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A federal judge last week ruled that the Bush administration may not proceed with a planned crackdown on U.S. firms that hire illegal immigrants, warning of what could be a "staggering" impact on law-abiding workers and companies. The proposal is to penalize companies who continue to employ workers whose Social Security information doesn't fit that in government files. The decision was hailed at a news conference Friday in front of the federal building in Hartford, with Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut, among the speakers. Read his remarks ==>> Earlier in the week, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco said the challengers had raised serious questions about the legality of the administration's plan to mail Social Security "no-match" letters to 140,000 U.S. employers, pressuring them to fire more than 8 million workers whose data doesn't jibe with what the government has on file. The government's plan, to start this fall, was to warn employers that they must resolve questions about their employees' identities or fire them within 90 days. If they did not, employers could face fines or even criminal prosecutions for violations of a federal law that bars employers from knowingly employing illegal workers. The plaintiffs convinced the judge that the Social Security Administration database has so many errors, found in more than 9 million individual's records in one year, 2003, ranging from typographical errors to name changes after marriage, for instance. They argued that using the database would discriminate against tens of thousands of legal workers, including native-born and naturalized U.S. citizens, and cause sweeping workforce disruptions that would burden companies. Judge Breyer also said the government may have ignored a 1980 law, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, that it must to calculate the cost of imposing new regulations that significantly burden small-business owners. He granted a preliminary injunction against the president's plan. "There can be no doubt," he wrote, "that the effects of the rule's implementation will be severe," causing "irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers."
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