Juan Carlos Cerda has lived in the United States since he was three. He grew up in Dallas, graduated from Yale University and now serves as the Texas state director for the American Business Immigration Coalition (ABIC), a bipartisan group of more than 2,000 CEOs and employers pushing for immigration reform. He is also a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, which means his work authorization must be renewed every two years.

At ISSA VEO in Dallas, Cerda told attendees he filed more than two months before his DACA expiration date, the usual lead time for an application that typically takes two to three months. The approval still took more than six months. His work authorization lapsed, his employer placed him on unpaid leave, and he drew down his savings to get through it. Asking dozens of congressional offices to investigate his case did not speed things up. Neither did help from Fort Worth’s mayor, who contacted his U.S. senators on his behalf.

“You can have connections with lawmakers … but that may not be enough,” Cerda said. “This is a systemic issue.”

For the cleaning industry, the issue hits close to home. Cerda, the son of a former maintenance worker, noted that immigrants fill a large share of cleaning and maintenance jobs. Labor studies put the immigrant share of janitors and building cleaners at roughly 28% to 41%, depending on the data set and region, with an even higher share among maids and housekeepers.

The I-9 turns 40 under heavy scrutiny

Jacob Monty, managing partner of Houston-based Monty & Ramirez LLP, has spent more than two decades advising employers with large Hispanic workforces, including companies in facility maintenance and construction. His firm handles I-9 audits for clients, and he said the form that has governed hiring since 1986 still trips up employers.

“It looks simple. It’s only one page, but it causes a lot of confusion,” Monty said.

Monty estimated that ICE will conduct about 8,000 employer audits in the federal fiscal year ending Sept. 30. The agency has not published a full-year count, though worksite enforcement has risen sharply since 2025. ICE also updated its I-9 inspection guidance on March 16, 2026, reclassifying several errors once treated as technical into substantive violations that can bring fines without a chance to correct them.

Tips drive much of that activity, according to Monty. Disgruntled former employees and rival companies are calling in employers, he said, and ICE’s tip line is now staffed around the clock. When his firm asks clients what happened before an audit notice arrived, the answer almost always involves a termination or a confrontation with an unhappy worker. One employer recently described an employee who claimed 104 hours of unrecorded pay and refused to provide any backup. Her message, as Monty relayed it: “Send me the money or I’m going to call ICE.”

Another common trigger starts with a phone call that payroll staff may ignore. A worker’s wages get reported under a Social Security number that belongs to someone else, often a person in another state who suddenly faces questions about income she never earned and benefits she could lose. If nobody at the company returns her call, Monty said, she may file a police report, and that complaint can grow into a full federal investigation. His advice was to treat those calls as urgent and resolve them quickly.

Why good fakes put employers in a bind

Monty showed examples of obviously bad documents, such as a single card with two people in the photo and foreign identity cards like the Mexican matrícula consular, which is not an acceptable Form I-9 document. The harder problem is that most counterfeit documents circulating in Texas are good enough to fool trained eyes, including a retired ICE agent who works with his firm.

Employers cannot solve that problem by demanding specific paperwork. Under federal law, the employee chooses which acceptable documents to present from the lists on the form. An employer that rejects documents that reasonably appear genuine, or insists on a particular one, risks a discrimination charge from the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The same tension shows up in everyday conversations. An employee asking a supervisor about immigration may be worried about an undocumented spouse or parent rather than their own status, and Monty cautioned managers against drawing conclusions. At the same time, a manager who learns that a worker’s I-9 information is false has to act on it.

“Remember, you just can’t take off your boss hat or your HR hat. You always wear that hat,” Monty said.

He suggested a direct response for workers who want to confide in a supervisor: the company is there for them, but anything they share that contradicts what is on their I-9 will have to be acted on. Some workers are also coming forward under new names after securing a provisional waiver. In that situation, Monty said, the employer should complete a new Form I-9 under the worker’s true identity and keep it with the original, ideally with guidance from counsel.

Work permits are harder to keep

Since Oct. 30, 2025, renewal applications for employment authorization documents no longer receive the automatic extension of up to 540 days that used to cover many workers while USCIS processed their cases. A slow renewal now means a gap in work authorization. DACA work permits, which many HR teams know by the category code C33, never qualified for that extension, so a delayed DACA renewal leaves the employee unable to work until the new card arrives.

Monty described a client with a DACA recipient who manages more than 30 stores and is responsible for more than $100 million in profit and loss. When the manager’s renewal stalled past his expiration date, HR advised that the law required his termination. The company kept him on anyway. Monty acknowledged the decision was technically improper and exposed the company to risk. His point was that the renewal was all but certain to be approved; it simply was not approved in time.

Enforcement has also grown less forgiving for people already living here. In September 2025 the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled in Matter of Yajure Hurtado that people who entered the country without inspection are not eligible for release on bond, regardless of how long they have lived in the United States. Federal courts have split on that interpretation, and the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, has upheld it.

Monty and Cerda both worked on the case of Omar Salazar, a Dallas entrepreneur in the artificial intelligence field and a Southern Methodist University graduate who was brought to the United States as a child and missed DACA eligibility by a matter of months. Lubbock police stopped him in August 2025 for an improper lane change while he was visiting his girlfriend. He had no valid driver’s license, and officers called ICE. Salazar had no criminal record. He married his girlfriend, a U.S. citizen, while in detention. After roughly seven months in custody, an immigration judge found he had not shown the “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to his wife that the law requires and granted him voluntary departure to Mexico.

There is no line to wait in

“People say, just get in line. The problem is, there is no line,” Cerda said.

