2026-09-19
ICE's I-9 audits ran at roughly 10 times 2024's pace in 2025. What happens to the ID photo you emailed for onboarding?
Somewhere in the first three business days of a new job, before the first paycheck, someone hands you Form I-9 and asks to see a passport, or a driver's license plus your Social Security card — and increasingly, to keep a photo or scan of whichever one you show. That paperwork moment has gotten heavier this year for a reason that has nothing to do with you personally: Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations unit has been auditing employers over that exact form at a pace employment-law firms tracking the agency's own filings describe as roughly ten times 2024's rate, and ICE's own release says it delivered more than 5,200 I-9 audit notices to businesses nationwide in a two-phase operation since January 2025. None of that changes what the form has always required. What it changes is how much employers now feel they need to keep on file, for how long, and what that means for the copy of your own ID that's sitting in an inbox, a phone gallery, or a Downloads folder somewhere right now.
What Section 2 actually asks you to hand over
The form itself only needs an employer to look. USCIS's own list of acceptable documents gives you two paths: one List A document that proves both identity and work authorization on its own — a U.S. passport, a Permanent Resident Card, an Employment Authorization Document — or a List B document that only proves identity (commonly a driver's license) paired with a List C document that only proves work authorization (commonly a Social Security card or a birth certificate). By law, the employer must complete that examination within three business days of your first day of paid work. What isn't required by the form is a copy: USCIS's own handbook for employers says photocopying is optional, not mandatory. But if an employer does keep a copy, the same handbook requires them to retain it — and produce it at inspection — alongside the form itself, and retention for the I-9 record runs three years after your hire date or one year after you stop working there, whichever is later. Put plainly: the photo of your Social Security card from a job you left years ago can still be sitting in a file today, and with audit volume up, more employers than before are choosing to keep that photo rather than risk not having it.
Remote hires now transmit the scan before anyone verifies anything
For years, Section 2 meant a document physically in front of a human being. That changed permanently for one category of employer. Since August 1, 2023, under a final DHS rule, an employer enrolled in E-Verify and in good standing may examine your documents over a live video call instead of in person — but USCIS's own guidance on the alternative procedure requires the employee to transmit a copy of the documents, front and back, to the employer first, and requires the employer to retain that transmitted copy for the same multi-year window described above. A second federal system adds a separate upload step of its own: E-Verify's photo matching applies to four List A documents — the U.S. passport, the passport card, the Permanent Resident Card, and the Employment Authorization Document — and if the photo E-Verify displays doesn't match the one on your document, the employer is prompted to upload a photo of your document directly into E-Verify itself, a Department of Homeland Security system that has nothing to do with your employer's own files. "Send me a photo of your ID for onboarding" isn't sloppy HR process anymore for a growing share of employers; for remote hires at an E-Verify employer, it's the federally defined procedure.
The stack keeps getting bigger, and it keeps getting breached
Two things are true about that first column at once: there's more of it than there used to be, and the places it eventually lands keep proving they can't hold it safely. On enforcement, ICE's own numbers back up the "roughly ten times" framing employment-law firms have been using this year — in April 2025, ICE's Denver field office announced more than $8 million in fines against three local cleaning companies for I-9 and unauthorized-hire violations, with one company, CCS Denver, fined $6,186,171 alone after auditors found a 100% substantive violation rate and at least 87 unauthorized workers. Fines for the paperwork violations themselves — a missing signature, an unretained form — now run $288 to $2,861 per form under DHS's own January 2025 inflation adjustment, with knowingly employing an unauthorized worker running as high as $28,619 per person on a repeat offense. Every one of those audits means more employers deciding it's safer to keep copies of your documents than not to. And once those copies exist, the vendors employers hand HR data to have their own track record: in 2024, Complete Payroll Solutions — a payroll and HR platform serving more than 10,000 employers — discovered unusual activity in its systems and later told Texas's Attorney General that the exposed data included Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers, with a first notification round in October 2024 and a second in April 2025. That's the exact document pair Section 2 asks for from anyone using a driver's license plus an SSN card, sitting in the exact kind of vendor system your own employer may never have told you about by name.
What encrypting your own copy actually fixes
Everything in the left-hand column of that diagram is yours, and it's the ordinary kind of exposure that has nothing to do with ICE, E-Verify, or your employer's payroll vendor: the phone photo of your passport taken to satisfy a remote video verification, still sitting in your camera roll months later; the email you sent HR with your Social Security card attached, still in your Sent folder; the scan in your Downloads folder from onboarding at the last job. If a remote employer asks you to transmit that photo yourself before a video call — which, per the alternative procedure above, is now a normal, legally defined step — encrypt it first and send the passphrase by phone or text rather than in the same email thread, so the photo sitting in that mailbox indefinitely is ciphertext rather than your Social Security card. NearSeal runs the whole operation in your browser: no account, no upload, and you can watch your browser's network tab confirm nothing leaves your device while you do it.
What it honestly can't do
Encryption cannot stand in for the document examination itself — Section 2 requires an employer to actually see your real document, in person or over the approved live-video procedure, and an encrypted file that nobody can read satisfies neither. The moment a legitimate employer decrypts what you sent them and files it, whatever protection your encryption provided ends there: nothing on your end reaches into their HR system, their payroll vendor's database, or DHS's own E-Verify servers after the fact, any more than an encrypted copy on your laptop would have kept Complete Payroll Solutions' systems from being breached. And if the request never had a real interview or a verified company behind it in the first place — the same fake-recruiter paperwork scam this site has covered before — encryption offers no defense either, since you'd be handing the passphrase to the scammer along with the file; the only real check there is confirming the employer independently before you send anything.
Where NearSeal fits
For the copies that are still yours to protect, NearSeal encrypts entirely client-side with AES-256-GCM, deriving the key from your passphrase via PBKDF2-SHA256 at 220 iterations — nothing is ever uploaded. Two honest caveats specific to a file named after your own identity documents. First, NearSeal's default format authenticates the filename it stores in its header so it can't be silently tampered with, but that header isn't secret — "SSN_Card_JaneDoe.jpg.nearseal" still announces exactly what's inside even though nobody can open it. Rename the file to something unremarkable before encrypting, or use the opt-in age-encryption.org format available in the same tool, which carries no filename field at all, at the cost of losing the original name on decrypt. Second, like every file NearSeal seals, there is no passphrase recovery of any kind — and neither this nor any other encryption tool can protect a device that's already compromised: if a keylogger is running when you type the passphrase, or malware already has file-system access, it reads the plaintext before you encrypt it or after you decrypt it, no matter how strong the cipher is. What's left, once the honest limits are out of the way, is still a real and specific fix: the document that proves who you are stops being a readable file sitting in your own Sent folder, camera roll, or Downloads folder for as long as you keep it — for the exact years an I-9 record itself is required to survive.