More than 100 workers at an Ohio gardening and landscaping company were arrested Tuesday when about 200 federal officers descended on the business and carried out one of the largest workplace immigration raids in recent years.
Government agents take a suspect into custody during an immigration sting at Corso's Flower and Garden Center, Tuesday, June 5, 2018, in Castalia, Ohio. The operation is one of the largest against employers in recent years on allegations of violating immigration laws. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
The operation was part of the White House's increasing focus on businesses that hire people in the country illegally amid a broad range of immigration crackdowns under President Donald Trump that include stepped-up deportations, targeting of sanctuary cities and zero-tolerance border policies.
The 114 arrests occurred at two locations of Corso's Flower & Garden Center, one in Sandusky, a resort city on Lake Erie, and another in nearby Castalia. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it expected criminal charges including identity theft and tax evasion.
No criminal charges were filed against the company, but the employer is under investigation, authorities said. Two locations were searched, and Khaalid Walls, an agency spokesman, said "a large volume of business documents" were seized.
The operation drew criticism over its heavy show of force that involved aircraft surveillance and a large contingent of federal agents to round up workers at a family business. It also highlights a tightrope President Donald Trump's administration is walking as it seeks to please immigration hawks but risks alienating business-friendly Republicans struggling to find enough workers in a tight job market.
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Government agents stand guard alongside apprehended suspects during an immigration sting at Corso's Flower and Garden Center, Tuesday, June 5, 2018, in Castalia, Ohio. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
In April, agents made about 100 worker arrests at a meatpacking plant in rural Tennessee, another high-profile show of force reminiscent of President George W. Bush's administration. No criminal charges have been filed against the employer.
Tuesday's operation was carried out with quiet efficiency. At the Castalia facility — covered with trees, flowers and greenhouse tarps — no workers were seen running as about 100 law enforcement officials established a perimeter. A voice on a radio called attention to specific employees who might try to flee, but none did.
Corso's did not return a message seeking comment on the operation.
Corso's describes itself as a family-owned company that serves seven states with a 160,000-square-foot (15,000-square-meter) greenhouse and additional 200,000 square feet (19,000 square meters) to grow perennials. Its Sandusky facility is on the city's busiest road amid hotels and fast-food joints that cater to tourists who drive by in the summer on their way to Lake Erie and Cedar Point amusement park.
Securing such sprawling facilities typically involves an enormous law enforcement presence to secure the perimeters.
A government agent takes a suspect into custody during an immigration sting at Corso's Flower and Garden Center, Tuesday, June 5, 2018, in Castalia, Ohio. The operation is one of the largest against employers in recent years on allegations of violating immigration laws. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Josie Gonzalez, a Los Angeles attorney who represents businesses on immigration matters, questioned why the arrests couldn't have been made with fewer resources, perhaps by visiting worker homes based on addresses Corso's provided to authorities. She suspects the government wanted publicity.
"Government is overreaching and trying to make a big splash, instill fear in the business community and immigrant communities and make the headlines," she said. "It's a tremendous use of resources to accomplish that purpose."
The investigation into Corso's began in October 2017 when the U.S. Border Patrol arrested a woman who gave stolen identity documents to job applicants in the country illegally, said Steve Francis, head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations unit in Detroit.
The document vendor led investigators to the landscaping company, where they examined documents in its files for irregularities, Francis said. Some Social Security numbers belonged to dead people.
Of the 313 employees whose records were examined, 123 were found suspicious and targeted for arrest and criminal charges of identity theft and, in nearly all cases, tax evasion. Francis said the identity theft targeted U.S. citizens who had no idea their information was being used at the Ohio business.
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Government agents apprehend suspects during an immigration sting at Corso's Flower and Garden Center, Tuesday, June 5, 2018, in Castalia, Ohio. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
"We verified that a lot of U.S. persons were obviously unaware of this. It's caused them a lot of hardship," Francis said.
Immigration officials have sharply increased audits of companies to verify their employees are authorized to work in the country. There were 2,282 employer audits opened between Oct. 1 and May 4, nearly a 60 percent jump from the 1,360 audits opened between October 2016 and September 2017. Many of those reviews were launched after audits began at 100 7-Eleven franchises in 17 states in January.
WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Joe Biden showed off his putting during a campaign stop at a public golf course in Michigan last month, the moment was captured on TikTok.
Forced inside by a rainstorm, he competed with 13-year-old Hurley “HJ” Coleman IV to make putts on a practice mat. The Coleman family posted video of the proceedings on the app — complete with Biden holing out a putt and the teen knocking his own shot home in response, over the caption, “I had to sink the rebuttal.”
The network television cameras that normally follow the president were stuck outside.
Biden signed legislation Wednesday that could ban TikTok in the U.S. while his campaign has embraced the platform and tried to work with influencers. Already struggling to maintain his previous support from younger voters, the president is now facing criticism from some avid users of the app, which researchers have found is a primary news source for a third of Americans under the age of 30.
“There’s a core hypocrisy to the Biden administration supporting the TikTok ban while at the same time using TikTok for his campaign purposes,” said Kahlil Greene, who has more than 650,000 followers and is known on TikTok as the “Gen Z Historian.”
“I think it illustrates that he and his people know the power and necessity of TikTok.”
The Biden campaign defends its approach and rejects the idea that White House policy is contradicting its political efforts.
