Photo System Unveiled to Catch Illegal Immigrant Workers

WASHINGTON — Businesses, facing a government crackdown on hiring illegal immigrants, now have one more tool to help them verify a worker's status.

The Citizenship and Immigration Services unveiled a system Tuesday that matches photographs from green cards and other immigrant work permits against a database of more than 14 million pictures.

If the photos match, the employer will know that the person is using his or her own card, not a stolen or doctored identification, federal officials said.

"We are very, very committed to the idea of workplace enforcement," said Emilio Gonzalez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). "If we have workplace enforcement, we can reduce pressure on our border. That allows the assets that we have on our border ... to catch bad people."

The photo system is part of a volunteer employment verification system known as E-Verify that compares employee information against millions of government records.

About 23,000 businesses across the country participate in the program and about 2,000 are signing up every month, Gonzalez said.

In addition, the Department of Homeland Security is working on regulations that would require all new federal contractors to use the E-Verify system. A draft of the new rules will likely be released early next year, said Gerri Ratliff, deputy associate director of the National Security and Records Verification Directorate at USCIS.

Ratliff, who demonstrated the photo match system for reporters, said it showed strong success in a pilot program where 93 percent of all new hires were instantly verified as "work authorized."

If an employee's photo doesn't match, the company has eight days to report the discrepancy to the Department of Homeland Security, which investigates within two days, she said.

The employee is given a letter, available in English and Spanish, that explains that the photo didn't match and details a process to contest the discrepancy.

In the pilot program, most of the mismatches resulted from problems with information from the Social Security Administration, such as a person not updating a change of name through marriage or a change of legal status, USCIS officials said.

Only about 5 percent of the inquiries resulted in people being ultimately rejected or never contesting the mismatch.

Ratliff said that USCIS is hoping to expand the E-verify program in the future to include access to photographs from drivers licenses in the 50 states, but that it would likely take federal legislation to accomplish that goal.

Businesses and civil rights groups have argued that the quality of government databases poses a problem for such programs.

A Department of Homeland Security effort to crack down on companies that ignore warning letters about employees with potentially fake Social Security numbers was put on hold earlier this year by a federal judge in part because of a lawsuit that raised such concerns.

The lawsuit, by the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, says the rule "would threaten jobs of U.S. citizens and other legally authorized workers simply because of errors in the government's inaccurate Social Security earnings databases."

On the Web:

Department of Homeland Security: www.dhs.gov

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: www.uscis.gov