President Cruz: Mandatory E-Verify in the First 100 Days?

Hero photo: File:Mexico-US border at Tijuana.jpg — Tomascastelazo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

01 The record and the scenario

Ted Cruz' verifiable record on workplace verification is concrete and recent. On May 21, 2026, he joined nine Senate Republicans — Katie Britt of Alabama as lead sponsor, with Cotton, Budd, Lankford, Graham, Tuberville, Capito, Blackburn and Hyde-Smith — in introducing the Mandatory E-Verify Act of 2026 (S. 4620), a bill to “permanently establish the E-Verify employment eligibility verification system, to mandate the use of E-Verify by all employers.” His office's framing: mandate E-Verify, “protect American jobs,” and ensure businesses “hire legal workers, not individuals who broke the law to enter this country illegally.” The bill's background section cites the arithmetic that defines the policy's ambition: an estimated 8.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. workforce as of 2022, growing to nearly 10.8 million by early 2025.

The system Cruz would mandate is already substantial: roughly 1.39 million enrolled employers — about a fifth of U.S. employer firms — ran about 43.5 million verification cases in fiscal 2024, with more than 11.5 million in the final quarter alone. E-Verify grew out of the 1996 pilot program under a law signed by President Clinton, whom Cruz's own press release quotes approvingly: the program “strengthens the rule of law.” A handful of states already mandate it for some or all employers; no national standard exists. Cruz's home state of Texas is not among the mandating states — one of several honest wrinkles in the record.

Scenario analysis, not a prediction or endorsement: as of September 18, 2026, AP describes Republican discussion around JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz as potential 2028 contenders, and Cruz has not formally entered a presidential race. The scenario: assume a Cruz administration takes office in January 2029 — how much of mandatory E-Verify could it actually deliver in its first 100 days?

02 Day 1: executive orders

The single largest lever available on Day 1 is the one the current administration already pulled: using the existing statutory mandate for federal contractors as a beachhead. Federal contractors and subcontractors are already required to use E-Verify under regulations implementing Executive Order 13465; a Cruz order could expand aggressive enforcement — debarment of violators, audits of the acquisition workforce, and a directive that every agency verify not just hires but existing contract-labor arrangements, which S. 4620's contract-labor certification section would later codify. This requires no Congress, and it moves the single largest coherent block of covered employers at once.

Second: worksite-enforcement prioritization by memo. ICE's worksite operations — audits of I-9 forms, raids on egregious violators — are discretionary within existing law (the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act already prohibits hiring unauthorized workers; E-Verify is the tool, IRCA is the prohibition). A Day-1 Cruz memo ordering a stated number of I-9 audits per quarter, with publicized penalties, replicates the 2017-18 model at larger scale, no new law needed.

Third — the one genuinely novel Day-1 move his bill implies: an E-Verify enrollment surge order, directing DHS to stand up capacity (the system is free to employers; the binding constraint is USCIS processing and the tentative-nonconfirmation appeals process) and setting an administration target for enrollment growth from 1.39 million toward the full 6.2 million employer base. Unenforced, it is marketing; enforced through contractor rules and audit exposure, it is the compliance ramp that makes a later mandate administrable.

03 Days 2-30: agency changes

The agency story is a USCIS capacity story. Forty-three and a half million cases in FY2024 is the voluntary-load baseline; the mandated load would be the entire U.S. hiring market — roughly 60+ million new hires a year — through a system whose error path (tentative nonconfirmations, appeals, the photo-matching rules) is built for a fraction of that volume. A Cruz administration's first month would go to: a USCIS program office reorganization around E-Verify capacity (the bill itself directs a permanent establishment and modernization, including the digital-verification option and the self-check function); SSA coordination — every case is matched against Social Security records, so the Social Security Administration's role becomes load-bearing; and rulemaking starts for the bill's good-faith defense and anti-discrimination safeguards, which cannot wait for passage if the ramp is to be credible.

Second month, second front: ICE audit doctrine. The enforcement philosophy shifts from targeting employers of unauthorized workers (IRCA's original design) to non-use of E-Verify as the offense itself — S. 4620's Section 4 treats failure to use the system as a violation of the same INA section that punishes unauthorized hiring. Writing the enforcement guidance, training the audit corps, and setting penalty schedules are all executive-branch work; the bill would later give them teeth, but the machine must exist first.

The documented risk, from the system's own history: false nonconfirmations — the scenario where a legal worker's records do not match and they bear the burden of proving employability. Every state that has mandated E-Verify has faced this; the bill's safeguards (Sections 2, 6, 8) exist because of it. A Cruz administration inherits that record on day 31.

04 The first budget

A first Cruz budget would make the capacity case in numbers. The honest sizing: E-Verify is cheap per case (it is a database check), but a full mandate's cost is not the checks — it is the appeals infrastructure, the SSA records cleanup, and the enforcement headcount. USCIS runs largely on fees (its FY2024 report shows a $6.3 billion budget, 96% fee-supported), so an E-Verify expansion would either move to appropriations — a new spending line a budget-hawk senator-turned-president would have to justify against his own record — or ride fee-rule changes through APA process.

