Huffines Requires E-Verify From Every Comptroller Grant Recipient

Texas Comptroller Don Huffines will require every organization that receives a grant from his office to check its workers through E-Verify, the federal system that confirms whether a new hire may legally work in the United States, his office announced Thursday.

Under the new terms, a grantee must certify that it will use E-Verify “to confirm the employment eligibility of all applicable personnel” and will not knowingly employ unauthorized workers. It must stay in compliance with federal immigration law “for the entire term of the grant” and notify the Comptroller’s office immediately if it discovers a violation. The office said it is writing immediate-termination authority into its agreements to enforce the certification.

“Texans work hard for their money, and their tax dollars will never subsidize illegal aliens taking jobs from Texans,” Huffines said. “If you want state funding, you will verify every hire and follow federal immigration law.”

The terms will be standard in future grants and solicitations, according to the release. It does not say whether agreements already signed will change or which law authorizes the new terms.

Texas has required E-Verify of its own agencies since 2015. Senate Bill 374 directs every state agency to “register and participate in the E-verify program to verify information of all new employees.” That law covers a state agency’s own hiring. Many of the Comptroller’s grants go to counties and local offices. They include salary supplements for sheriff’s, constable’s and prosecutors’ offices in counties of 300,000 people or fewer, and money for rural counties to buy ambulances.

One program sits closer to the new rule than the rest. Under Senate Bill 8, the Comptroller pays sheriffs who have signed immigration enforcement agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) between $80,000 and $140,000, depending on county population. Future grants to those sheriffs will carry the same E-Verify certification.

According to the release, the performance review of the agency that Huffines launched in August found that “no previous Comptroller had ensured that the agency’s contractors and grant recipients comply with state and federal immigration laws.” The same review led him to announce last week that the agency had failed for as long as 20 years to keep proper I-9 hiring records and faced about $5 million in federal penalties, as the Texian Partisan reported.

Since October, Huffines has written several conditions of this kind into the office’s grants and contracts, among them a ban on spending grant money on license plate cameras and a bar on contractors tied to convicted traffickers. The release says more will be announced “in the coming weeks.”

Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Huffines in July, and he took office August 1. State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt defeated him on November 3, and he leaves office in January.

A sheriff can spend an immigration grant over two years. Any county that signs one before January agrees to E-Verify its hires until the grant ends, long after the man who wrote the term has left the office.