Idaho considers a way to crack down on illegal immigration. Would it work?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Bill would require E-Verify for gov't and firms with 150+ employees and $500K+ contracts.
- Critics say bill exempts industries and leaves subcontractor hiring structures intact.
- Committee voted 6-3 to advance bill amid doubts about E-Verify and employer burden.
Idaho Republican lawmakers have put up a united front in their opposition to illegal immigration. On Wednesday, members of the Senate State Affairs Committee agreed that the federal government had failed to secure the border and was wrongly leaving immigration enforcement up to the states.
What the states should do about that, however, was not so clear-cut.
Sen. Mark Harris, R-Soda Springs, proposed one solution: Idaho could require government officials and large private companies with government contracts to use E-Verify, a federal government website that tracks workers’ legal status and whether they’re eligible to work in the U.S.
Lawmakers have suggested this in past years, in legislation that would require all employers in the state to use the program. But Harris’ proposal was more dialed-back, requiring only businesses with over 150 employees and a state contract worth over $500,000 to use the program.
That approach, he told committee members, reflected his own doubts about the program’s accuracy and ability to discern whether a potential hire is using fake or stolen identity documents. Limiting the pool of users, he said, would serve as a way to “get the wrinkles smoothed out” while the state figured out if the tool was really effective.
“I suppose (E-Verify) is somewhat effective, as other states are implementing the program,” Harris said. “But to me, it’s kind of an unknown, and I’d like to see how it works before we make everybody use it.”
For some, that more measured approach didn’t go nearly far enough.
Michael Angiletta, head of Idaho Immigration Watch and Secure Idaho, two groups that advocate a tougher approach to immigration, testified that the bill “creates the appearance of E-Verify enforcement without delivering it,” he said. “That delays the real reforms Idaho needs.”
The bill would also largely exclude some of the industries, including dairy farming, in which concerns about workers’ immigration status are most prevalent, Angiletta said.
“Illegal labor is rarely hired directly. It flows through subcontractors, labor brokers and misclassified independent contractors,” he said. Harris’ bill, he argued, “leaves all of those structures intact.”
“Employer behavior is not going to change,” he added.
Created by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996, E-Verify enrolls about 1.4 million employers nationwide. As of 2024, over 20 states had laws requiring businesses to use the program, which allows employers to match new hires’ I-9 forms against Social Security and Department of Homeland Security records.
In states that have adopted E-Verify, the program has been ineffective at catching unauthorized workers and has not meaningfully diminished the undocumented population, InvestigateWest reported in January 2025.
Employers who use E-Verify must do so for all employees, according to the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services office.
At Wednesday’s hearing, other lawmakers said that though the program itself is fairly accurate, it can’t do much to address false documents. Businesses have long criticized E-Verify’s difficulty detecting identity fraud, according to the Migration Policy Institute. While the program can confirm that documents are legitimate, it can’t confirm that they belong to the person who is presenting them. The program also often wrongly flags people with valid documents in cases where a person’s name is misspelled or updated after getting married.
If workers present false documents, asked Senate Pro Tem Kelly Anthon, R-Declo, would it be fair for the state to punish the employer who relied on E-Verify?
“Should the employer be responsible for that? If there was a license that they had, should that be revoked? And are you going to put a large, major employer out of business because that happened?” he asked the committee. “I would say no. I don’t think that is justice.”
Den Hartog echoed those concerns.
“We’ve put employers in the middle of this and asked them to be experts and asked them to use a government system, and then that government system also has failed them,” she said. “I’m not under any illusion that any E-Verify act, whether it’s tied to a government contract or not, actually solves the problem that we think it solves.”
The committee voted 6-3 to send the bill to the Senate for a vote — but with trepidation. Sen. Ben Adams, R-Nampa, voted in support of the bill but told the committee that he wasn’t sure how he’d actually vote on the Senate floor.
“I do think that the discussion needs to keep going,” he said. “I think this is the first salvo of an issue that has been around for a long time and is not going away until we deal with it.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2026 at 11:53 AM.