“We would be silly to write off any place where people are getting information about the president,” said Rob Flaherty, who ran the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy and now is deputy manager of Biden’s reelection campaign.
Flaherty said Biden's team forged relationships with TikTok influencers the 2020 election and that the platform has only gotten more influential since then, “growing as an internet search engine and driving narratives about the president.”
The Biden campaign says that an increasingly fragmented modern media environment requires it to meet voters where they are and that TikTok is one of many such places where would-be supporters see its content, in addition to platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
It has produced its own TikTok content, but also relied on everyday users who interact with the president. That includes a post from a family that ate fries and other fixings from the Cook Out fast food chain when Biden recently visited Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as Coleman’s putting video.
Opponents of TikTok say its ownership by Chinese company ByteDance gives Beijing a dangerous amount of influence over what narratives Americans see as well as potential access to U.S. user data. Chinese national-security laws allow the ruling Communist Party wide latitude over private business, though the U.S. has not made public evidence that the Chinese government has manipulated the app or forced ByteDance to do its bidding.
The law Biden signed Wednesday would force ByteDance to sell the app to a U.S. company within a year or face a national ban. ByteDance has argued the law violates the First Amendment and promised to sue.
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, now publicly opposes a TikTok ban after issuing an executive order while in office trying to ban the app if ByteDance didn’t sell it.
The White House doesn't have an official TikTok account and Biden banned the app on most government devices in December 2022. Yet the Biden campaign also officially joined TikTok on the night of this year's Super Bowl, as the president shunned a traditional gameday TV interview to instead spread a political message with the platform.
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki convened a virtual briefing in 2022 for more than two dozen of the app’s influencers to discuss the U.S. approach to Ukraine, a gathering later parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
There have been scores of other such events, including an influencer party at the White House last Christmas and a State of the Union watch party in March. During Biden’s recent, $26 million campaign fundraiser at New York’s Radio City Music Hall with former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, there was an influencer happy hour and an after-party where attendees interacted with Biden.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the legislation Biden signed “is not a ban. This is about our national security.” She added that the White House isn’t saying “that we do not want Americans to use TikTok."
TikTok has 170 million U.S. users and a study released last November by the Pew Research Center found that about a third of U.S. adults under 30 regularly got news from TikTok, compared to 14% of all adults.
Adults under 30 are more likely than U.S. adults overall to oppose a ban on the use of TikTok in the United States, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in January. Nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds are opposed, compared to 35% of U.S. adults.
About 2 in 10 U.S. adults said then they use TikTok at least once a day, including 44% of 18- to 29-year-olds. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 7% say they use TikTok “almost constantly” and an additional 28% are using it “several times a day.”
Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, is spending around $1 million this cycle to help fund more than 100 TikTok influencers who produce pro-Biden content ahead of November, and views those efforts as an extension of traditional organizing and communications initiatives.
Even if TikTok is eventually banned, most of its influencers are on other platforms that could continue to take their content, especially YouTube and Instagram, said Danielle Butterfield, Priorities USA’s executive director.
“TikTok users are online generally and that’s a lot of different places,” said Butterfield, who was also deputy director of digital advertising for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Biden, meanwhile, has seen his standing with young people decline. About one-third of adults under 30 approve of how he’s handling his job as president, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in March — a sharp drop from the roughly two-thirds approved when he first entered office.
Greene studied history at Yale, served as the school’s first Black student body president and graduated in 2022. He attended past White House events as an influencer, including a Juneteenth celebration and a West Wing event for the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping health care and green energy package, where he met both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
About a year ago, however, Greene says he began posting about Biden’s championing a sweeping 1994 crime law that activists have long said contributed to the mass incarceration of racial minorities. He also criticized Biden's current administration for what he called “a lack of specific policy made for Black Americans.”
Since then, while Greene continues to receive more general emails from the Biden administration, he said says he's no longer invited to more personal events while some “creators who fell in line, who are less critical” are still going.
Flaherty, Biden's deputy campaign manager, said the campaign has paid influencers in specific instances, like when their content has been used in ads, and that some content creators who work with the campaign have raised concerns about legislation forcing divestment. But he doesn't see it having a major Election Day impact.
“I think young voters aren’t going to vote on TikTok,” Flaherty said. “They are going to vote on issues, which are discussed on TikTok but they’re also discussed other places.”
Greene, however, said young voters' frustration with the Biden administration in other areas — particularly its handling of Israel-Hamas war — have combined with the TikTok divestment legislation to spell political problems for Biden.
“There's no ability for me to overstate how that exacerbates the outcry," he said, “and the dissatisfaction that people already have.”
Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.
Jennifer Gay, a TikTok content creator, sits outside the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, April 23, 2024, in Washington as Senators prepare to consider legislation that would force TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell the social media platform under the threat of a ban, a contentious move by U.S. lawmakers. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
FILE - A man carries a Free TikTok sign in front of the courthouse where the hush-money trial of Donald Trump got underway April 15, 2024, in New York. The House has passed legislation Saturday, April 20, to ban TikTok in the U.S. if its China-based owner doesn't sell its stake, sending it to the Senate as part of a larger package of bills that would send aid to Ukraine and Israel. House Republicans' decision to add the TikTok bill to the foreign aid package fast-tracked the legislation after it had stalled in the Senate. The aid bill is a priority for President Joe Biden that has broad congressional support. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File)
First lady Jill Biden and President Joe Biden greet riders at the Wounded Warrior Project's Soldier Ride on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
