Pa. mushroom farmer wonders why Trump’s immigration police are out to get him

Joseph N. DiStefano | @PhillyJoeD | JoeD@inquirer.com

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During the week of June 24, the president tweeted recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement “will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.”

Three days before he made that promise, I drove uphill between the concrete and wood structures of a cluster of Chester County mushroom farms, pungent from composted manure and compressed sawdust, in an intensely farmed southern corner of the county, “America’s Mushroom Capital.”

It’s a place where workers are already scarce, foreigners take the hard jobs, and growers wonder why their government seems to be pushing them away from their family businesses of filling the produce aisles.

In one farm office, the manager showed me a new letter from the Department of Homeland Security, which runs ICE. The assistant special agent in charge wrote that ICE agents had stopped by recently to copy employment records. Over the next four weeks, they had checked those documents, and found that some of the workers “appear, at the present time, not to be authorized to work in the United States.”

Why? Some work documents appeared to “pertain to other individuals.” Others didn’t match official records, provide employment authorization, or had expired. For all those reasons and more, they failed to “satisfy the Form I-9 employment eligibility verification requirements of the INA,” the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. As amended.

The letter listed the familiar Spanish names: Carlos, Jesus, Maria, Miguel. Gonzalez, Martinez, Zavala. In combinations and hyphenations. With hire dates, Social Security numbers, and the status of those numbers, marked “Invalid.” More than two dozen.

Unless they can come up with new, valid documents, “they are considered by [Homeland investigators] to be unauthorized to work in the United States.” If he keeps them on, the farmer may be subject to “civil penalties ranging from $548 to $4,384 per unauthorized alien for a first violation.” And more if ICE finds this has happened here before.

“This is a very serious matter that requires your immediate attention.”

Within 10 business days, the assistant special agent in charge concluded, the employer must either verify the workers’ status “or take other appropriate actions.” The penalties could include “civil” fines. Or worse: “Criminal charges may be brought against any person or entity that engages in a pattern or practice of knowingly hiring or continuing to employ unauthorized aliens.”

Most of the men and women on the list are already gone, the farm manager tells me. If the last seven from the list can’t find valid papers and also end up leaving the farm, some of their fully documented family members will go with them, reducing his workforce even more.

The owner had invited me so he could vent about the damage. The manager asked me not to name the farm. He says ICE people have been polite and professional. But why risk annoying the assistant special agent in charge?

The owner and the manager don’t want to lose these workers. They don’t know how they are going to replace them.

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