JURIST - Paper Chase: US Secretary of Homeland Security calls for review of workplace immigration raid

[JURIST] US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano [official profile] has called for a review [materials] of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) [official website] workplace immigration raid [press release] that occurred in Bellingham, Washington on Tuesday. In a Wednesday hearing, Napolitano told lawmakers that she was not made aware of the raid which resulted in the arrest of 28 foreign nationals, adding:

In my view, we have to do workplace enforcement [and] it needs to be focused on employers who intentionally and knowingly exploit the illegal labor market. That [behavior] has impacts on American workers, it has an impact on wage levels, [and it] often has undue impact on the illegal workers themselves. Our ICE efforts should be focused on those sorts of things.

Napolitano issued a directive [text] in January calling for the review and assessment of ICE fugitive operation teams in response to a number of workplace raids similar to Tuesday's.

Earlier this month, ICE tactics under the Bush administration were criticized [JURIST report] for being overly-aggressive and ineffective. ICE has arrested [JURIST report] many non-criminal illegal immigrants in the past year, many of whom were imprisoned [JURIST report]. In April, Seton Hall Law School's Center for Social Justice filed a lawsuit [Star-Ledger report] claiming that warrantless immigration raids violate the US Constitution.

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