The charges arise from a federal investigation that began in January and in April netted 27 arrests of undocumented immigrants employed by Shipley and living in housing provided by the company. In addition to the probation and fines, the Shipley company has agreed pay $1.334 million to the government in lieu of forfeiting the homes it provided for its illegal workers.

Three current and former Shipley supervisors and managers, Christopher Halsey, Jimmy Rivera and Julian Garcia, have also been charged and are scheduled to appear in court in early September, DeGabrielle said.

After the April arrests, immigration enforcement came under fire for seemingly only punishing the workers and not sanctioning their employers.

“Obviously we can’t and haven’t stopped every company from hiring people illegally, and perhaps in the past we haven’t done as good a job addressing this problem,” said DeGabrielle, “but we are serious about doing something about it when evidence comes to our knowledge. So hopefully the business community will take notice that there are consequences.”

When asked if fines and probation send a strong enough message, DeGabrielle said, “I think a felony conviction for a company, the stigma attached to the convictions … [and] a $1.33 million forfeiture is not insignificant and are consequences. Perhaps you can say there are more serious crimes in the relative scheme of things, and I’m not saying that maybe somebody would look at this as the cost of doing business; if they want to, that’s fine. We can’t put a company in jail, we can only put people in jail and in the right case we will be doing that.”

-- Chris Vogel