Worksite Enforcement Plan Heads to DHS, Homan Says

A worksite enforcement plan built on mass Form I-9 audits is headed to the DHS secretary, Tom Homan says. Nothing is public yet, but his own descriptions show where employers would feel it first.

A worksite enforcement plan that would put employers’ Form I-9 records under far wider review is moving to the desk of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, White House border czar Tom Homan said on Oct. 19. Homan told Fox News that the plan “just cleared last week out of HSI,” the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and that he expects the secretary to see it “this week or next,” according to Breitbart News, which reported the interview. Latin Times also reported the remarks. DHS has not released the plan or commented on it.

The timing matters. Most of this year’s enforcement has centered on arresting individuals, under pressure to push ICE arrests toward 3,000 a day, and Mullin has signaled the same priority; on Sept. 25 he wrote on X that “ICE is not conducting worksite operations in Kansas,” Breitbart reported. A plan aimed at employers would move part of that pressure from workers to the companies that hire them, and its main tool would be paperwork rather than raids.

How Homan describes the worksite enforcement plan

The fullest public account comes from Homan himself. In a July 15 interview published by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors lower immigration levels, he said “it doesn’t take an 1811 special agent to do an I-9 inspection,” a reference to the federal job series for criminal investigators, and proposed to “hire a bunch of smart contractors who can batch I-9 inspections.” Leads, “whether it’s criminal or administrative,” would then go to HSI. He said the Justice Department sits in the planning meetings and that criminal worksite violations are “gonna be charged.” On Oct. 19 he added that people who use fraudulent IDs “to steal your Social Security numbers” will be prosecuted.

What an I-9 audit can cost

Most I-9 audits end in civil fines, not criminal charges, and the fines are counted form by form or worker by worker. These are the ranges in the penalty schedule DHS published in the Federal Register in January 2025:

Violation (8 U.S.C. 1324a)	Civil penalty range
Form I-9 paperwork violation	$288 to $2,861 per form
Knowingly hiring or continuing to employ unauthorized workers, first offense	$716 to $5,724 per worker
Second offense	$5,724 to $14,308 per worker
Third or later offense	$8,586 to $28,619 per worker

Source: DHS, Civil Monetary Penalty Adjustments for Inflation, Federal Register, Jan. 2, 2025; amounts apply to penalties assessed after that date.

Because paperwork penalties apply per form, a high-turnover employer can reach seven figures on errors alone. Employers that contest an ICE notice of intent to fine go before a Justice Department administrative law judge, as a construction company is now doing over 637 Forms I-9 and a proposed $1.63 million penalty.

Contractors would change the scale, and raise a legal question

The last time ICE made audits a priority, the number of I-9 audits it opened rose from 1,360 in fiscal 2017 to 5,981 in fiscal 2018, and worksite investigations from 1,691 to 6,848, according to ICE’s published figures. Agency staff did that work, and reading forms one at a time is the bottleneck, so handing review to contractors could lift the ceiling well past the 2018 level.

It also raises a question the plan’s text will have to answer. The I-9 regulation, 8 C.F.R. 274a.2(b)(2)(ii), gives employers at least three business days’ notice before an inspection and requires them to make forms available to officers of DHS, the Labor Department and the Justice Department. That points to a model in which federal officers still serve notices and collect records while contractors review them behind the scenes. Employers fighting a fine are likely to probe how much of the government’s case rests on contractor work.

Nothing binds employers yet. If adopted, the plan would open a second front alongside the Justice Department’s separate push on PERM recruitment, which produced Cloudera’s two-year green card sponsorship ban last week. The step that holds up under any version of the plan is the one an audit would test: an internal review of existing Forms I-9, with errors corrected, initialed and dated rather than backdated. The next markers are whether Mullin signs off, whether DHS releases the plan, and whether audits begin before or after the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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