Grassley, a longtime supporter of the program now known as E-Verify, has introduced an amendment that would require any entity that enters into a contract with the federal government to participate in the E-Verify program.

“When people enter this country illegally, they create undue delays and hardship for people following the rules,” Grassley said. “E-Verify is an effective tool to fight illegal immigrants who break the law.”

Obama administration officials said implementation was postponed to Sept. 8 to allow further review of the order’s necessity. In opposition to the order, he U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit, which remains pending in the U.S. District Court in Maryland.

Although some groups have touted the effectiveness of the database, which draws information from the Social Security Administration, not everyone is convinced. One of the primary criticisms surrounding the program is that the database cannot ascertain if documents presented by workers are legitimate. In fact, Swift & Co. was using the program prior to the massive 2006 raids at their meatpacking plants, including their Marshalltown facility. The same was true of Mississippi’s Howard Industries before it became in 2008 the largest single-site immigration enforcement action in the nation’s history.

It was due in large part to immigration raids at the very plants utilizing the E-Verify system that Eric Bord, a partner in the Washington, D.C.-based Morgan Lewis law firm, said the program has the “perverse effect of encouraging identity theft.”

A press release announcing Grassley’s amendment indicates that “over the last several years, reports have shown many examples of illegal aliens working at military bases or installations and allowing them to work in sensitive areas.”

“During the last immigration debate,” Grassley said, “the Senate spoke unanimously that government contractors should not receive a free pass when it comes to their hiring practices. We’ve seen too many illegal immigrants hired by federal contractors to turn a blind eye to this national security risk.”

The entire E-Verify program is up for extension as a part of U.S. Homeland Security appropriations. The Senate committee has approved a three-year extension, as requested by Pres. Barack Obama, and provided $118.5 million. The House committee, however, seeks to extend the program for only two years and provides $112 million. For at least the time being, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said publicly that she supports the program and wants it to continue. Either the House or Senate appropriations would provide the funds necessary to continue to the program until anticipated comprehensive immigration reform legislation is debated.

And, because comprehensive immigration reform discussion is anticipated to be taken up by Congress after health reform is complete, it isn’t likely that Grassley’s amendment will do much more than generate talking points for an already frustrated Republican base — much like the other three GOP attempts to attach the mandate.

“What [the raids] will do is focus employers on compliance in general, but E-Verify is an ineffective compliance tool because it doesn’t protect against identity theft,” Bord told reporter Mark Schoeff, Jr. of Workforce Management magazine.

Both Howard Industries and Swift & Co. used E-Verify, a government-run employment verification system, before the companies were targets of federal immigration raids.

The law that authorizes the E-Verify program is slated for expiration this fall. Although the U.S. House has approved a five-year extension of the program, the Senate has not yet considered reauthorization. The Department of Homeland Security, which has partnered with the Social Security Administration to manage E-Verify, is pushing for the now mostly voluntary program to become mandatory. The first step in that process is the approval of a regulation that would require all federal contractors to use the system.

Press releases from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement indicates that 595 individuals suspected of entering the country illegally from Peru, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil and Germany were detained as a result of the raid. More than 100 of those detained have already been released back into the community with ankle tracking devices on humanitarian grounds. Nearly 500 have been transfered to a federal detention facility in Jena, Louisiana to await further processing and possible criminal charges.

The names and faces have changed, but the stories coming out of Mississippi in the wake of the raid will not sound new to Iowans who have been following the news in relation to Postville.

A report today by Holbrook Mohr of the Associated Press:

A day after the largest single-workplace immigration raid in U.S. history, Elizabeth Alegria was too scared to send her son to school and worried about when she’d see her husband again.

Nearly 600 immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally were detained, creating panic among dozens of families in this small southern Mississippi town.

Alegria, 26, a Mexican immigrant, was working at the Howard Industries transformer plant Monday when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stormed in. When they found out she has two sons, ages 4 and 9, she was fitted with a bracelet and told to appear in federal court next month. But her husband, Andres, wasn’t so lucky.

“I’m very traumatized because I don’t know if they are going to let my husband go and when I will see him,” Alegria said through a translator Tuesday as she returned to the Howard Industries parking lot to retrieve her sport utility vehicle.

The superintendent of the county school district said about half of approximately 160 Hispanic students were absent Tuesday.

Roberto Velez, pastor at Iglesia Cristiana Peniel, where an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the 200 parishioners were caught up in the raid, said parents were afraid immigration officials would take them.

The Hattiesburg American, a newspaper located just 40 miles from the site of the Mississippi raid, has already began questioning both a state law requiring employers to verify identities of employers and the use of the federal E-Verify system. The Mississippi law requires employers to use E-Verify, a web-based database operated by the Department of Homeland Security that draws from Social Security Administration information.

