Form I-9 for Your Crew: Seasonal Rehires, Subs and an ICE Inspection

If ICE serves you a Notice of Inspection, you get three business days to hand over a Form I-9 for every employee on your payroll. That includes many who have already left. ICE does not need a warrant. What decides the next few months is what is in that folder: forms on the right edition, signed on time, kept for the right period, and rehires handled correctly.

Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, is the federal form you complete for every person you hire to work in the United States, citizens included. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) publishes it, and the requirement comes from 8 U.S.C. 1324a, the employer rules in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. It is a legal requirement, not a best practice. You never send it to the government. You keep it, and you produce it when asked.

Here is the form in the order your crew meets it, then the parts that trip up seasonal trades: the spring recall, subcontracted labor and the inspection itself.

Check your Form I-9 edition before the first hire

The current Form I-9 carries an edition date of 01/20/25 and expires on 05/31/2027, according to USCIS. USCIS still accepts forms with an 08/01/23 edition date and the same 05/31/2027 expiration. The 08/01/23 printing that expired on 07/31/2026 is not. If you printed a stack of forms a few years ago, check the expiration date at the top of page 1. Using an out-of-date version counts as a technical failure in an inspection.

Day one: Section 1

The new employee completes and signs Section 1 no later than their first day of work. They can do it earlier, but only after they have accepted your job offer. In Section 1 they state their citizenship or immigration status. You do not fill it in for them, and you do not tell them which box to tick.

By day three: Section 2 and the documents

You complete Section 2 within three business days of the first day. For a crew member who starts on Monday, that means Thursday. In Section 2 you record the documents you examined, in person, to confirm identity and permission to work.

The worker chooses the documents, not you. They can show one document from List A, such as a U.S. passport or a permanent resident card. Or they can show one from List B, which proves identity, such as a driver’s license, plus one from List C, which proves work authorization, such as an unrestricted Social Security card. USCIS keeps the full lists. Every document must be an unexpired original.

That choice matters more than it looks. Asking for “a green card” or “your passport”, or for more documents than the form requires, can be an unfair documentary practice under the federal anti-discrimination rules. Accept what reasonably appears to be genuine and relates to the person in front of you.

Two timing exceptions catch short jobs. If the employee hands you a receipt for a lost or stolen document, you generally must accept it, and they bring the replacement within 90 days. But for work lasting less than three business days, both sections are due on day one, and you cannot accept a receipt.

The spring recall: a new form or not?

This is the question seasonal contractors face every year. You lay off part of the landscaping or roofing crew in November, and in March you call them back. Do they fill in a new Form I-9?

Often, no. The federal regulation, 8 CFR 274a.2, treats someone who is “temporarily laid off for lack of work” or “engaged in seasonal employment” as continuing in their employment, not as a new hire. The condition is that they had a reasonable expectation of coming back the whole time. You carry the burden of showing it. A written recall letter, a history of bringing the same people back each spring, and not filling their positions permanently all help.

If you actually ended someone’s employment and rehire them, the answer changes. Within three years of their original form, you can either complete Supplement B or start a new form. Supplement B is the rehire section on page 4, which used to be called Section 3. After three years, it must be a new form. Either way, look at the old form when they return. If their work authorization has expired, you reverify it on Supplement B.

Reverification has limits too. You never reverify a U.S. citizen, a permanent resident who showed a green card, or a List B identity document. Doing it anyway can count as asking for more documents than the law requires.

Keeping the forms

Keep each form for three years after the date of hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later. The Handbook for Employers (M-274), USCIS’s official guidance on the form, gives a simple test. For someone who worked less than two years, keep the form for three years from their first day. For someone who worked longer, keep it for one year after they leave.

Store the forms together, apart from personnel files, so you can pull every one in a hurry. Paper is fine. The fillable PDF from the USCIS site must be printed and signed by hand, because it does not meet the federal standards for electronic signatures. If you are an E-Verify employer in good standing, you can examine documents by live video instead of in person. That option has its own conditions, including keeping copies and offering it to everyone at a hiring site.

When the labor comes through a subcontractor

You do not complete a Form I-9 for a genuine independent contractor, or for workers supplied by a staffing agency or a labor subcontractor. Their own employer does. That relief has an edge. Under federal law, using a contract or subcontract to obtain workers while knowing they are not authorized to work counts as hiring them yourself (8 U.S.C. 1324a(a)(4)).

The paperwork also follows the relationship, not the label. A crew member you pay on a 1099 who is really your employee still needs a Form I-9. If you are unsure which side of that line someone sits on, our guide to worker classification sets out the tests.

The three days after a Notice of Inspection

A Notice of Inspection is ICE’s written demand to see your I-9s. It comes from Homeland Security Investigations and starts an audit. Under the regulation you get at least three business days to produce the forms, and refusing or delaying is itself a violation. ICE’s inspection guide says it usually asks for supporting records too, such as payroll, a list of current and former employees and your business licenses.

After the review, ICE may send a compliance letter or a notice of technical or procedural failures. It may also send a warning notice or a Notice of Intent to Fine. For technical mistakes, such as a missing date, you get at least 10 business days to correct them. Uncorrected ones become substantive violations. If ICE proposes a fine, you have 30 days to request a hearing.

The fines are per form. Under the Department of Justice’s current table in 28 CFR 85.5, paperwork violations run from $288 to $2,861 for each person. Knowingly hiring or keeping an unauthorized worker costs $716 to $5,724 per worker for a first offense, and more after that. The Justice Department kept those 2025 amounts unchanged for 2026. ICE adjusts each fine for your business size, good faith, the seriousness of the violation, whether the worker was unauthorized, and your history.

States that add E-Verify

E-Verify is the free online system run by USCIS and the Social Security Administration that checks a new hire’s Form I-9 details against government records. Under federal law it is voluntary, except for federal contracts that include the E-Verify clause. Some states make it mandatory. Arizona and South Carolina require it of essentially all private employers. Florida requires it once you have 25 or more employees. North Carolina also starts at 25, but its count leaves out people employed less than nine months a year, which matters for seasonal crews. Utah requires it at 150 employees, under a law due to lapse by 1 July 2027. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee have their own mandates too, so check your state’s current statute before relying on any threshold. E-Verify never replaces the Form I-9. You still complete one for every hire.

None of this is hard once it is routine. Give each new crew member Section 1 on day one and finish Section 2 before day three. File the form in its own folder, and write the recall date on your seasonal layoffs. Then a Notice of Inspection becomes a three-day errand instead of a crisis. For the rest of the hiring paperwork, from the EIN to workers’ comp, see what hiring your first employee costs and our workers’ comp requirements guide.