On April 30, 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) issued enforcement guidelines that direct the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) arm of the DHS to focus on criminal and civil prosecutions of businesses hiring undocumented immigrants.  The new enforcement program will focus on “criminal prosecution of employers who knowingly hire illegal workers in order to target the root cause of illegal immigration.”  The DHS Fact Sheet released to the press on April 30, 2009 notes that in 2008, nearly 6,000 people were arrested in workplace immigration raids in the United States, but only 135 of those arrested were employers.  The new enforcement guidelines aim to balance the disparity in those numbers. One of the new investigative standards promulgated in the guidelines directs ICE officers to obtain “indictments, criminal arrest or search warrants, or a commitment from a U.S. Attorney’s Office to prosecute the targeted employer before arresting employees for civil immigration violations at a worksite.”  In addition to criminal prosecution of employers, DHS will use other available civil and administrative tools, including civil fines and debarment from federal contracts.  In contrast to this new focus on employer-based enforcement, DHS plans to offer more protections to undocumented workers. For example, rules involving “humanitarian considerations,” which generally allow authorities to release detainees who are sick or sole caregivers for small children, may be taken into account in raids impacting worksites involving twenty-five or more undocumented workers, as opposed to previous rules requiring a threshold of 150 workers.