An unscrupulous employer in Pennsylvania who harbored illegal aliens will pay a heavy price for his crime.

The conviction of the owner of a temporary employment agency is the second report in a week about an employer who illegally hired and harbored illegals. On February 14, federal authorities charged a baker owner in Texas with harboring.

The conviction in Pennsylvania and charges in Texas comport with repeated warnings from border czar Tom Homan before and after the election that he would file charges under the statute that forbids harboring.

In a related story, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that DHS found will fire the leakers who blew Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on illegals. Leakers fouled up two raids — one in Aurora Colorado, and another in Los Angeles, California. 

The harboring felon is Andy Ha, 28, of Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, whose temporary employment agency, Prosperity Services, provided staffers for businesses in Charleroi.

The two towns are about 25 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

From September 2022 through April 2024, “Ha paid for more than 25 workers who were not legally authorized to be in the United States to stay in a former hotel, and his business paid for vans to transport those workers to and from their work,” the Justice Department said:

In addition, Ha provided Prosperity’s tax return preparer with spreadsheets listing only workers who were legally authorized to be and work in the United States. That information, in turn, was reflected on the company’s quarterly employment tax returns, representing less than 10% of the actual total number of workers employed by Prosperity. Ha then also signed those returns, knowing them to be false and causing a tax loss of at least $3.1 million.

Ha not only broke the law by harboring but also by costing the federal government “millions of dollars through his failure to pay taxes related to his business,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Troy Rivetti.

Charged on January 28, Ha pleaded guilty to the two counts and faces sentencing on February 24.

The penalty is stiff. 

He could land in prison for five years and pay up to $250,000 “or twice the gain from the offense, or both on the tax charge and up to 10 years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 or twice the gain from the offense, or both on the harboring charge.” 

As The New American reported on Friday, Leonardo Baez and Nora Alicia Avila-Guel, owners of Abby’s Baker in Frontera, Texas, confessed that they knowingly employed eight illegals and that they “harbored the aliens in their personally owned property,” the criminal complaint says.

Two of the illegals told investigators that Baez and Avila-Guel knew they, the illegals, were in the country illegally and “willfully harbored” them.

For months, Homan has said he would use the harboring statue, 8 U.S. Code 1324. It applies to “any person” who helps an illegal into the country, and “knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation.”

It also punishes anyone who “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.”

Homan didn’t just mean unscrupulous employers such as Ha. He also included sanctuary officials who impede or refuse to cooperate with ICE on deportations.

“They need to educate themselves,” he told Fox News:

They need to review this. Title 8, United States Code 1324 III. Read about that and don’t cross that line because it is a felony to harbor and conceal an illegal alien from ICE. Read the statute. Don’t cross that line.

Homan and Noem vowed to find the leakers who tipped off illegal-alien gang members in Aurora, California, to a raid, and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, which published a story about a forthcoming raid in February.

“I have found some leakers,” Noem told Fox talker Sean Hannity last night:

We are continuing to get more. They will be fired. There will be consequences. Remember, when they leak information to the press in order to blow an op, they are putting law enforcement lives in jeopardy. They are risking their lives and putting their families in the position where they have to live without those individuals any further. So, you bet we have used every tactic that we have.

Noting that DHS is looking at leakers and using polygraph exams to expose them, Noem said some bureaucrats “have an agenda to stop the work that we’re doing to bring safety to America,” but quickly “sell each other down the river if it’s just to protect themselves.”

Noem added that leakers are “breaking the law” and will be prosecuted. She said DHS would “go after” leakers who “threaten [law enforcement] lives.” 

Noem also told Hannity that border agents apprehended just 200 illegals on Saturday, a 15-year record low.