On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced the arrest of Montenegro national Radule Bojovic, who was employed as a police officer in the western Chicago suburb of Hanover Park. According to DHS, Bojovic overstayed a six-month tourist visa that required him to leave the country by March 31, 2015. Yet Bojovic’s situation appears to be more complex, and it provides a launch point to consider an even more complex issue: the logistics of illegal immigration.
As federal immigration officers continue to face widespread opposition and little law enforcement cooperation in Chicago, the optics of Bojovic’s arrest were too good to pass up. “[Illinois] Governor J.B. Pritzker [D] doesn’t just allow violent illegal aliens to terrorize Illinois’s communities, he allows illegal aliens to work as sworn police officers,” alleged DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “What kind of police department gives criminal illegal aliens badges and guns?”
But the Village of Hanover Park would not be dunked on so easily. “Before hiring Officer Bojovic, the Village confirmed that he was legally authorized by the federal government to work in the United States,” it responded. “At the time of his hire, Officer Bojovic presented the Village with a Work Authorization Card, which was issued by the federal government’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The card was valid and recently renewed. We also conducted a full background check, including his criminal history with both the Illinois State Police and the FBI.”
Well, isn’t that a juicy twist? A man allegedly in the country illegally also had a valid work authorization issued by the federal government. This work authorization appears to be a parting gift of the Biden administration, as the Hanover Park Police Pension Fund approved Bojovic’s hiring on January 8, 2025.
Assuming both DHS and Hanover Park got their facts right, there must be more to the story that is not publicly known. Something happened in the intervening 10 years to enable a visa overstayer to obtain work authorization. Did Bojovic really depart the country and return legitimately at a later date? Did he, “under penalty of perjury,” falsely claim an “eligibility category” on his work authorization application that he had no right to claim? Was Bojovic in fact eligible for work authorization under one of the great variety of qualifying options? Did the Biden administration ignore his lack of qualification and grant him a work authorization card anyways? Was this his first work authorization, or had he obtained other jobs in the interim?
As is clear from this list, the possible options for what went wrong are so varied that is impossible even to determine which narrative fits the facts of this case without further investigation. For now, all that can be said with certainty is that the work authorization process for noncitizens is not perfect. Once again, biblical wisdom holds true that, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17).
Yet readers may also reflect that this is not the first time that DHS has found an alleged illegal immigrant employed in a position of public trust. Only three weeks ago, ICE arrested Guyana national Ian Roberts, who was employed as the superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools. (Documentary evidence against Roberts’ presence in the U.S. is much stronger, since a federal judge issued a final order of removal against him in May 2024. Nevertheless, he was also able to supply documents to support his ability to work.) On Thursday, Jackie Norris (D), chairwoman of Des Moines School Board, suspended her campaign for U.S. Senate because of the fallout from Roberts’s arrest.
The point of raising this previous incident is to establish a pattern. Behind public debates over the legal standing of immigrants employed in positions of trust stands the reality that illegal immigrants can obtain and have obtained work authorization. This is a key distinction: if everyone followed the law, only immigrants with a legal right to be in America would be able to obtain work authorization. This is the whole point of requiring businesses to check with the federal government before hiring an immigrant — a process that may have failed the Village of Hanover Park.
Yet a significant number of illegal immigrants have obtained work credentials — not only gifted grifters like Ian Roberts. In August, Indian national Harjinder Singh caused a fatal accident when he made an illegal U-turn on a Florida freeway in a semi-truck. Authorities discovered that Singh could not understand English-language road signs, yet the states of Washington and California had still issued him a commercial driver’s license (CDL). “If states had followed the rules, this driver would never have been behind the wheel, and three precious lives would still be with us,” lamented U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. “This crash was a preventable tragedy directly caused by reckless decisions and compounded by despicable failures.”
Upon review, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) revoked thousands of commercial licenses from truck drivers who could not speak English. The department now requires states to comply with stricter rules when issuing CDLs, or risk losing their federal transportation funding. California, which improperly issued 25% of the non-domiciled CDLs reviewed by the DOT, has yet to comply.
A California government inadvertently advertised the extent to which illegal immigrants are working in the U.S. once again this week, when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors proclaimed a local emergency on the theory that federal immigration enforcement operations left many illegal immigrants too scared to go to work. The supervisors concluded that taxpayers should help these illegal immigrants pay their rent.
This brings us to the logistics of illegal immigration. In August, Pew Research Center estimated that there were a record 14 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2023, with “continued growth into 2024 and a decrease in 2025.” (DHS claims that two million illegal immigrants have left the country since January 20.) Whatever the exact number — and it’s a lot — debates over immigration too often overlook the questions: where are all those people, and what are they doing?
The L.A. County emergency exposes the answer: millions of illegal immigrants are working jobs and living in homes or apartments. The Center for Migration Studies calculates that “the U.S. workforce includes 8.5 million undocumented workers,” concentrated in jobs such as construction, housekeeping, food services, manufacturing, and retail. The Center for Immigration Studies estimated in February that 88% (4.7 million) of the jobs added during the Biden administration were filled by immigrants, with 60% of those jobs going to illegal immigrants. By contrast, “Employment of the U.S.-born is up just 645,000 since January 2020.”
Are American citizens having a difficult time finding work, or at least work that can support them? At least part of the reason is that millions of jobs have been filled by illegal immigrants. The same goes for housing. Are rental prices breaking the bank for American citizens? Are home prices shutting American citizens out the dignity of ownership? At least part of the reason is that millions of illegal immigrants live in American domiciles, taking millions of housing units off the market.
The worst of it is that the illegal immigrant population expanded dramatically during the Biden administration. Suddenly, the American economy had to absorb millions of extra workers and home-dwellers every year — without a corresponding expansion in the number of jobs and homes. This inevitably elbowed out American citizens, or forced those just entering the labor or home market to face more competition than they otherwise would have.
The media tends to dismiss the claim that illegal immigrants take away opportunities from American citizens as a racially-tinged populist talking point. But the demographics of the question are far less important than the logistics. It doesn’t matter whether illegal immigrants hail from India, Guyana, or Montenegro. What matters is that the U.S. government has established an orderly process by which foreigners can legally immigrate with minimal disruption to the lives of citizens and with the maximum opportunity for assimilation.
When a lawless administration opens the border to millions of immigrants, the resulting chaos hurts not only many immigrants, but Americans as well.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared here.
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