Famed NYC bakery's immigrant workers defy Trump
Source: Associated Press
Verena Dobnik, Associated Press
Updated 5:31 pm, Saturday, April 8, 2017
NEW YORK (AP) — Immigrant workers at a famed New York bakery who are threatened with being fired if they don't produce legal work papers defied the government outside President Donald Trump's Manhattan home on Saturday.
Thirty-one employees of the Tom Cat Bakery also could be deported if they don't prove by April 21 that they're in the country legally.
The mostly Spanish-speaking workers and about 100 supporters rallied outside Trump Tower to protest what they called the Trump administration's "bullying."
Tom Cat managers summoned the workers one by one last month to tell them that the Department of Homeland Securitywas investigating the company, and they would be fired if they could not provide the documents, according to Daniel Gross, executive director of Brandworkers, a nonprofit that defends food manufacturing workers' rights.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Famed-NYC-bakery-s-immigrant-workers-defy-Trump-11059962.php
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I can read Spanish and French much better than I can understand either spoken, especially by fluent native speakers. But in kitchens I learned key phrases FAST. 
It was deemed a good and great thing.
I had to ask employees whose parents and grandparents I knew, whose grandparents were born in the US to US-born citizens, for their papers. Or tell my boss they weren't eligible to continue working.
One way of looking at the claims in the article is that the employees are ignorant of the law. Somebody should tell them the law instead of defending their ignorance in that case.
Another way of looking at the claims is that non-citizen employees aren't to be subject to the same onerous restrictions that citizens are. This is backwards, but not unheard of in my experience.
A third way is to claim that anybody in the US should be able to work. To which my response would be that the current system is inherently discriminatory--the poor of undocumented workers doesn't look like the world, and therefore the immigration procedures in place discriminate against Africans and Asians of all types. The response would be to charter planes to cities in Asia and Africa and ask who would like to illegally immigrate to the US. Must be fair about this. /snark off
The usual non-permissive (D) reaction to deportation was to say we should target the employers. They hire undocumented workers, they break the law, they provide a moral hazard, so punish them. Not the workers. This 1986 law was intended to do just that. Remove the moral hazard, punish employers. However, as soon as the law is actually used in a restrictive way a lot of its supporters flip-flop.
It's a tough law to use for this, though, because of court decisions. Take one case. I had the documents for a variety of people. Including Gertrude Halvorsen (or some such name), an 18-year-old Latina who knew no English but whose ID said she was 64 and whose SSN said she applied for it in Kansas decades earlier. Then one day Gertrude (usually called "Maria"
came in and said she had different idea. Now she was Mabel Brandfort, 45, with blonde hair on her driver's license ("I dyed it" and with a different SSN. Now, the IDs were obviously fake. However, court precedent said that if I asked anybody to justify their ID by providing substantiation or alternative documentation I had to ask that of everybody. "Suspicion" could too easy be language or skin color, the courts found, and so any investigation had to be "even handed", however absurd, lest it appear to carry the taint of racism.
The only "out" was that the SSA runs checks on SSNs from time to time. Does the name/SSN match up, is the SSN used in multiple places, is it valid. At the time I stopped doing I-9 verification and the books this was advisory, to let employees make sure they got credit for their income and things were clear for when they applied for retirement benefits.
