CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – Some 38 companies in the Carolinas and Georgia will be inspected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for the possible hiring of undocumented workers.

ICE spokesman Ivan Ortiz told Efe that 20 of the businesses are in Georgia, 13 in North Carolina and five in South Carolina.

Ortiz could not give the names of the companies for “security reasons,” but said that audits are done independently of the firms’ size, number of employees or line of business.

“Those related to public and national security have priority,” he said.

ICE plans to take about six months finishing the investigations and will continue issuing notices as part of its strategy of workplace operations.

On Nov. 19, ICE director John Morton announced that he had sent 1,000 inspection notices to companies nationwide in order to check their I-9 forms that contain their employees’ migration information.

Since the strategy of auditing companies was implemented in July, a total of 61 of the 654 that ICE has investigated up to now have received civil penalties and fines.

Immigration agents checked more than 85,000 I-9 forms and detected more than 14,000 suspicious documents.

In the Carolinas, ICE carried out several raids on factories and companies on suspicion that their managers were employing workers without legal documents.

In August 2008, an immigration operation at Mills Manufacturing Corporation in Asheville, North Carolina, which makes parachutes for the U.S. Army, ended with the arrest of 57 undocumented aliens.

In South Carolina, House of Raeford Farms, one of the biggest poultry processors in the world, made an out-of-court settlement with the federal government to pay $1.5 million for hiring illegal labor. EFE