Since his second inauguration, President Donald Trump has reshaped immigration enforcement across the country, focusing on increasing detentions in the country’s interior, closing the border and ending the asylum process and other Biden-era humanitarian programs.
The changes have shaken immigrant communities across the country and in Ohio, where social media exploded with reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement sightings in Northeast and central Ohio shortly after Trump’s inauguration.
Now employers too are girding for Trump’s immigration crackdown to hit workplaces. In January, the Society for Human Resources Management reported that experts expected slowed-down processing and increased restrictions on employment-based visas and increased worksite enforcement and warned employers to expect more employment eligibility audits from the federal government.
Employers can face civil and criminal penalties for hiring people who are in the country without authorization. But the law is nuanced and the economic impact of a crackdown on businesses and the economy is complex, legal experts say.
What is an employer's liability?
If an employer knowingly hires undocumented immigrants, Cleveland immigration attorney David Leopold said they are breaking the law and would likely face repercussions. The severity of the repercussions, he said, depends on how many undocumented immigrants are hired.
“They could wind up with stiff fines and depending on the situation even criminal charges,” Leopold said. “In a worse case scenario, it means jail time.”
An employer is likely to face criminal charges only if they knowingly hired a large number of undocumented people, he said, adding it’s “rare” for the government to pursue criminal charges for hiring one or two undocumented people.
In 2018, 146 employees were arrested at Fresh Mark, a meat packaging company with locations in Salem, Massillon and Canton, who were working without legal status. Fresh Mark entered into a non-prosecution agreement at the end of 2024 with the Northern District of Ohio United States Attorney's Office and agreed to pay more than $3.7 million in penalties and to abide by compliance reporting requirements for two years.
If an employer unknowingly hires an undocumented immigrant, which can happen if a person provides false employment documents, they are unlikely to face repercussions, Leopold said.
“The employer is not supposed to be a forensics examiner," he said," so if the documents provided during the onboarding process look real or reasonably appear to be correct documents, the employer is likely to be insulated from any fine or criminal charge."
But some employers may face consequences if the documents an employee provides are obviously false, for example, if “Ohio” is spelled incorrectly on a driver’s license, Leopold said.
For decades, some have criticized efforts to crack down on illegal immigration that focus on deportations as missing the reason why people come to the U.S. illegally. Cleveland immigration attorney Jose Juarez said he wonders why immigration enforcement targets employees rather than employers.
“If you wanted to really stop undocumented work here, then you kind of have to go for the employers as well. They’re the ones employing them,” Juarez said. “But they’re not, so the employers don’t have incentive to, basically, do a more rigorous check on these individuals.”
While campaigning in 2016, Trump called for all employers to use the federal government's online E-Verify system, which allows employers to check job applicants' documentation with records at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to see whether they are authorized to work, according to PBS Newshour.
In 2019, Trump seemed to modify his stance on E-Verify when he told Fox News that it was a "tough thing" to ask farmers to use of the system, which may eliminate candidates.
Earlier that year, Eric Trump said the Trump Organization implemented the use of E-Verify across all its properties after claims surfaced that some of its workers were in the country illegally.
Could the crackdown impact the economy?
Northeast Ohio is not currently an immigration magnet compared to other parts of the country. Still, businesses and the economy could be affected if deportations pick up, said Bill Kosteas, an economist at Cleveland State University.
“It depends on the scope. If it does expand, then you’ll definitely start to see an impact, especially in the industries where employers are more heavily reliant on immigrant labor,” Kosteas said.
Estimates show that between 75,000 and 175,000 people, representing between .63% and 1.48% of Ohio’s population in 2022, were unauthorized, according to figures from the Pew Research Center. Nationwide, unauthorized immigrants represented about 4.8% of the workforce. Most undocumented immigrants came from Mexico and Latin America.
Those industries where there is a lot of immigrant — not necessarily undocumented — labor, Kosteas said, include construction and hospitality. Regionally, immigrant labor is often utilized in fields that require higher education, he said. He said he doesn’t think those industries will be the focus on immigration action.
“I’d be shocked if all of a sudden they came down to CSU and started grabbing faculty,” Koteas said.
But if people in fields like agriculture are targeted, as was the case at Fresh Mark, Kosteas said that could have an impact on production. He said that slowed down production could raise the cost of goods. And an increase of immigration enforcement could force employers to find new employees, which could also raise wages.
“How much will we see that playing in the grocery store,” Kosteas said. "It’s hard to tell."
Trump’s crackdown could send a message that makes it difficult to attract talent to the state, even in industries that rely on immigrants who come legally to study and work.
“It’s hard to quantify how much of a decline that a lot of universities are seeing in international students — how much of that is because of the perception of there being a less welcoming climate in the U.S.,” Kosteas said. “There’s definitely some making that argument or clinging to that as a reason for seeing decline. A lot of universities have [made that argument] as far as their international student population.”
