Tennessee Court Gives No Quarter To Fired Undocumented Immigrant

Tennessee's workers' compensation statute allows injured workers to recoup benefits regardless of whether they are lawfully employed. In a recent case, a West Tennessee federal district court considered whether an undocumented immigrant could file a lawsuit against his former employer, whom he claims fired him in retaliation for pursuing workers' comp.

Facts

Born in Mexico, Ricardo Torres moved to the United States without documentation in 1997. Later, he applied for a job with Precision Industries, Inc., a small company in Whiteville. When he applied for the job at Precision, he gave a false Social Security number (SSN). Precision hired him in early 2011 without realizing he was an undocumented immigrant.

Precision claimed it learned in early 2012 that Tennessee law required employers to review all of their employees' documentation by 2013 to ensure they were lawfully authorized to work in the United States. Precision planned to undertake the review in November 2012. In the meantime, Torres was injured on the job and sought workers' compensation.

Precision fired Torres in September 2012. It's unclear why he was fired, but Precision denied knowing his true immigration status at the time he was fired. The company fired four other employees in April 2013 after they didn't return to work with completed I-9 forms.

Torres claimed that Precision fired him in retaliation for his workers' comp claim—which is illegal in Tennessee. He then sued his former employer in West Tennessee federal court for retaliatory discharge. He also alleged that Precision knew at the time it hired him that he was an undocumented immigrant.

Court's holding

Following a trial, the federal district court concluded that Torres wasn't entitled to any relief because he wasn't legally authorized to work in the United States. The court noted that if only Tennessee state law applied, Torres could obtain relief. Indeed, Tennessee workers' compensation law defines a covered employee as including anyone "lawfully or unlawfully employed." Therefore, immigration status doesn't matter under state law if an employee is seeking workers' comp or suing his employer for firing him in retaliation for seeking workers' comp.

Unfortunately for Torres, however, the court found that federal law came into play in his case. In its 2002 Hoffman Plastic decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) erred when it awarded back pay to an undocumented worker...