States to Join Immigrant Worker Crackdown With E-Verify Bills

State legislation across the country to mandate that businesses use E-Verify threatens to intensify scrutiny on employers’ immigrant hiring, while making it tougher for some industries to find enough workers.

Lawmakers have considered bills this year in more than a dozen states from Florida to Oregon that would require companies to use the federal system to confirm job candidates are authorized to work in the US. Some bills propose new mandates while others expand existing requirements and increase noncompliance penalties.

Florida’s Republican-majority legislature is considering several versions of a bill to expand its E-Verify mandate, adding to a broader immigration enforcement law enacted in February that immigrant rights advocates have challenged as unconstitutional. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said in March that teenage workers could replace immigrant labor, as the state also considers relaxing limits on minors’ work hours.

Business groups, including those from sectors with large immigrant workforces such as agriculture and hospitality, have fought state and federal proposals to mandate E-Verify for years. But the renewed federal push to restrict immigration under the second Trump administration has revived states’ efforts.

“There’s some industries that it could have a substantial effect on, if newly hired employees couldn’t pass E-Verify,” said Bruce Buchanan, an attorney with Littler Mendelson PC based in Nashville, Tenn.

Industry impact may also be the reason proposals in Congress haven’t succeeded, Buchanan added, despite Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reintroducing bills to mandate E-Verify use repeatedly for more than a decade.

The US House passed an E-Verify mandate as part of its immigration policy overhaul in 2023, but the bill failed in the Senate. Grassley and seven other Senate Republicans introduced another E-Verify bill in March.

The potential expansion of E-Verify mandates is one small part of ramped-up immigration enforcement, including through workplace raids and audits. The Trump administration also announced plans to cancel temporary protected status for Venezuelan and Haitian refugees, ending work authorizations for potentially half a million workers if the administration defeats court challenges.

Businesses that employ immigrants “are in a state of panic,” wondering what will become of their workforce, said Ali Brodie, attorney at Fox Rothschild in Los Angeles.

“The floodgates haven’t opened in terms of I-9 audits and raids,” she said. But there’s “fear of what’s to come based on rhetoric.”

Existing Mandates

Businesses that contract with the federal government are required to use E-Verify, but it’s largely optional for other private-sector employers. Nine states, mostly Republican-led and in the South, require employers to use the system, with some exemptions for small or mid-size businesses.

E-Verify allows employers to confirm a worker’s authorization based on federal records from the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. It’s a second verification step that businesses can take after collecting identity and residency documents to fill out an I-9 form, which the federal government already requires for all employers.

Proposals pending this year in Idaho, Indiana, Montana, and Texas, among others, would newly mandate that employers use E-Verify.

A Utah bill to expand the state’s mandate to employers with five or more workers died in the House labor committee after agriculture and construction industry representatives testified against it. The state currently requires E-Verify use for employers with 150 or more workers.

New Hampshire lawmakers also killed a proposal to mandate E-Verify use, and similar bills died when the Kansas and Kentucky legislatures adjourned their 2025 sessions.

Immigration lawyer Sarah Hawk said she always assumed E-Verify would eventually become mandatory.

“I just hoped it would be coupled with some commonsense business immigration programs to help employers hire staff in a way that’s temporary and allows people to move back and forth” between their home country and the US, said Hawk, an attorney with Barnes & Thornburg LLP in Atlanta. “There’s a need for workers for our country to be able to thrive economically.”

Florida Bill

Less than 20% of US employers are enrolled to use E-Verify, but advocates for tighter enforcement including the Center for Immigration Studies have argued mandating its use would be a strong deterrent to illegal immigration. The Project 2025 policy agenda also called for making E-Verify mandatory.

Trump proposed requiring E-Verify early in his first administration. But he dropped it from his 2020 budget proposal and didn’t mention it in his January 2025 immigration executive order.

States like Florida with large immigrant worker populations have held particularly contentious debates on E-Verify.

Unauthorized immigrants “should not be working in our state to begin with,” said Florida state Rep. Berny Jacques (R), sponsor of HB 955, in a House subcommittee meeting where the bill won initial approval April 1. “This is just to make sure that they aren’t slipping through the cracks.”

Florida requires businesses with 25 or more employees to use E-Verify, but HB 955 would apply the standard to all employers. Other Florida bills would go further, such as increasing penalties for violations and applying the verification rules to companies hiring independent contractors—a category that workplace immigration attorneys said falls outside the scope of E-Verify’s intended use.

While acknowledging key Florida industries such as agriculture use immigrant labor, Jacques, who was born in Haiti, said immigrants can and often do find legal pathways to live and work in the state, “present company included.”

Businesses and workers trying to get proper approvals face a broken immigration system where visa renewals are limited, plus a political climate in which immigrants are unfairly branded as dangerous criminals, said state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D), who opposed the bill in subcommittee.

“We don’t have the workforce to support Florida’s growing population in ag, in tourism, in health care,” she said. “We are very reliant on immigrant labor.”