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WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has stopped using fake health and safety meetings at job workshops to snag illegal immigrants.

Marcy Forman, director of the Homeland Security Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division, said in a letter to the United Food and Commercial Workers union that it had stopped using the health and safety sting operations for rounding up illegal immigrants.

ICE arrested 49 illegal immigrant workers at North Carolina’s Seymour Johnson Air Force Base last summer by luring them with a flier to what was advertised as a mandatory Occupational Safety and Health Administration meeting.

Those arrested were contract workers and largely laborers, such as carpenters, with no access to military files.

"The use of the OSHA ruse by ICE agents in North Carolina at the Air Force Base was not coordinated with OSHA," Dean Boyd, an ICE spokesman, said Wednesday. "It was a mistake and should not have happened. ICE has since taken corrective action to ensure it doesn’t happen again."

The sting drew immediate criticism from unions, immigration advocates and North Carolina’s Occupational Safety and Health Division. Neither the state agency nor federal OSHA officials were involved in the sting.

OSHA "is the agency charged with keeping people safe on the job," said Jill Cashen, spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers union. "To use it as a trap is outrageous and undermines safety on the job."

The union made the March 17 letter from Forman public as the Senate plunged into a debate over tightening borders and fining employers who hire undocumented immigrants. (more…)

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