<font color=green>Update</font color=green> Federal Judge Temporarily Stops No-Match Letter Rule

Landscape professionals who feared they may be tangled in trap of red tape upon potentially receiving social security “no-match” letters after the Department of Homeland Security announced its new immigration enforcement measures can breathe a sigh of relief, even if it’s just a temporary one.

In response to a suit filed by the AFL-CIO, the ACLU and other labor groups, a federal judge issued an order temporarily blocking the government from implementing the new DHS measures that rely on error-prone Social Security Administration records as a tool for immigration enforcement.

“It’s a stopgap measure for now,” said Tom Delaney, the Professional Landcare Network’s director of government affairs. “We’re just saying the government didn’t do their homework before they proposed this rule and they didn’t check the effect it would have on small business.” The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, of which PLANET and the American Nursery & Landscape Association are members, and the ANLA itself recently filed papers to join the case.

ANLA joined based on DHS's failure to comply with the requirements of the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA), which says government agencies must assess the impacts of new regulations on small businesses and seek less burdensome ways for small entities to comply.

The judge’s ruling also stopped the SSA from sending out no-match letters to an estimated 140,000 employers on Sept. 14. A formal court hearing on the permanent suspension of the DHS rules is set to take place Oct. 1.

Some groups are likely hoping that challenging DHS's new rules will delay enforcement until comprehensive immigration reform legislation is back on the table, Delaney said. However, he doesn't think the stoppage will last that long. "We're able to buy some time, but eventually the government is still going to be able to issue their no-match letters," he said.

The new rule makes the employer liable for failing to respond to no-match letters, although it’s common for discrepancies to occur because of innocent factors like typographical errors, name changes due to marriage or divorce and the use of multiple surnames, according to the ACLU. In fact, according to the Office of the Inspector General in SSA, 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies in SSA’s database – more than 70 percent – belong to native-born U.S. citizens, the ACLU said in a news release.

“This is a crucial and significant first step in challenging this rule, which would be a bureaucratic and costly nightmare for employers and many U.S. citizens and other legally authorized workers,” said Lucas Guttentag, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. 

Related link

Read the complaint: AFL-CIO v. Chertoff