14 DAY TRIAL // Police have performed raids at 14 7-Eleven locations on the East Coast, making nine arrests over breaking immigration rules and treating illegal immigrant workers as slaves.
According to the Web Pro News, franchise owners and managers are under fire over illegal dealings where payments and harboring illegal immigrants are concerned.
Officials have raided convenience stores in Long Island, New York, and in Virginia. The 7-Elevens would employ Pakistani workers, with owners putting them up with housing and treating them like slaves.
They were not allowed to leave, they would be overcharged for housing bills and they would only be paid part of their wages.
“As set forth in the indictments, the defendants used 7-Eleven as a platform from which to run elaborate criminal enterprises.
“Finally, these defendants ruthlessly exploited their immigrant employees, stealing their wages and requiring them to live in unregulated boarding houses, in effect creating a modern day plantation system,” explains Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
James Hayes, special agent-in charge for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations adds that the managers stole the identities of some 25 American citizens, some of whom are children while others are deceased, in order to obtain their Social Security Numbers.
This has gone on for over a decade, and the owners will be charged with wire fraud conspiracy, identity theft and concealing and harboring illegal immigrants.
“As alleged, the franchise owners knowingly and repeatedly employed an illegal workforce and abused and exploited that workforce for more than 13 years.
“This charged criminal scheme had a vast detrimental effect on both the employees who were overworked and cheated out of wages, as well as the more than 25 American citizens whose lives were upended by the theft of their identities in furtherance of the scheme,” Hayes describes.