NEW YORK TIMES The Chelsea Art Museum in New York was one of the high-profile businesses to get fined by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have decided that they are no longer releasing information to the public on companies fined for hiring illegal immigrants.

Despite talking tough about cracking down on employers who break federal immigration laws, ICE is withholding the names and other identifying information about the companies it penalizes, essentially protecting them from public scrutiny.

Richard Rocha, an ICE spokesman, said ICE attorneys have advised them not to disclose information about the fines because of a pending case before the Supreme Court that looks at whether corporations have a right to “personal privacy.”

We’d make the argument, however, that there is a public interest in learning which companies were fined. We have a copy of the list of companies hit with civil fines from 2007 through mid-July and, which was converted into a database and published here on the blog. (To view this database, click on the “continue reading” this post link at the bottom.)

For example, Westex Well Services, a company headed up by Texas Tech University Regent Mickey Long, paid $60,984 to immigration officials earlier this summer. (That’s the 16th largest fine nationally and the third-largest in Texas since 2007.)

Long was appointed to his regent position by Gov. Rick Perry in February 2009. He has contributed $135,000 to Perry’s campaign over the years and is listed as his co-chair for fundraising based out of Midland. (Long did not return phone calls to his home or business seeking comment.)

There are some big names on this list of 220 companies: Koch Food of Cincinnati, LLC ($536,046), Johnson Dairy LLC out of Colorado ($100,800), and American Rice Inc. of Texas ($5,486).



The businesses ranged from remote egg and cat fish farms in the South to New York’s Chelsea Art Museum, which was hit with a $9,770 fine in December 2009.

In Texas, ICE busted a Mr. Gatti’s Pizza Store to the tune of $18,279, but we can’t tell which location from these records.

We recently were denied a request for an updated list of companies ICE has fined through the end of August.

As part of a separate Freedom of Information Act request, we received some internal records in August on the government’s new audit enforcement initiative that showed the government was failing to penalize some companies that had large numbers or percentages of workers with suspect documents. See that story here.

It seems that the central question in all of this is whether you all think this information should be made public, or if you think ICE is right to err on the side of protecting companies’ “personal privacy”?

— Susan Carroll