Federal officials have carried out raids on 14 7-Eleven stores in New York and Virginia, arresting nine owners and managers and seizing property, including five homes, in one of the biggest immigration busts in history. Prosecutors in New York charged the franchises on Monday with running what they called a "modern-day plantation system" in which more than 50 undocumented immigrants worked for 100 hours a week but paid for only a fraction of that time and forced to live in boarding houses where they paid rent to store operators. Authorities from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security say that the stores, which were licensed by 7-Eleven to use company buildings, trademarks, and Slurpee and hot dog machines, gave workers identities stolen from American citizens, including deceased people and children.
According to an anonymous source who spoke to the New York Times, investigators have set their sights on at least another 40 7-Eleven stores across the East Coast, with an expected $30 million in forfeitures.
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The New York Times reports authorities as saying that store managers were able to escape notice in some cases for over a decade because the parent company, 7-Eleven Inc., did not have proper safeguards in place to protect its payroll system from employee fraud - two immigrant employees, one in New York and one in Virginia, used the same Social Security number to get paid.
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Loretta E. Lynch, the US attorney in Brooklyn, whose office helped investigate the case, told the paper that the company put forth "little to no effort to ensure the integrity of their payroll system."
"From their 7-Eleven stores the defendants dispensed wire fraud and identity theft, along with Slurpees and hot dogs," said Lynch. "In bedroom communities across Long Island and Virginia, the defendants not only systematically employed illegal immigrants but concealed their crimes by raiding the cradle and grave to steal the identify of children and even the dead." She added that the defendants "ruthlessly exploited their immigrant employees" in such a way that amounted to "a modern-day plantation system."
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One case was brought against Farrukh and Bushra Baig, a married couple and American citizens from Pakistan. The Baigs owned and managed 12 stores in New York and Virginia along with two of Farrukh's brothers Zahid and Shannawaz, and associates Malik Yousaf, Tariq Rana and Ramon Nanas, who were all also charged. Another case was brought against two brothers with stores in Suffolk County, New York: Ahzar Zia, a US citizen from Pakistan, and his brother Ummar Uppal, who authorities said did not have authorization to be in the US. In both cases, investigators said the families recruited workers from their own ethnic communities in Pakistan and the Philippines.
Scott Matter, a spokesman for the convenience store company, which with 7,600 locations in the United States alone is one of the largest such companies in the world, said in a statement that 7-Eleven was cooperating with authorities and that it would "take aggressive actions to audit the employment status of all its franchisees' employees".
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