The Des Moines Public Schools board announced Friday it intends to pursue legal action against a consulting firm it says it hired in 2023 to conduct a search for a new superintendent, claiming the firm failed to "properly vet candidates" after the district's now-former superintendent was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents last week.Federal authorities said the superintendent, Ian Roberts, is not in the U.S. legally and has not had any work authorization in the U.S. since 2020. He had served as the superintendent of the Des Moines school district since July 2023 until his resignation this week following his detainment.
This is bizarre. Every employer of mine since 9/11 has required proof of citizenship or other legal employable status. So Des Moines School District did not? How many other employees slipped through the cracks?
I've had antidiscrimination training in several states as a state employee, in which it was emphasized that if you are involved in hiring you:
ReplyDelete• are required to accept 'facially-valid' documents from the I-9 acceptable-documents-list without further inquiry.
• and that it's super easy to step over the line of national origin or ethic discrimination in that scenario.
• (With the subtext that one shouldn't look too closely at such documents.)
Quoting from the New York Times:
"Ms. Norris said Dr. Roberts claimed on an I-9 form that he was an American citizen and that he provided a Social Security card and driver’s license. Some noncitizens have authentic Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, and other records suggest that Dr. Roberts had both."
I would have thought that his authentic social-security-card from one of the periods when he was legally present with work authorization would have a ""VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION" notice.
But such cards can be (and frequently are) counterfeited by persons not legally present in the U.S.–– the security features of valid SSN cards aren't widely known and were not used for still-valid pre-1983 cards.
I suspect that if E-Verify wasn't such a royal pain-in-the-neck for HR and IT workload, more employers use it.