Omaha, Nebraska \u2014 Gary Rohwer built his QuickSteak empire at a meat processing center in Omaha, Nebraska.<\/p>\n
But then, a tactical team of federal agents raided his facility on June 10, and more than 70 of his assembly line employees were arrested by Homeland Security Investigations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He showed CBS News an old company photo, disclosing that about half of the employees in that photo were swept up in the raid.<\/p>\n
“Oh my God, half of them,” Rohwer said. “It makes me sad, it really does, because these guys made us successful.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rohwer said he put his faith in E-Verify \u2014 the federal system used by more than 1 million employers each year, and which is mandatory in 10 states and by most federal contractors \u2014 to confirm the employment eligibility of would-be hires.<\/p>\n
“We did everything right, but yet we got penalized big, I mean, big-time,” Rohwer said.<\/p>\n
The government tells employers like Rohwer that E-Verify provides “peace of mind.”<\/p>\n
To green-light employees, the system matches documents, such as licenses and Social Security cards, to a U.S. government database of eligible workers. But it vets paperwork, not people.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Experts say the E-Verify system is broken, not only exposing employers like Rohwer to raids, but also increasing an all too common crime: identity theft.<\/p>\n
“This is a nationwide problem,” Elhrick Cerdan, assistant special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations Omaha, who led the investigation into Gary’s QuickSteak, told CBS News.<\/p>\n
Cerdan called Rohwer and his business victims.<\/p>\n
“This was in fact a targeted criminal investigation to rescue over a hundred victims of stolen entities,” Cerdan said, emphasizing that this was a criminal investigation, not civil immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n
“Everybody is the victim of this broken system,” Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies for the Libertarian Cato Institute, told CBS News.<\/p>\n
Nowrasteh called E-Verify a “wink-and-nod” system.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The thing that experts know that is sort of a dirty little secret, is E-Verify is a very easy-to-fool program,” Nowrasteh said.<\/p>\n
He added that part of its appeal is that it doesn’t work.<\/p>\n
“It allows politicians to talk tough about illegal immigration without actually imposing enormous costs on the U.S. economy,” Nowrasteh said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Matthew J. Tragesser told CBS News in a statement that “E-Verify consistently receives high marks from users and maintains a nearly perfect accuracy rate, while requiring no special software or additional costs to employers.”<\/p>\n
“In recent months, staff at USCIS have taken an aggressive approach in concert with the Social Security Administration to systematically block E-Verify from automatically accepting SSNs that are known to have been used fraudulently,” Tragesser went on. “E-Verify supports employers, but it does not take the place of their legal responsibility to ensure employee-presented documentation reasonably appears to be genuine and relates to the person presenting it.”<\/p>\n
\n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n