Omaha, Nebraska — Gary Rohwer built his QuickSteak empire at a meat processing center in Omaha, Nebraska.
But then, a tactical team of federal agents raided his facility on June 10, and more than 70 of his assembly line employees were arrested by Homeland Security Investigations.
He showed CBS News an old company photo, disclosing that about half of the employees in that photo were swept up in the raid.
“Oh my God, half of them,” Rohwer said. “It makes me sad, it really does, because these guys made us successful.”
Rohwer said he put his faith in E-Verify — the federal system used by more than 1 million employers each year, and which is mandatory in 10 states and by most federal contractors — to confirm the employment eligibility of would-be hires.
“We did everything right, but yet we got penalized big, I mean, big-time,” Rohwer said.
The government tells employers like Rohwer that E-Verify provides “peace of mind.”
To green-light employees, the system matches documents, such as licenses and Social Security cards, to a U.S. government database of eligible workers. But it vets paperwork, not people.
Experts say the E-Verify system is broken, not only exposing employers like Rohwer to raids, but also increasing an all too common crime: identity theft.
“This is a nationwide problem,” Elhrick Cerdan, assistant special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations Omaha, who led the investigation into Gary’s QuickSteak, told CBS News.
Cerdan called Rohwer and his business victims.
“This was in fact a targeted criminal investigation to rescue over a hundred victims of stolen entities,” Cerdan said, emphasizing that this was a criminal investigation, not civil immigration enforcement.
“Everybody is the victim of this broken system,” Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies for the Libertarian Cato Institute, told CBS News.
Nowrasteh called E-Verify a “wink-and-nod” system.
“The thing that experts know that is sort of a dirty little secret, is E-Verify is a very easy-to-fool program,” Nowrasteh said.
He added that part of its appeal is that it doesn’t work.
“It allows politicians to talk tough about illegal immigration without actually imposing enormous costs on the U.S. economy,” Nowrasteh said.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Matthew J. Tragesser told CBS News in a statement that “E-Verify consistently receives high marks from users and maintains a nearly perfect accuracy rate, while requiring no special software or additional costs to employers.”
“In recent months, staff at USCIS have taken an aggressive approach in concert with the Social Security Administration to systematically block E-Verify from automatically accepting SSNs that are known to have been used fraudulently,” Tragesser went on. “E-Verify supports employers, but it does not take the place of their legal responsibility to ensure employee-presented documentation reasonably appears to be genuine and relates to the person presenting it.”
