House committee advances bill expanding E-Verify to all Florida businesses

Rep. Berny Jacques is seeking to revive his legislation to expand E-Verify to all businesses after his similar bill last Session died in the Senate.

Jacques’ new measure (HB 197) took a step forward as the House Commerce Committee advanced it with a 16-5 vote. That was the final committee stop in the House, but no Senate companion bill has been filed so far.

Under a 2023 law, large businesses with at least 25 employees or more are already required to use E-Verify to confirm their employees’ immigration statuses. But efforts to expand the law to cover smaller businesses haven’t gotten the political will to clear the full Legislature.

Last Session, the House passed Jacques’ bill in April before it stalled in the upper chamber.

Jacques, a Seminole Republican, argued Thursday that the extra step wouldn’t be time-consuming for small business owners to type information in the federal system administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“There is not going to be a heavy burden,” Jacques said. “It’s a free system, and so as far as financial costs, there wouldn’t be any.”

Jacques was joined by his co-sponsor, Rep. Kiyan Michael, whose son was killed in a car crash in 2007 by someone who had illegally entered the country.

“I absolutely will always show up with anything to do with combating illegal immigration,” Michael told lawmakers as she urged them to vote in favor.

But Florida AFL-CIO lobbyist Rich Templin dismissed Jacques’ bill as nothing more than a “headline pursuing approach” for what’s a more complicated immigration problem.

“Our position is that we have got to stop taking these little Band-Aid approaches state by state,” Templin said during Thursday’s hearing. “Presidents, legislators, Legislatures, states cannot fix the immigration system in this country with these haphazard headline chasing approaches like requiring E-Verify. It has to be done at the federal level.”

Templin added the AFL-CIO supports E-Verify “as a potential tool” but only as part of more comprehensive immigration.

“Because every time a state does something like this, we get that much further away from all of our goal, which is to fix immigration in this country,” Templin said.