7-Eleven raids, More than a dozen 7-Eleven franchises took in more than $180 million in revenue by running a “modern-day plantation system,” prosecutors in New York charged on Monday, built on the unpaid labor of dozens of illegal immigrants hired using sham Social Security numbers.
Federal authorities seized 14 7-Eleven stores on Long Island and in
Virginia, arresting nine owners and managers, and seized property,
including five homes. They are investigating 40 other 7-Eleven
franchises in New York City and elsewhere in one of the largest criminal
immigrant employment investigations ever conducted by the Justice and
Homeland Security Departments, officials said.
Through the scheme, the defendants, who as franchisees for the parent
company were licensed to use 7-Eleven buildings, trademarks and Slurpee
and hot dog machines, recruited more than 50 illegal immigrants and gave
them identities stolen from American citizens, including children and
dead people.
The employees worked for 100 hours a week but were paid for a fraction
of that time, and were forced to live in substandard housing owned by
the operators of the convenience stores, the authorities said.
The store managers escaped notice, some for more than a decade, because
the national company, 7-Eleven Inc., which has more than 7,600 stores in
the United States, did not have safeguards in place to protect its
payroll system from employee fraud, the authorities said. For example,
two immigrant employees, one in New York and one in Virginia, used the
same Social Security number to get paid.
There was “little to no effort to insure the integrity of their payroll
system,” said Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney in Brooklyn,
whose office helped investigate the case.
A spokesman for 7-Eleven Inc., Scott Matter, said in a statement that
the company would “take aggressive actions to audit the employment
status of all its franchisees’ employees” and was cooperating with
federal authorities. The company, based in Dallas, is one of the largest
operators of convenience stores in the world.
The raids come as Congress is debating a major overhaul of the
immigration system, and Obama administration officials have been called
upon to defend their record on enforcement against illegal immigration
to convince skeptical lawmakers, many of them Republicans, that the
nation is ready to grant legal status to undocumented immigrants.
Under the Obama administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has
moved away from high-profile workplace raids in which dozens of workers
in the country illegally were rounded up for deportation. Instead,
agents from ICE, as the agency is known, have relied on audits of
employers’ hiring records to detect illegal immigrant workers.
The audits were low profile but often very effective at forcing illegal immigrants to leave their jobs.
Federal immigration officials said the wage theft and other abuses of
the workers in the 7-Eleven case were the type of violation they now
treat as a priority. Vincent Picard, an ICE spokesman, said the timing
of the arrests was not related to the debate in Washington.
The case began two years ago when a 7-Eleven employee approached the New
York State Police about not being paid for his work. Another worker
later contacted the Suffolk County police.
The investigation led to two families and their associates with roots in
Pakistan and the Philippines, who recruited from their own ethnic
communities.
Farrukh and Bushra Baig, a married couple and American citizens from
Pakistan who live on Long Island, owned and managed 12 stores in New
York and Virginia along with Mr. Baig’s brothers, Zahid and Shannawaz,
and his associates, Malik Yousaf, Tariq Rana and Ramon Nanas. All have
been charged.
A separate case was brought against two brothers, Ahzar Zia, a citizen
of the United States and Pakistan, and Ummar Uppal, who the authorities
said was an illegal immigrant. They own and control two stores in
Suffolk County.
7-Eleven raids news via nytimes Tolong Share ya ^^
