Ice in Northern New York

Building one of these takes a lot of worker hours, often not by US citizens

My old buddy Jeff(not his real name) just called to tell me a horrific story from Northern New York.  You may know, I am in construction, building solar fields.  He is a labor supplier getting us people who do everything from rack buildering to panel mounting, electricians, anything.  I’ve asked him often — has ICE harassed any of your sites yet?  Well — it just happened.

To date, he’s heard of other projects hit, but none of his.  One that makes me especially sad, they got a crew of Haitians who are SUPER.  They were some of the hardest working people, and on my projects they worked through a Maine winter like it was just a day in the life.  I don’t know if they were “legal” …. But when my employers had them next to union electrical workers, there was zero friction.

All of his sites use E Verify, and since our work is typically behind a fence out in the country most of the time, we’re not PRIME targets — or weren’t.  But yesterday 4 Hispanics were driving to lunch and got pulled over.  All had basic paperwork, 2 had drivers licenses.  Didn’t matter — all were shipped to Buffalo for detention.  He got a call from one guys wife, and said they were going to get deported to Venezuela if she couldn’t get proof of their status.

Fortunately he had everything on file, called up Buffalo and got through.  He sent over all the documents showing the men were legal, and then hit the wall.  According to ICE, since they can’t independently run E-Verify because of the shut down, they won’t let them go.  It doesn’t matter that ICE knows where they live and work, and have valid copies of all the paperwork.  The were picked up on suspicion of being illegal, and are being held until the Shut Down is over and E Verify is working again. 

Jeff is out, the project is slowed, and what’s worse — now they’re targeting the site actively for more captures.  Welcome to Trump’s America — where you can go to prison indefinitely for being brown.