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Ice Was Not Meant To Be Cold: The Case For Civil Rights Monitoring Of Immigration Enforcement At The Workplace, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] As Professor Lee discusses, the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”), the main agency in charge of health, safety, and wage and hour protections for employees, has failed to ward off the negative effects of IRCA’s workplace-based immigration enforcement scheme. Part of the reason for this failure, as Professor Lee convincingly contends, is that ICE has the power to make enforcement decisions that affect the workplace rights of employees without consulting the DOL. For Professor Lee, the DOL’s relative impotence, coupled with ICE’s lack of regard for employees’ workplace rights in its immigration enforcement measures, allows “bad-actor” employers to trample …