Romney fires company after Globe investigation

By Maria Cramer and Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff

Former governor Mitt Romney has continued to employ a company that uses illegal immigrants at his home in Belmont, a Boston Globe investigation has found.

This evening, responding to inquiries from the newspaper, Romney's presidential campaign announced that he had fired the company for failing to comply with federal law.

"After this same issue arose last year, I gave the company a second chance with very specific conditions. They were instructed to make sure people working for the company were of legal status,'' Romney said in a statement issued by his campaign. "We personally met with the company in order to inform them about the importance of this matter. The owner of the company guaranteed us, in very certain terms, that the company would be in total compliance with the law going forward.''

Romney has made illegal immigration a central campaign issue in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. At last week's Republican debate in St. Petersburg, Fla., Romney was quick to attack Rudy Giuliani for safeguarding illegal immigrants in New York City.

Yet early the next morning after the debate, illegal immigrants from Central America were in plain view on the lawn in front of Romney’s salmon-colored mansion in Belmont. Chatting in Spanish, they hustled to rake massive clumps of leaves, dump them in barrels, and clear debris from his tennis court.

Their boss, Ricardo Saenz of Chelsea, was the same man who for a decade brought illegal immigrants and others to work for Romney, whom he had met through their shared Mormon faith. A year ago, a Globe article revealed that illegal immigrants landscaped Romney’s 2.5-acre property.

In the past two months, The Globe observed Saenz and his crew at Romney's estate once a week, except during the week of Thanksgiving. The lawn work at Romney's usually took place around noon, then the crew drove a few houses down the street to the home owned by Taggart Romney, one of Mitt Romney's sons, where they worked for about an hour. The work was sandwiched in between other jobs elsewhere, on workdays that sometimes lasted 10 to 12 hours.

Last week, the Globe interviewed two of the three workers who were at Romney's house on Thursday. Both said they were illegal immigrants from Guatemala; one of the immigrants said the third worker was also here illegally. After the first snow, one of the workers said he went on to another job for another employer after Saenz said they would not return to Romney's house until next spring.

Saenz, 54, said the workers he hired were here legally.

"They have papers," he said during an interview at his house today. "I copied them."

He declined to show reporters copies of the workers' legal papers. He said he did not verify the employees’ documents with the government.