… Mike Cockrell, chief financial officer of Sanderson Farms, a chicken-processing plant based in Laurel, said the system’s downside is its inability to detect false or stolen ID information.

“If somebody comes in and they manufacture a name …. that’s the primary weakness in the system,” Cockrell said.

Although Agriprocessors was not using E-Verify at the time of the May 12 raid, Marshalltown’s Swift & Co. had been using the system prior to the December 2006 raid there. Officials with Howard Industries have claimed to use “every check allowed to ascertain the immigration status of all applicants for jobs.” It is unknown at this time if the company was using the E-Verify system; however, it is possible that because of the change in Mississippi law the company had begun to use it. In that case, only newly hired employees would have been run through the government database.

But as the Iowa Independent reported two weeks ago, one of the primary criticisms of E-Verify is that it cannot ascertain if the documents being presented by workers to those doing the hiring are legitimate. Conversations about E-Verify have continued, the latest taking place in Topeka, Kansas where the city council there voted 8 to 1 to reject a proposal that the city implement the program.

Nonetheless, if Howard Industries is found guilty of hiring individuals not legally eligible to work in the U.S., the company could lose state contracts for the next three years and its business license. In addition the manufacturing company could face a stack of fines. The penalties are a part of the Mississippi Employment Protection Act, a piece of legislation that went into effect on July 1.

The Mississippi legislation also contains penalties for undocumented workers. They face a felony charge that carries jail time between one and five years as well as a monetary fine of up to $10,000.

Mississippi state Sen. Michael Watson, R-Pascagoula, was a co-author of the legislation and said the state should launch its own investigation now that the federal authorities have conducted the raid.

“It’s important to realize that people want to point fingers at the immigrants, but the businesses are taking advantage of that situation,” he said. “If we can put a stop to that, then the immigrants wouldn’t come here anymore.”

At the present time, eight of the detainees from Mississippi have been charged with aggravated identity theft. They appeared in U.S. District Court in Hattiesburg on Tuesday. It is unknown how many additional detainees will be charged as ICE officials refer to the investigation as ongoing.

Laurel is significantly larger than Postville. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 18,393 — a figure that increased significantly following Hurricane Katrina. Postville had a population of roughly 2,300 before the May 12 raid. Perhaps due to the larger population base, it appears as if Howard Industries won’t suffer the extended worker shortage that has plagued the Postville meatpacking plant. An office manager for the local job center told Eloria Newell James of the Laurel Leader Call that his agency has seen an increase “in traffic from people interested in jobs at Howard.”

Congress voted to reauthorize the Basic Pilot in January 2002 at roughly the same time as an independent evaluation of the Basic Pilot by Temple University and Westat was completed. The report outlined several concerns, but recommended continuing the program with modifications.

In December 2003 Congress passed the Basic Pilot Program Extension and Expansion Act. This legislation expanded the Basic Pilot to all 50 states and required the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, now partnering with the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to administer the program, to submit an evaluation report to the House and Senate by June 2004. Specifically, Congress wanted to know if the problems identified in the 2002 independent evaluation had been addressed.

The report was submitted, but questions about the accuracy of the databases behind the program and the potential for employee discrimination remained. The program is due for reauthorization by Congress in November.

The Bush Administration and the Department of Homeland Security have pushed for the program to become both permanent and mandatory for all U.S. employers. When it was discovered that a high percentage of federal government agencies were not using the program, Pres. George W. Bush signed an executive order requiring them to do so as of October 2007. His latest executive order, signed in early June, is an amendment to Executive Order 12989 from 1996 and would require all federal contractors — roughly 200,000 companies — to use E-Verify. Bush’s latest executive order has drawn the ire of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a typically friendly group to the administration. In addition, Bush’s 2009 budget includes $100 million specifically for “expansion and enhancement” of the E-Verify system.

States’ reactions have been mixed. The California Immigrant Policy Center and the Service Employees International Union are both backing legislation that would block the use of federal electronic employment verification systems by California employers. Arizona, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Mississippi, Minnesota and Missouri mandate at least employers of or above a certain size use the program to verify workers. Rod Blogojevich, governor of Illinois, signed a law in September 2007 that forbid use of the program by companies in his state. The federal government is suing Illinois to overturn the law and the state has agreed to non-enforcement until the case is settled. Mississippi went one step further by enacting the Mississippi Employment Protection Act, which is the first law to make it a felony to perform work as an undocumented immigrant.

In the final days before the August 2008 recess, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 407 to 2 to approve H.R. 6633, the Employee Verification Amendment Act of 2008, that reauthorizes E-Verify/Basic Pilot for five additional years and calls for two Government Accountability Office studies on the program. The legislation, considered a bipartisan compromise, has been sent to the Senate for consideration.