Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in the Bloomberg Law Daily Labor Report, in “USCIS Quietly Ends Program to Shield Workers Reporting Abuse,” by Elias Schisgall. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
US Citizenship and Immigration Services is sunsetting a Biden-era program designed to encourage undocumented workers to speak out on labor violations, signaling the Trump administration won’t prioritize that aspect of enforcement even as it ramps up workplace raids.
The Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement program was among the raft of policies and programs overturned in the days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to a person familiar with the matter. In the months since, the Department of Homeland Security subagency responsible for adjudicating immigration benefits stopped processing applications, the person said.
Under DALE, undocumented workers involved in a state or federal labor investigation could apply to USCIS for four years of deferred action from deportation and temporary work authorization. But the protection is discretionary, and already the agency has terminated the status of a handful of workers at the request of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the person, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the program.
The cancellation of DALE occurred without much fanfare. USCIS archived a webpage with information about the program on Jan. 24, and released draft revisions in May for a form for deferred immigration action that removed an option for “Labor Investigation-Based” protection.
Ending the program is unlikely to make a meaningful impact on the administration’s deportation goals, as only about 7,700 people had been granted DALE status as of October 2024, according to a January statement from the Biden DHS to media outlets. That’s a tiny fraction of the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the US, according to DHS statistics, but the change may hinder labor enforcement against employers of those workers, who are often vulnerable to bad actors due to their undocumented status. …
Enforcement Challenges
The apparent end of DALE means that undocumented workers will feel less emboldened to speak out about workplace abuses, posing a challenge for state and federal agencies tasked with enforcing labor laws, observers said. …
Paul DeCamp, who led the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division during the George W. Bush administration, said that while the DALE rollback will have “some degree of a reduction” in worker complaints and DOL enforcement, the agency has tools to continue carrying out its mission. He said the DOL should encourage workers to share information with the agency through advocacy or faith-based groups or via anonymous channels.
“There will always be some fear,” DeCamp, now an attorney at Epstein Becker & Green P.C., said. “But I think the tried and true method that workers have used quite a bit in recent years is to work through intermediaries to present information to the department. For workers who are at great risk of being deported, that may be the best we can do in the current administration.”
