The Trump administration is touting an immigration crackdown that includes putting shackled immigrants on U.S. military planes, expanding agents’ arrests of people here illegally and abandoning programs that gave some permission to stay.

One tool that’s conspicuously absent from President Donald Trump’s efforts to reduce illegal immigration: Going after the businesses that hire workers who are in the U.S. illegally.

A nearly 30-year-old government system called E-Verify makes it easy to check if potential employees can legally work in the U.S.

The program has had high-profile backers. Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for Trump’s second term, called for it to be mandatory.

Yet it remains largely voluntary and rarely enforced. Trump’s own hotels and golf courses were slow to adopt E-Verify.

The debate over workplace enforcement is, in many ways, a reflection of America’s complex views on immigration, its economic dependence on immigrant labor and a quietly bubbling Republican divide.

“There are only so many people you can round up and deport” who are criminals or fugitives, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for reduced immigration and has close ties to the Trump administration. “To make a deep reduction in the illegal population it has to be done at least in part through workplace enforcement.”

Trump’s order declaring a national emergency at the southern border used dark terms, describing a country in chaos due to an immigrant “invasion” He has linked illegal immigration to violent crime and claimed countries are emptying prisons, mental institutions and “insane asylums” to send dangerous people to the U.S.

The reality is often far more prosaic. Many immigrants living here illegally areworking. They’re fixing roofs and cars, putting up drywall and running hotels. They’re making sure shoppers have lettuce, milk and apples.