Business people who hire undocumented immigrants often have gone unpunished, but those days will end, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday, according to the El Paso Times. As immigration laws are reformed, businesses will continue to be audited, and undocumented workers will be arrested, charged and deported, she said at the sixth annual Border Security Conference at the University of Texas at El Paso.
But unlike in the old days, the business operators who hired undocumented immigrants will be punished, too, Napolitano said. “We need to make sure work-site enforcement is done. We need to make sure we are building cases against employers,” she said. “For the past eight years or so, the federal government’s approach to the Southwest border was to treat it as a problem sect and to treat it as something to be dealt with separately from our nation’s broader challenges with immigration, security, counter-narcotics enforcement and international relations. Well, let me tell you, the issues we have with the Southwest border are not distinct and separate.”