ICE Rewrote the I-9 Rules Without Telling Anyone. Fifteen Errors That Used to Be Free Now Cost You $2,861 Each.

What moved

The following errors are now substantive, immediately fineable, with no cure period:

1. Missing employee date of birth in Section 1
2. Missing USCIS/alien number in Section 1
3. Missing date next to the employee signature
4. Missing expiration date in Section 1 where required
5. Failure to date Section 1
6. Incomplete or incorrect employee attestation
7. Use of the Spanish-language Form I-9 outside Puerto Rico
8. Missing name or title of the employer representative in Section 2
9. Failure to record the first day of employment
10. Incomplete List A, B or C document data in Section 2, even where the employer retained copies of the documents
11. Failure to date Section 2
12. Incomplete preparer/translator information (Supplement A)
13. Failure to provide a rehire date (Supplement B)
14. Failure to check the alternative-procedure box, or remote verification without E-Verify enrollment
15. Electronic I-9 system audit-trail, e-signature, or security documentation deficiencies

Item 10 deserves its own paragraph. For years, retaining a copy of the underlying document functioned as a practical safe harbor against transcription gaps in Section 2. That safe harbor is gone. The copy in your file no longer cures the blank in the box.

Item 14 creates retroactive exposure, which is the trap most employers will not see coming. Remote document examination has been available since August 2023, but only to employers enrolled in and in good standing with E-Verify. Any company that adopted remote examination during 2023 to 2025 and later lapsed from E-Verify good standing (through a lapsed MOU, a missed recertification, an acquisition that consolidated systems) now has a substantive violation on every I-9 completed during the lapse.

Still technical and curable: missing employee name on page 2, missing address in Section 1, missing business address in Section 2, and failure to use the current Form I-9 version.

The version question, answered

Use the 01/20/2025 edition, expiring 05/31/2027. The 08/01/23 edition bearing a 07/31/2026 expiration became unusable when that date passed.

USCIS's own guidance is not perfectly clear on whether an 08/01/23 form bearing the later 05/31/2027 expiration remains acceptable. Since failure to use the current version is one of the four errors that remains technical and curable, there is no downside to the conservative course and no reason to litigate the question in your own file.

The pincer: ICE wants more documentation, DOJ fines you for asking

Here is the part that makes this genuinely difficult, and the part most compliance alerts miss.

Everything above pushes employers toward demanding more documents and more information. The Department of Justice's Immigrant and Employee Rights Section penalizes exactly that, at $236 to $2,364 per individual, plus back pay.

Whirlpool Corporation settled with IER on June 15, 2026 for $125,000 in civil penalties plus a back-pay fund of up to $100,000. The conduct, at a single Iowa facility over roughly two years: requiring non-U.S. citizens to provide unnecessary additional documents for reverification, unnecessarily reverifying workers whose Permanent Resident Cards or List B identity documents had expired, and terminating workers who declined.

Neither of those documents ever triggers reverification. Lawful permanent residents are not reverified. List B identity documents are not reverified. Both errors are pure own-goals, and both are the kind a single misconfigured HRIS reverification rule reproduces across an entire workforce automatically.

Note also the direction of IER's docket. Of the enforcement actions it announced across 2026, the overwhelming majority allege discrimination against U.S. workers, a near-complete inversion of the historical caseload. In August 2026, OpenAI and Statsig paid $3.2 million ($1.2M in penalties, $2.0M in back pay) over how PERM positions were recruited.

The two agencies' incentives now point in opposite directions. The answer to both is the same: complete the form fully and accurately, using whatever documents the employee chooses to present from the Lists of Acceptable Documents. Never specify which document. Never reverify an LPR card or a List B document.

What is coming

Enforcement volume has been low relative to the rhetoric. Reporting in early 2026 indicated worksite raids declined after September 2025 and that employers had faced limited consequences.

That is changing by design. In a July 16, 2026 interview, Border Czar Tom Homan described the plan directly: "It doesn't take an 1811 special agent to do an I-9 inspection. So create a warehouse, hire a bunch of smart contractors who can batch I-9 inspections." On employer liability: "We want criminal charges. We just don't wanna arrest the illegal aliens. We wanna hold employers who circumvent the law responsible."

Batched, contractor-driven I-9 audits are a volume instrument. They do not require investigative judgment, they scale with funding, and roughly 7,000 of 10,000 planned new ICE positions had been filled by mid-2026.

What to do this quarter

1. Re-audit against the March 2026 classifications. Any internal audit scored under the old technical/substantive split understates your exposure. Prioritize Section 2 completeness; item 10 is where most files fail.
2. Confirm continuous E-Verify good standing since August 2023. If there is any gap, identify every I-9 completed remotely during it. This is the highest-severity finding in most files.
3. Audit your reverification logic, not just your forms. Pull every reverification your HRIS triggered in the last three years. If any were triggered by a Permanent Resident Card or a List B document expiring, you have Whirlpool's fact pattern.
4. Standardize on the 01/20/2025 edition and remove every prior version from circulation.
5. Screenshot and date-stamp ICE's I-9 inspection fact sheet. The page carries no last-updated date, and ICE has now demonstrated it will change the standard without notice. In an OCAHO proceeding, an undated web page is poor evidence, for them and for you.
6. Fix errors now, while you still control the timeline. Once a Notice of Inspection arrives, you have three business days to produce, ten business days to cure what remains curable, and thirty calendar days from a Notice of Intent to Fine to request an OCAHO hearing.

One note of genuine encouragement: OCAHO continues to reduce ICE-proposed penalties, cutting them 23% to 40% in recent decisions, on the reasoning that near-maximum penalties should be reserved for egregious conduct. No OCAHO decision has yet applied the March 2026 classifications. The first one to do so will matter a great deal.

There is also a real question whether a reclassification of this magnitude, adopted without notice-and-comment, survives an Administrative Procedure Act challenge. No challenge appears to have been filed. That is worth watching, and it is not a compliance strategy.