Lawyer: Everything now a priority for immigration enforcement

KENNEWICK — Keep your head down and do everything you can to avoid the police.

That’s the best advice Pasco-based immigration attorney Eamonn Roach had for a roomful of Washington and Oregon farmworkers and managers at the Washington-Oregon Potato Conference.

“ICE used to have levels of priority, but now everything is a priority,” Roach said.

Roach was one of the speakers at the Spanish-language session Tuesday on the first day of the 2018 Washington Oregon Potato Conference, where he delivered his remarks entirely in Spanish.

“Immigration law is super complicated and always changing,” Roach said later in an interview with the Columbia Basin Herald. “It’s a political football, and it depends upon the executive in power.”

However, the nature of the immigration crackdown has changed, Roach said. When the Obama administration first tightened enforcement, it did so with well-publicized raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

However, Roach said those raids didn’t prove terribly effective, and much of the work ICE now does involves tedious audits of company records to see if all the I-9 forms on file match to people who can work legally.

“Give me all your forms so I can see if all your T’s are crossed,” Roach said of the ICE approach. “That’s more where they are headed, dinging employers for hiring people without status.”

Which is a problem for agriculture, Roach noted, since roughly 80 percent of farm workers in the United States are in the country illegally.

“Agriculture and low-skill workers — dishwashers, cooks, apple pickers — are, by and large, here without status,” Roach said.

Roach attributes the problem to the 1986 Immigration Reform Act, which failed to account for future immigration flows or allow for a significant guest worker program.

“They just figured they solved the problem (in 1986),” Roach said. “We still need people working in agriculture, picking apples, cutting asparagus. Americans just aren’t doing those jobs.”

Roach, who consults with both farmers and farm workers, said he is hoping for a comprehensive fix for the country’s immigration issues — something that gives permanent status to the people covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, builds a boarder wall with Mexico, increases interior enforcement of immigration laws, and “some sort of program to help everyone else.”

Washington’s 4th Congressional district, which spans from the Tri-Cities all the way to the Canadian border, is home to 6,200 DACA recipients, making it one of the top 20 DACA districts in the country.

However, Roach noted that building a border wall won’t actually accomplish very much, since smaller Mexican families mean fewer people need to look for work outside the country.

He also noted that 40 percent of the people in the United States illegally originally came on tourist visas, student visas, or temporary work permits.

“They just never left,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.