Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice (DOJ) is hitting a North Carolina landscaping business with a major civil penalty for hiring foreign workers while discriminating against Americans.
The DOJ announced on Tuesday that it had reached a settlement with the Newland, North Carolina landscaping company, Triple H Services LLC, after the business was accused of hiring foreign workers imported to the United States on the H-2B visa program, rather than hiring American citizens who were available to take the blue collar jobs.
After a DOJ investigation — led by the Civil Rights Division’s Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative — the agency revealed that Triple H misled American workers in job advertisements for more than 450 landscaping jobs in a way that was designed to deter Americans from applying for the positions.
When Americans did qualify and apply for the landscaping jobs, the DOJ investigation found that Triple H “did not consider” those U.S. workers for the positions, and “instead hired H-2B visa workers,” a release by the agency stated.
“Federal law prohibits employers from discriminating against U.S. workers in hiring because of their citizenship status,” Acting Assistant Attorney General John Gore said in a statement. “The Department will continue to fight to ensure that U.S. workers are not disadvantaged because of their citizenship status.”
The DOJ investigation also discovered that Triple H had ended multiple online job applications before American workers could start and finish the process, instead quickly filling the landscaping positions with H-2B foreign visa workers.
DOJ officials said in their settlement with Triple H that the landscaping company “effectively denied U.S. workers access to jobs based on its preference for hiring” H-2B foreign visa workers.
As part of the settlement, Triple H will have to pay a civil penalty of $15,600, along with establishing a back pay fund capped at $85,000 for workers who were impacted by the company’s anti-American discrimination practices. Triple H will additionally have to be monitored by the DOJ for three years while ramping up their recruitment practices of American workers.
Sessions’ DOJ is set to further its initiative of protecting American citizens and workers by working with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency to denaturalize thousands of foreign nationals who are accused of defrauding the U.S. government in their citizenship applications.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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