 in the video below notes

So it seems like undocumented workers, the dad of that little girl and the like, often bear the brunt of these raids and not the employers that hire them. Isn't it important to hold businesses responsible for this? Syracuse found, researchers at Syracuse University, found that from April 2018 to March 2019 the Trump Administration prosecuted zero companies and only eleven individuals for employing undocumented immigrants. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants have been targeted.

After Morgan makes a comment, Tapper clarifies, asking "What I'm saying is why aren't you focusing more on the companies and the business owners?" and the Acting Director replies "they are- again, this was a joint criminal investigation between ICE and the Department of Justice which was targeting the companies that were hiring illegal aliens."

Tapper responds "are there any charges against the companies and the business owners?" and Morgan maintains

It's a pending investigation right now. There's a criminal search warrant to go in there, to collect more information, more intelligence and that investigation is ongoing. But that's the intent of that investigation.

Morgan insists there is a "pending investigation" and time, and good journalism, may prove the accuracy of his claim.  However, while there always has been a suspicion- or perhaps assumption- that while the Trump Administration wants to intimidate, punish, maybe even terrorize illegal immigrants, that it wants to avoid prosecuting their employers, whether from a pro-business ideology or to protect Mr. Trump, himself a prodigious employer of illegal immigrants.

Approximately 380 of the individuals arrested were moved toICE detention facilities and roughly 300 released the following day and given a court date. Their (ex-) employers remain at large, however. The ringleaders went home at night, slept in their own beds, and in the case of one of the employers- 14,000-employee Koch Foods- already has scheduled a job fair.

All of this raises the suspicion that employers violate labor standards because "they feel that ICE is going to back them up." President Trump emphasized the importance of the strategy because "this serves as a very good deterrent."

If deterrence is an objective, employers must be prosecuted. And more- they should be arrested at the same time as the workers (some with actual documents, some not) are picked up. They should be led out in handcuffs, so that their families, friends, and fellow executives can see them.

This need not be done out of vindictiveness, but rather because they can be presumed to have committed a felony, or felonies.  An individual worker has (presumably) broken the law himself. But the boss has employed not only him, but a whole lot of people who have presumably broken the law. It's long past time for a perp walk.

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