Idaho County's Immigration Suit Rejected

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected an attempt by Canyon County to use federal organized crime laws to sue businesses that employ undocumented workers.

In the decision handed down Friday, a panel of three 9th Circuit judges ruled the county was unable to prove it suffered any harm as a result of businesses hiring undocumented workers.

The case began in 2005, when former Commissioner Robert Vasquez and current Commissioners Matt Beebe and David Ferdinand voted to have the county sue four businesses and a community leader, alleging the companies employed illegal workers who were running up the county's costs for schools, indigent medical care, jails and law enforcement. The four companies were accused of knowingly hiring hundreds of illegal immigrants, partly through agreements with worker recruiting companies.

It was the first time a government tried to use the federal Racketeering and Corrupt Organizations Act to demand damages from businesses for the costs of allegedly illegal employees. The RICO statutes have traditionally been used to prosecute organized crime.

The companies _ Swift Beef, Syngenta Seeds, Sorrento Lactalis and Harris Moran Seed _ and Albert Pacheco, the former director of the nonprofit Idaho Migrant Council, asked U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge to dismiss the lawsuit. Lodge agreed, ruling that Canyon County's claimed higher expenses for social services were simply the costs of being a government entity.

Syngenta Seeds, a division of Switzerland's Syngenta AG, is based in Golden Valley, Minn.; Sorrento Lactalis, a division of France's Groupe Lactalis, is based in Buffalo, N.Y.; Swift Beef Co., a division of Swift & Co., is based in Greeley, Colo.; and Harris Moran is based in Modesto, Calif.

The commissioners appealed to the 9th Circuit, where Judges William Canby Jr., A. Wallace Tashima and Consuelo Callahan upheld Lodge's ruling and went a bit further.

Besides being prohibited from suing to recoup the cost of being a government entity, Tashima wrote for the panel, Canyon County can't prove that undocumented workers were causing county expenses to increase.

"In fact, it is not clear how the companies' hiring of undocumented immigrants would increase demand for health care and law enforcement within Canyon County," Tashima wrote. "The proceedings required to evaluate the county's injury would be speculative in the extreme. ... The court would have to construct the alternative scenario of what would have occurred had the companies employed legally authorized workers, and determine how this might have affected the county's total population, and how these alternative workers might have differed from the undocumented workers in their consumption of county services, if at all."

Beebe and Ferdinand could not immediately be reached for comment. Angie Sillonis, the spokeswoman for the commissioners, said they haven't yet decided if they will ask the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the case. That decision will likely come within the week, she said.

"The other side may move for rehearing but if I were they I would not be optimistic of this panel changing it's mind," said Marie Yeates, the Houston attorney who represented Swift Beef in the lawsuit, said. "It's a very well-reasoned, thought-out opinion. We won on two different grounds, both of which are very sound."

Canyon County, on the Oregon border, is largely agricultural and many of its Latino residents work in that industry. Just over 20 percent of the county's 164,000-plus residents identify themselves as Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.