Berny Jacques’ E-Verify expansion bill clears first committee hurdle on party-line vote

Legislation by Seminole Republican Rep. Berny Jacques to require all private businesses in Florida to confirm that their employees can legally work in the U.S. is again advancing in the House.

Members of the House Industries and Professional Activities Subcommittee voted to advance HB 197, which would mandate the use of E-Verify, a federal system administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that enables companies and agencies to check the legal status of new employees.

The current law, enacted in 2023, requires E-Verify only for public employers and private employers with 25 or more workers. HB 197 would remove the 25-employee threshold.

The measure, which has no Senate analogue yet, is Jacques’ second consecutive attempt at passing the expansion. It comes amid a rising national crackdown on undocumented immigration across the U.S. under President Donald Trump, whose administration has also worked to remove existing exceptions and protections for foreign-born residents.

“This simply enforces the law,” Jacques told the panel Wednesday.

“It’s already illegal to hire these unauthorized workers, and we have a system that will verify whether or not you are in compliance with the law. That system is E-Verify, something that’s been used for many, many years now. It’s been used for all public-sector employers. This is nothing new.”

Effective July 1, HB 197 — like its predecessor that cleared the House floor in April before stalling out in the Senate — would keep enforcement authority with the Florida Department of Commerce. It would also maintain the current penalty rate of $1,000 per day for repeated violations and allow for the suspension of business licenses until compliance is proven.

Penalties would apply to any business that gets caught skirting the rules three times within 24 months, Jacques said.

“This simply closes the gap that we currently have,” he said. “It will strengthen the workforce integrity of our state.”

Every Republican on the subcommittee agreed with that assertion and voted “yes” for the bill.

Rep. Yvette Bennaroch, a Marco Island Republican born in Puerto Rico, said that despite numerous reports that E-Verify can be unreliable, “over 98% of employees” today are verified “instantly” and without issue. It’s also free for employers, she added.

“It’s not perfect, but just because it’s not perfect doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work,” she said, adding that there is “plenty of data to support” the figure she provided. That includes the E-Verify website and information provided by the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank.

Democratic Reps. Bruce Antone and Anna Eskamani of Orlando, Yvonne Hinson of Gainesville and Angie Nixon of Jacksonville voted against HB 197.

Nixon, a small-business owner, noted that all employers already must complete and maintain I-9 forms for their employees, which provide documentation similar to E-Verify. She argued the added requirement Jacques proposes would be “cumbersome” for many modestly sized companies.

“We don’t need it, honestly,” she said.

Nearly 476,000 businesses in Florida employ fewer than 20 people, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy.

Eskamani said that while there’s a general consensus on both sides of the political aisle that the federal immigration system is “broken” and that comprehensive reform is needed, imposing new state-level requirements under volatile federal policies is a recipe for hardship.

“There are millions of hard-working people in this state, many who are currently asylum seekers, TPS recipients, and their status is just being pulled away from them for all different sorts of political reasons, so one day you have (legal) status, the other day you don’t,” she said. “It’s hard for me to vote on a bill without thinking about the larger ecosystem that we’re operating within.”

Hinson read a written testimony from the left-leaning Florida Policy Institute, which opposes HB 197.

Among its objections: Employees must read a 145-page E-Verify user manual and sign a contract with the federal government to use the system, “significant time and cost burdens” to employers that Bloomberg estimated in 2010 would cost small-business owners $81 million, and the bill’s lack of a carve-out for home-based employees like nannies, maids, nurses and other domestic service providers.

“This has high implications for Florida’s growing senior population, which currently comprises over one-fourth of the state’s residents,” Hinson said.

Two other organizations — Voices of Florida and the Florida AFL-CIO — also spoke against the measure Wednesday.

Rich Templin, Legislative and Political Director for Florida AFL-CIO, said that his organization doesn’t oppose E-Verify in concept, since the U.S. labor movement’s purpose is to protect American jobs and workers.

But only Congress can solve the immigration crisis, he said.

“Any effort by the state to weigh in on the immigration issue only complicates our overall goal of fixing the problem once and for all, and that’s the issue we have here,” he said. “Any state that arbitrarily, at the state level, mandates that this system be used is going to complicate the effort of other states to implement all kinds of things. Immigration cannot be a patchwork of different solutions. It has to be comprehensive. We are one nation.”

Templin added that despite its intended purpose, E-Verify remains dependably faulty.

“Since the moment it was implemented, it has had exceedingly high error rates,” he said. “It just has never worked, which is why so many employers have pushed back on it, even those that want to use it.”

Jacksonville Republican Rep. Kiyan Michael is the co-prime sponsor of HB 197, which Deltona Republican Rep. Webster Barnaby is co-sponsoring. The bill has one more stop in the Commerce Committee before reaching the House floor.

The bill’s webpage lists only one related piece of legislation: SB 328 by Orlando Democratic Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith. It’s a very different bill.

So far, it also doesn’t have a proper companion in the opposite chamber.

SB 328, if passed — an unlikely event, considering the current political climate — would establish an Office for New Americans in Florida focused on immigrant and refugee inclusion and workforce participation.

The bill would also revise state ID laws to allow additional forms of identification proof, prohibit the state from sharing people’s photos and identification information with agencies that primarily enforce immigration law without a court order and remove some existing E-Verify mandates.

Further, it would broaden access to Florida public colleges and universities for students regardless of immigration status —a reversal of legislation Gov. Ron DeSantis signed earlier this year that eliminated in-state tuition for undocumented students.