ICE Asks the Food Service Industry To Please Oppress Itself

In the absence of manpower, the agency is trying to assign its own work to the managers of the servers and line cooks it’s trying to abduct

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

A SERIES OF RAIDS this week in Washington, D.C. by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was intended to net the agency thousands of new detainees. Instead, it was an expensive failure, in part because of ICE's attempt to turn routine tax-document audits into camera-ready assaults that looked deceptively like criminal enforcement actions.

FOREVER WARS has obtained two pages from ICE agents presented at local restaurants. One of them appears to be a questionnaire with no legal force behind it. 

ICE’s problem, say immigration lawyers, is that it simply did not have the manpower to disrupt hundreds of workplaces during its two-day blitz. In the absence of the necessary staff, ICE instead has asked that restaurant workers to please oppress and entrap themselves and each other. 

Staff at D.C. businesses were given both documents above. (These are the only pages we have from them.) The first is a standard request for I-9 forms, which identify employees and verify their eligibility to work in the U.S., and which the business owner is responsible for providing on request. The second, titled “Interview Questions—Long Form” appears to be a list of questions that DHS officials are supposed to ask restaurant workers about the businesses’ employment practices, presumably in aid of identifying labor violations. 

The language of the forms is boring accountant-ese. These interviews are usually done by a completely different division, Homeland Security Investigations’ Worksite Enforcement Unit. But the language of the raids, carried out by mask-wearing thugs with guns, is “turn over your illegals.”

These raids were intended to frighten undocumented workers into fleeing their places of work so they could be arrested, a source with knowledge of the operation tells FOREVER WARS. It’s a little like a SWAT team breaking down your door to tell you that you entered your Social Security number wrong on your 1040, in the hope that you’ll run away. But if employers fill out the forms, or give them to their employees to fill out, they will provide further material for potential investigations. However tempting it may be for employers to volunteer information, lawyers recommend business owners consult a lawyer before answering any questions, including those in writing.

Jessie Hahn, a senior labor lawyer for the National Immigration Law Center, says that while I-9 checks are standard procedure, they are usually done through the mail—sometimes over the course of many months—and business owners have zero legal obligation to return the list of questions ICE added to them.

“This questionnaire was sloppy work by ICE agents who are under extreme pressure from Trump to meet weekly quotas for opening new investigations,” Hahn said in an interview. “It is clearly designed to induce employers to reveal potentially self-incriminating information on hiring violations, meaning that the ICE agents were trying to get employers to do the agents’ jobs for them. Employers should not respond to any such questions without first consulting legal counsel.” 

This speaks to the generally sloppy nature of the raids. I-9 verifications aren’t intended to identify undocumented immigrant employees to deport, they’re part of standard procedure in bureaucratic investigations of employers that can take months or years.

Hahn emphasizes that employers must comply with ICE requests for their I-9 forms—though they have a three-day window to do so—and allow ICE to serve administrative subpoenas. “But the regulations do not mention any kind of printed list of ‘interview questions’ such as the ones that were given to DC businesses this week,” she says. 

The Department of Homeland Security has been on a firing spree for months, and it saw mass resignations during the first Trump administration, when its entire advisory committee resigned in protest of its “morally repugnant” child separation policy.

Put plainly, FOREVER WARS understands from multiple sources both within and outside DHS that ICE is having a labor problem of its very own: Not enough people want to work for the Gestapo for this kind of sweeping operation to succeed at scale. 

However conservative DHS culture has been or has become, it’s still controversial to remove third-country nationals to a notorious forced-labor prison in El Salvador, to use Guantanamo Bay for migrant detentions, and to defy court orders and try to render people from Vietnam and Laos to Libya. Given that Secretary Kristi Noem has followed Trump’s reduction-in-force edicts and illegally fired hundreds of people, morale is already low.

SPENCER HERE. Let's all take a moment to applaud Sam for his excellent, thorough and nuanced reporting on the ICE raids in D.C. this week. He worked hard and diligently on this, and endured my overbearing editing like a champ. 

Speaking of Noem, this week the secretary gave a speech in Springfield, Illinois, to whine about Illinois' and other states' resistance to DHS' kidnapping and rendition operations. Noem specifically highlighted a slain 24-year old community organizer, Emma Shafer, to cast collective blame for her murder on undocumented people. Her parents had something to say about that: 

"Our daughter Emma radiated love and light everywhere she went and for all people. Even as a child, she was a friend to everyone and someone who spoke up for the less fortunate. She dedicated her life - her career and her free time - to causes of social justice and equity. That was just who she was. To see her used by Secretary Noem and others to advance a cruel and heartless political agenda is not just deeply painful to us - it is an insult to her memory," Cathy Schwartz and John Shafer said in a statement hours later. "Noem's words are in direct conflict with who Emma was as a person. Emma built up community and stood with all members, including immigrants."

NBC Chicago reports that Cathy and John were among a crowd protesting Noem. 

LATELY IT'S BEEN EASY TO DISMISS Trump's delusions of taking ownership of an ethnically cleansed Gaza as his typical impulsivity. But in addition to his recent musings about controlling Gazan food distribution and the Israeli flirtation with hiring U.S. contractors for that purpose, a Reuters report from Wednesday suggests that it may not be a passing fixation. Reportedly Washington and Tel Aviv are discussing an interim U.S. administration of Gaza—in essence, pairing American political authority with Israeli military occupation. And guess what they've picked for a model? 

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the talks publicly, compared the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

This is like the protein shake version of every noxious element of the War on Terror, all blended together. 

WANT TO KNOW WHAT GUANTANAMO BAY LOOKS LIKE on Ketamine?

I'VE GOT A LOT TO SAY about Yemen, the ceasefire with the Houthis and Trump's portentous trip to Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi next week—a trip that comes right after the U.S. and Iranians talk through intermediaries in Oman. That's going to be the subject of my next Zeteo column, which paid subscribers (do it) will get for free in their inboxes. But also make sure you don't miss Zeteo's new documentary, Who Killed Shireen?, which I have yet to watch, but which apparently reveals for the first time the name of the Israeli soldier who shot dead the Palestinian-American report Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 while she wore a blue helmet and plate carrier marking her as a journalist.