Conservative U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who is running for re-election in 2024, wrote yesterday on X: “The Biden administration is fining a Tennessee company $700,000 for ensuring its employees are eligible to work in the USA.” She added the claim, “This administration is more focused on protecting illegal immigrants than the American people.”
The Biden administration is fining a Tennessee company $700,000 for ensuring its employees are eligible to work in the USA.
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) December 2, 2023
This administration is more focused on protecting illegal immigrants than the American people.
Blackburn is referring to the recent settlement between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Tennessee trucking company Convenant Transport Inc. (and its subsidiary Transport Management Services LLC), which has agreed to pay $700,000 in civil penalties to the federal government.
According to the DOJ press release, the two transportation logistics and long-haul trucking companies headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee “violated the anti-discrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by routinely discriminating against non-U.S. citizen workers when checking their permission to work in the United States.”
The Immigration and Nationality Act (which was enacted in 1952) prohibits employers from mandating specific or unnecessary documentation based on an employee’s citizenship status, immigration status, or national origin (for example, a green card). Employers are obligated to accept any valid documentation chosen by the employees and cannot reject legitimate documentation that reasonably appears to be authentic and relevant to the employee’s work status.
A DOJ investigation found that Covenant and Transport from January 2020 through August 2022, “routinely discriminated against non-U.S. citizens by requiring lawful permanent residents to show their Permanent Resident Cards (known as green cards) and by requiring other non-U.S. citizens to show documents related to their immigration status.”
Tripp Grant, CFO of Covenant, said in a statement: “While we disagree with the DOJ’s assessment of the company’s practices, we reached this settlement to avoid costly and time-consuming litigation despite the DOJ not finding a single actual instance in which an employee was terminated or was refused employment related to our employment verification practices.”
Note: Convenant Transport was founded in 1986 by David Parker and his wife Jaqueline Parker who “made an agreement (a covenant) with God: they would run the business ‘the right way,’ if God would provide.”
According to the Convenant corporate website, the Parkers “built Covenant’s corporate culture around these three values: treat others as you want to be treated (empathy), put others before yourself (servanthood), and do business with integrity, honesty, and fairness in all situations (virtue).”
Convenant Transport, which has been rebranded as Convenant Logistics Group, Inc., is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ: CVLG.
In January 2023, David Parker announced that in 2022 the company “generated over $1.0 billion in freight revenue, the highest annual earnings per share in our history.”
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