Monty hears the same misunderstanding from employers who call his office every week wanting to fix a valued employee’s status, often offering to pay whatever it takes. One offered $50,000 for a superintendent the company considered indispensable. Under the immigration law Congress passed in 1996, a person who entered without inspection and has been here unlawfully for more than a year triggers a 10-year bar on returning once they leave the country, and leaving is usually a required step toward a green card. A waiver exists for applicants who can prove extreme hardship to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse or parent, but an employer cannot sponsor its way around the bar. Humanitarian options, such as the U visa for certain crime victims, reach very few workers.

That dead end has opened the door to fraud. Monty warned about notarios, who in Latin America can function much like attorneys but in the United States have no authority to give legal advice, charging thousands of dollars for results they cannot deliver. He also pointed to Alexandra Lozano, a Washington state immigration attorney who permanently surrendered her law license in May amid allegations that her firm filed fabricated abuse and trafficking claims in humanitarian visa cases. Lozano has denied wrongdoing.

TPS holders are running out of time

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and humanitarian parole have narrowed as well. Monty estimated that the loss of parole and TPS for workers from countries including Venezuela and Honduras has turned roughly 1.6 to 1.7 million previously authorized workers into undocumented ones, deepening a labor shortage that was already severe in 2025.

El Salvador’s TPS designation, in place since 2001, was scheduled to end Sept. 9, 2026. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not publish a decision by the statutory deadline, and under the TPS law a designation that is not terminated on time extends automatically for at least six months, which would carry it to about March 9, 2027. DHS has not confirmed that date and has said only that an announcement will come at the appropriate time. Monty credited ABIC’s advocacy for the reprieve and noted that USCIS was still treating Salvadoran TPS protections as valid.

The climate on the ground has grown tense. Monty represents the widow of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who spent roughly three decades building homes in the Houston area and was fatally shot by an ICE officer during a vehicle stop on July 7. DHS has said Salgado Araujo was not the person agents were looking for and that he tried to ram officers, an account his family disputes. A Harris County grand jury is reviewing the case. Monty questioned whether a driver approached by masked officers would recognize them as ICE at all, rather than as would-be carjackers.

He added that one deportation officer described the strategy to him as making conditions bleak enough that people leave on their own. Monty doubts that long-settled workers will simply pack up and go.

Make the economic case to lawmakers

Cerda’s message to employers was to take what they are seeing inside their companies to elected officials and frame it around the economy.

“Every American listens to the same radio station, WIIFM. What’s in it for me?” Cerda said.

Monty agreed. “Trying to argue about the humanity of it is not that effective,” he said. “The best approach is to talk about how this affects the economy.”

ABIC has worked with administrations of both parties. During President Donald Trump’s first term, the coalition lobbied to close a gap that left U.S. citizens married to undocumented immigrants out of pandemic stimulus payments; Congress extended the payments to those mixed-status households in late 2020. Under President Joe Biden, ABIC backed Keeping Families Together, a parole process that could have helped roughly 500,000 undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens seek green cards without leaving the country. Texas and 15 other states sued, and a federal judge in Tyler, Texas, struck the program down in November 2024.

Cerda said ABIC-commissioned polling shows 78% of Republican voters support work authorization for long-term, law-abiding immigrants, and a separate survey of roughly 1,300 Hispanic voters in battleground states found strong support for candidates who back legal status alongside border security. The coalition has brought more than 150 employers to Washington, D.C., to meet with more than 300 lawmakers and administration officials. Cerda said President Trump has repeatedly voiced support, in concept, for work permits for law-abiding immigrants, and he named White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller as the biggest obstacle to getting there.

Two bills worth watching

The Dignity Act (H.R. 4393), introduced in July 2025 by Reps. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), pairs border security with a seven-year Dignity Program for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the country continuously since Dec. 31, 2020. Participants would need to pass a criminal background check and pay back taxes along with $7,000 in restitution over the life of the program. Those who finish could apply for a renewable legal status that allows them to live and work here but does not lead to citizenship. Restitution payments would go to an American Worker Fund for training U.S. workers.

The bill also includes a Dream Act provision and would phase in mandatory E-Verify for every employer, a detail worth noting for any company not already using the system. It has roughly 40 cosponsors split almost evenly between the parties, though House leadership has not brought it to a vote.

The American Dream and Promise Act would create an earned path to permanent residence for Dreamers and eligible TPS holders. Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) filed a discharge petition on July 20, 2026, to force a House floor vote without leadership’s support. As of early September, the petition had 217 of the 218 signatures it needs, and Cerda noted that the final signature has to come from a Republican. He expects renewed pressure when Congress returns after the November elections.

Small conversations can move policy

Cerda pointed to home builders in the Rio Grande Valley as evidence that employers can make a difference. After heavy enforcement activity in the region, members of the South Texas Builders Association reported construction activity down 30% to 40% and a steep drop in construction lending. Builders took those numbers, along with voter polling, to lawmakers including Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas), a Dignity Act cosponsor, and Cerda said the effort reached House Speaker Mike Johnson. By his account, raids on Valley construction sites fell from about five a day to none in March 2026. The relief was temporary. By midsummer, builders were again reporting enforcement, with much of it shifting to traffic stops of crews on their way to job sites.

“It doesn’t have to be loud and proud,” Cerda said. “It can just be, hey, this is what’s happening. Can you please contact my representative?”

ABIC is also collecting signatures from Hispanic business and faith leaders on a nonpartisan letter urging Congress and the administration to protect long-term immigrants. Cerda stressed that signing does not mean endorsing a specific bill.

Monty noted how modest the current ask has become. Citizenship is largely off the table, he said. What employers and advocates are pressing for now is a work permit for longtime workers who can pass a background check.

“Pretty low bar,” Monty said. “Start with that.”