WASHINGTON, April 20 — The apprehension on Wednesday of more than 1,100 illegal immigrants employed by a pallet supply company based in Houston, as well as the arrest of seven of its managers, represented the start of a more aggressive federal crackdown on employers, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday. Describing the hiring of millions of illegal workers, in some cases, as a form of organized crime, Mr. Chertoff said the government would try to combat the practice with techniques similar to those used to shut down the mob.
"We target those organizations, we use intelligence to define the scope of the organization, and then we use all of the tools we have — whether it's criminal enforcement or the immigration laws — to make sure we come down as hard as possible and break the back of those organizations," Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference.
The arrests took place just days before the Senate reconvenes with immigration laws on its agenda. Earlier this month, the Senate faltered in its efforts to develop a proposal that would have given most illegal immigrants a chance to become citizens while intensifying border patrol and deportation efforts. And in recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters have demonstrated in response to a bill passed in the House in December that would speed deportations, tighten border security and criminalize illegal immigrants.
In the action on Wednesday, federal officials detained 1,187 illegal immigrants working in 26 states for IFCO Systems North America, a subsidiary of a company based in the Netherlands that supplies plastic containers and wood pallets used to ship a variety of goods, from fruit to computers.
Of the 1,187 detained workers, 275 have already been deported to Mexico. The rest are being processed for deportation, although many may be released on bond.
Homeland Security Department officials said company supervisors knowingly hired illegal immigrants, provided some of them housing and transportation to and from work, and even reimbursed an undercover agent for the cost of obtaining fraudulent identity documents.
An examination of the company's payroll of 5,800 employees found that just over half of them had Social Security numbers that were either invalid, belonged to a dead person or did not match names on file, the department said.
The investigation started in February 2005, when agents received a tip that IFCO Systems workers in Guilderland, N.Y., were seen ripping up federal tax-related employment verification forms, and then an assistant manager present explained that they were illegal immigrants who did not intend to file tax returns.
No senior executives at the company were arrested, but officials filed criminal charges against seven current or former lower-level managers and a foreman. The supervisors, from New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Texas, were accused of conspiring to transport, harbor and induce illegal immigrants to come to the United States, charges that carry maximum sentences of up to 10 years in jail.
Mr. Chertoff made clear that the investigation was continuing and that further charges might be filed, leaving open the possibility of action against the company. Last year, Wal-Mart paid an $11 million civil fine to settle charges that it had knowingly hired illegal immigrants who worked as floor-cleaning crews through independent contractors. The fine surpassed the sum of all administrative fines from the previous eight years.
A spokeswoman for IFCO Systems, which had $576 million in sales globally last year and whose customer list includes such companies as Dell Computer, Winn Dixie supermarkets and Target stores, did not respond to messages left at her office and on her cellphone.
As part of the campaign against illegal hiring, Mr. Chertoff and Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, plan to hire 171 more work-site enforcement agents. There are now about 325. They have also asked Congress for legal authority to get routine access to Social Security records in order to identify companies in which large numbers of new employees submit fake numbers.
Separately, the department is adding 20 special teams of investigators, for a total of 52, to search for some of the 590,000 immigrants in the country who have ignored orders to leave. The department is also working with state and local officials to try to identify and, if possible, deport many of an estimated 630,000 foreign-born individuals who are arrested on criminal charges and put into jail.
Nationally, there were 127 criminal convictions last year — up from 46 the year before — against employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants, the department said.
Bill Bernstein, deputy director of Mosaic Family Services, a nonprofit group in Dallas that works with refugee and immigrant families, said that simply apprehending workers who might be here illegally was not the answer to the immigration problem.
"There is a reason why these people were doing that job," Mr. Bernstein said, "and that is there are a lot of jobs in this county that Americans aren't taking."
Mr. Bernstein said the timing of the announcement of the arrests was probably not a coincidence. "The reason this is being done now is to look good politically," he said. "The administration wants to make it clear they have an enforcement side as well as an amnesty side."
Michael W. Cutler, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a research group that supports tougher immigration laws, said Mr. Chertoff's enforcement blitz was more about public relations than substance.
"All they are doing is hanging window dressing on a building that is condemned," said Mr. Cutler, who is a former federal immigration enforcement officer. Even with additional agents, he said, the department will still have far too few enforcing immigration laws.
Except for a small pilot program, Mr. Chertoff acknowledged that the federal government had not provided a way for employers to verify employees' immigration status quickly. That makes it difficult to hold employers criminally liable when workers present valid-looking but falsified documents.
"We have to admit from the get-go that we've got to provide employers with the necessary tools to verify the legal status of their employees," he said.