The rest of the budget story is the offset claim: the Cruz bill's political premise is that mandatory verification shrinks the unauthorized workforce, which its sponsors argue raises wages for legal workers and reduces fiscal outlays — citing the 8.3-to-10.8 million workforce estimate. Whatever the first budget shows for E-Verify itself (call it hundreds of millions, not billions), the fight would be over whether the enforcement side — ICE audits at mandated scale — is funded as a jobs program for American workers or as a mass-deportation-by-attrition mechanism, which is how opponents will frame the identical line item.

One budget line to watch as the tell: SSA funding. The system's accuracy depends on the quality of the Social Security earning records it checks; the fastest way to break a mandate is to fund the checking system but starve the record system. The budget documents whether an administration is serious.

05 First legislation and what requires Congress

Here the scenario meets its hardest fact: mandatory E-Verify is legislation, full stop. The president cannot order 6 million private employers to run new hires through a federal database — that requires amending the Immigration and Nationality Act, which is what S. 4620 does (Section 3 mandates use; Section 5 rewrites the penalty structure; Section 9 preempts state laws, resolving the current patchwork in the federal government's favor). The bill is with the Judiciary Committee. Its own drafting concedes the timeline: six months for general employers, a year for recruiters, eighteen for agricultural labor. Even signed on day one of a Cruz presidency, the mandate would not bite inside the first 100 days.

What the first-100-days legislative strategy actually looks like: introduce the mandate bill immediately (it exists; it has nine co-sponsors), and look for the path that avoids 60 votes. The reconciliation question is genuinely open — penalty revenue is arguably germane to a budget, and a scaled mandate-attached-to-penalties version could ride reconciliation the way the 2025 immigration package did. The alternative is the bipartisan route the bill's own design hints at: its anti-discrimination safeguards, self-check function, and agriculture runway are exactly the provisions written to bring on Democratic votes, and workplace verification has a long bipartisan history (the pilot was Clinton's; the contractor rule was Bush's). A Cruz first-100-days E-Verify win is possible in either lane — it is the rare immigration item where the constraint is arithmetic, not chemistry.

The honest scorecard sentence: a President Cruz could spend 100 days building the machine — enrollment, enforcement, capacity — and could sign a mandate only if he finds 60 senators or a reconciliation path; the 100-day deliverable is preparation, not the mandate.

06 What the comparative record shows: Texas versus the mandating states

The topic-specific comparison for this domestic piece is the state laboratory that already exists. Roughly 20 states mandate E-Verify in some form — Arizona for all employers (upheld by the Supreme Court in 2011 against a preemption challenge, then partially displaced by federal-law changes on licensing penalties), Mississippi and Alabama similarly; others mandate for public contractors or under specific conditions. The measurable results are contested but real: studies of Arizona's post-2008 mandate (the Legal Arizona Workers Act) found the policy shifted unauthorized workers out of formal employment — some to other states, some into informal work — with small measured wage gains for some legal workers and documented disruption in labor-intensive sectors. The agricultural runway in S. 4620 exists precisely because of that state evidence.

The honest wrinkle in Cruz's own record: Texas mandates E-Verify only for state agencies and public contractors, not for the private economy — and Texas has the largest unauthorized workforce of any state, the population the mandate most targets. A Cruz administration would be nationalizing a policy his home state deliberately declined to adopt for private employers, while running against the very federal-preemption logic the bill's Section 9 embodies (states that want tougher rules would lose the ability to keep them, though states with weaker rules would gain the standard). The comparative lesson cuts both ways: the state experiments prove a mandate is administrable — and that its costs concentrate exactly where its politics are hardest.

07 What courts could constrain

The litigation map for mandatory E-Verify is unusually well-scouted, because the states already fought versions of it. Preemption: the Supreme Court's 2011 Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting decision upheld Arizona's mandate, but federal law (8 U.S.C. 1324a note) explicitly bars the federal government from compelling voluntary-program use — which is exactly why S. 4620 must amend the statute rather than simply order it. A Cruz mandate built on regulation alone, before passage, would be preempted by the very law it claims to enforce.

Discrimination claims: the bill's own safeguards exist because E-Verify's documented failure mode is national-origin discrimination — employers pre-screening or refusing to hire workers they expect to fail verification. The INA's anti-discrimination provisions (administered by the Justice Department's IER) and the good-faith defense in Section 8 are the litigation surface; a Cruz enforcement wave would generate dockets on both sides. Privacy: a mandate covering every hire in America is a federal database of essentially the entire workforce — expect challenges on data-security and misuse grounds (Section 10 of the bill is the response). Due process: the tentative-nonconfirmation path — where a legal worker must contest a mismatch to keep a job — has been litigated at the state level and would be tested federally within the first year of any mandate's operation.

The summary for the scenario: courts would not likely stop a properly enacted mandate — the statutory architecture is defensible and was drafted with this litigation in mind — but every executive shortcut taken to get enforcement running before passage would be enjoined, and the current administration's immigration-litigation record (frequent early losses, some reversals on appeal) is the baseline expectation for how fast.