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In June 2022, Mehmet Oz — the TV personality known as Dr. Oz and the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania — posted a tweet in which he pledged to fight to end illegal immigration. In response, the left-wing commentator Brian Tyler Cohen accused Oz of hypocrisy, claiming that his own family business had been caught illegally hiring thousands of immigrants using fake names. Cohen wrote: Cohen's claims were further boosted when the left-wing Facebook page Occupy Democrats posted a version of the tweet to its 10 million followers. Those social media posts referred to a real Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) case involving a Pennsylvania company called Asplundh Tree Expert. However, by describing Asplundh as Oz's family business, they grossly exaggerated and distorted its actual ties to Oz himself, and his lack of involvement in the company's affairs. As a result, we're issuing a rating of False. In September 2017, ICE announced that Asplundh had agreed to pay $95 million — including $80 million in forfeiture and $15 million in civil payments — to settle a major immigration enforcement case. In a news release, ICE described it as the largest civil settlement agreement ever levied by ICE, and added: In court filings, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania stated that federal audits had found at least 100 Asplundh employees were ineligible to work in the United States, and that these workers subsequently quit or were fired. However, Asplundh was accused of abusing the Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify system by knowingly rehiring these former employees under different names and using different Social Security numbers for them. Checking those numbers on the E-Verify system would yield a match to a real person authorized to work in the U.S., even though that wasn't actually the person who was being hired. Operating in this way afforded Asplundh managers plausible deniability about the illegal scheme. Neither court filings nor federal government news releases about the case specified the total number of unauthorized workers in question. However, prosecutors did stipulate that the fraudulent rehiring scheme involved workers throughout many regions in the United States over a four-year period between 2010 and 2014. Given that Asplundh had 35,000 employees in total, as of 2018, it was certainly plausible that the number of workers embroiled in the scheme came to thousands, as Cohen claimed in his tweet. Since June 1985, Oz has been married to the former Lisa Lemole. Her mother, Emily Jane Asplundh Lemole, was herself the daughter of Carl Hjalmar Asplundh Sr., who co-founded the family business in 1928, along with his two brothers Lester and Griffith. Lemole is therefore a granddaughter of one of the company's founders. Over the decades, several generations of Asplundh family members have worked for the company in various capacities and at various levels. The CEO of the company during the period involved in the ICE investigation was Scott Asplundh — the grandson of co-founder Griffith Asplundh and second cousin of Lemole. Oz and Lemole also own shares in the company. Federal Election Commission records show that between 2008 and 2020, the couple contributed a total of $51,000 to the Asplundh Tree Expert Political Action Committee, which in turn distributed campaign funding to various Republican candidates. In each of those filings, Oz and Lemole listed themselves as shareholders. However, we could find no evidence whatsoever to suggest that either Oz or Lemole have ever been employed by the company, or involved in any decision-making there. In February, a spokesperson for Oz's campaign told the New York Post as much, stating: Notwithstanding Lemole's obvious familial ties to the company, it would be misleading to describe it as her family business. She does not work for the company, and it's not her business. And since Oz is connected to the Asplundhs only through his marriage to Lemole, it is even more misleading to describe the company as his family business, as Cohen did in his tweet.
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