Federal immigration agents raided a cellphone repair business last week in a Dallas suburb and arrested 280 people charged with unlawfully working in the United States.

While U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have conducted such raids in the past, this one, the agency said, is the largest work-site raid at one location in the past 10 years. It also resulted in hundreds of arrests, rather than civil penalties, immigration law experts said.

And how often raids are conducted may not be going down anytime soon, they added.

“If anything, [this incident] is the tip of the iceberg,” said Harry Joe of Dallas-based global business immigration law firm JMA Firm. “The Trump administration is targeting employers because they view employers as the magnets that draw the illegal workers into the country.”

In a statement, CVE Technology Group Inc. in Allen, Texas, said it works with multiple temporary and staffing agencies, all of which are independently owned and operated and contractually accept full responsibility to ensure compliance with all relevant law, including the country's immigration laws.

“We strongly dispute the portrayal of CVE as a culpable party in connection with the raid and the detentions of the hundreds of detained individuals—the vast majority of whom were employed by unrelated third parties, not CVE,” the statement said, adding the company intends to cooperate with all investigative agencies involved in the process. “Based on these facts, we have no reason to believe CVE has engaged in any wrongful action and, instead, we appear to have been caught up in ICE's investigation of staffing companies.”

However, immigration lawyers told Corporate Counsel, employers may bear responsibility for such alleged illegal conduct if they knew or should have known that the agencies were not properly verifying employment eligibility. Thus, the raid is a strong warning and reminder to employers who contract with staffing agencies, they added.

“Staffing agencies are increasingly becoming targets of [Homeland Security Investigations],” Joe said. “Employers must be extremely careful in who they select to use. They really need to do their due diligence to ensure that staffing agencies are in compliance.”

It's important, Joe added, for employers to conduct their own mini-audit of the agency's compliance procedures.

However, when it comes to employment verification, it all comes down to the I-9 process, the means by which employers big and small verify that an individual they plan to hire or continue to employ in the United States is authorized to work here.

“In general, employers tend to view the I-9 employment verification process as a nuisance, but this case demonstrates that compliance with I-9 is a must—an important corporate procedure that has to be taken seriously,” Joe said.

These robust compliance efforts should include internal audits to ensure proper I-9 protocol, including documentation to that effect, said Littler Mendelson shareholder and global mobility and immigration practice group chair Jorge Lopez. Having paperwork to show that the legal and compliance departments did everything correctly and did not intentionally hire someone who ended up being illegal can save a company from being hit with charges that it intentionally violated immigration laws like those facing the Texas company, he added.

“What the government has never liked, under any administration, is intentionally hiring an undocumented worker,” Lopez said.

Matthew Dunn, partner and co-chair of the immigration group at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, said that employers, to better improve I-9 compliance and fill in any gaps in the process, could implement a system that automatically notifies them when an individual's work authorization has expired so that he or she can go through the process again. They also, he added, can “double-down” on I-9 training programs to ensure that “whoever owns the I-9s must be really knowledgeable.”