From the read of this it makes me think swift assumed they could play snitch and switch.

For the last 10 years Swift has participated in a special federal program to catch illegal job applicants. Under the program, the company compared an applicant's social security number to the federal data base to determine if it's authentic.


For much of this year the government used information gathered by Swift in that program to build a case for the December raid. One goal was to catch workers who used real, but stolen social security numbers.

Swift lawyers said federal statute prohibits the government from imposing penalties on the company for data gathered in the special federal program.
edited for your protectionhttp://minnesota.publicradio.org/dis.../swiftprogram/

But they were surprised and upset that a raid had insued and it meant a loss of production when the raid occured.

Does handing over information to the government somehow give a company immuinity from being raided? Note swift wasn't charged with anything they just lost a big chunk of thier illegal workforce. Workers they knew had falsified documentation.

Note it took fear of an immigration raid to finally increase the starting wage.