Former cashier speaks out after Market Basket in New Bedford suspends 47 employees
A former Market Basket cashier is speaking out anonymously to Telemundo in Spanish after 47 employees of the New Bedford store were suspended over their paperwork.
"I felt so sad. We are not disposable. We are human beings with children who depend on us," the woman said. "The boss tells me, 'I'm very sorry, but you can’t continue working here,' and I asked him, 'Why?' He said, 'Because you don’t have a Social Security number.'"
A Market Basket spokesperson said the Department of Homeland Security asked for the I-9s of employees in 2023 and that the investigation found the paperwork had not been properly updated, leading to the workers’ suspensions.
“On June 25, 2025, HSI served Market Basket with a Notice of Suspect Documents and found 167 employees that were unauthorized to work in the United States. No arrests have been made at this time, and the investigation is ongoing," a senior DHS official said in a statement when asked about the suspensions.
The statement did not say where the 167 employees work in the grocery store chain.
"It's sad because you have this population that 47 people's lives has been put upside down," said Helena DaSilva Hughes at the Immigrants' Assistance Center in New Bedford. "I think that paperwork hasn't been accurate for a very long time, but I think now under this administration, there's been more enforcement. I think that is a combination of using documents that were false or using a tax ID or using just regular working permit that has expired and the employer basically had not checked their documents."
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James Mohs, a professor of accounting and taxation at the University of New Haven, said federal matching programs will eventually notice something is off.
"If there is an irregularity between the tax filing, the tax withholding, and of course the I-9, they'll all tie together at some point they have to," he said. "So what they do is that the IRS will go, 'OK, Market Basket, you have issued W-2 forms for all these employees. They did not file tax returns. Are they still employed? What's their address?' so forth and so on. And they'll trace it out that way because failure to file a tax return is a federal crime."
With all that information now in the hands of DHS, Hughes said there are fears that the layoffs are just the start and deportations could be next.
"When is it that they're going to start picking up these individuals, right? Because they have this information. So that's a huge concern of ours," she said.
A Market Basket spokesperson said in a statement that it looks forward to welcoming the employees back to work as soon as they update their paperwork.
