ICE is reportedly planning a nationwide raid on a chain restaurant

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be sending agents to a national food chain in the near future as part of a series of nationwide workplace raids, The Daily Beast reported Tuesday. The stated goal of the raids, according to ICE documents viewed by The Daily Beast, is to target employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers and pay them below minimum wage.

The impending investigations against the unnamed food chain are part of ICE's recently announced plan to quadruple its workplace raids. Franchise owners targeted in these efforts will likely be charged with "harboring illegal aliens." ICE has additionally apparently been making plans to go after specific targets. An ICE official who spoke to The Daily Beast said, "These [workers] are basically being used as slave labor."

That same official also claimed that undocumented workers picked up in the raids who agree to testify against their employers could be allowed to temporarily stay in the the country, contradicting statements by ICE's acting chief, Tom Homan, who has previously said that undocumented workers detained in workplace raids would be deported.

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Under the Trump administration, arrests of non-criminal undocumented immigrants have doubled, and immigration arrests as a whole have increased by 43 percent in 2017. The number of deportations, however, has dropped this year, though there is a backlog of more than 600,000 pending immigration cases in the U.S. court system.