The US Department of Justice is suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX over allegations that it discriminated against asylees and refugees in hiring. In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the DOJ claims that, from a minimum of September 2018 to May 2022, SpaceX discouraged refugees and asylees from applying to the corporate “by wrongly stating that SpaceX can only hire U.S. residents and lawful everlasting residents.”
The lawsuit states SpaceX “did not fairly consider” and “refused to rent” the asylees and refugees who ended up applying anyway. It also alleges that SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that the US’s export control laws allowed it to only hire US residents and lawful residents. Moreover, the DOJ claims SpaceX hired “only” US residents and green card holders from September 2018 to September 2020.
The lawsuit indicates that SpaceX has been on the DOJ’s radar for a while. In May 2020, the DOJ’s Immigrant and Worker Rights Section (IER) opened an investigation into whether SpaceX was discriminating against potential hires based on citizenship or immigration status. Nonetheless, the DOJ claims SpaceX “failed to supply documents conscious of the IER’s investigation requests.”
In response to the lawsuit, SpaceX only provided the documents greater than a yr later after the IER obtained a subpoena. In November 2022, the IER told SpaceX that it finished its investigation into the corporate, stating that it “found reasonable cause to imagine that SpaceX had engaged in a pattern or practice of unfair immigration-related employment practices.”
A number of the evidence within the lawsuit comes directly from Musk himself. The DOJ cites two videos of Musk speaking about hiring restrictions. Just per week after the investigation began, Musk even wrote in a post on X — formerly Twitter — that “US law requires a minimum of a green card to be hired at SpaceX, as rockets are considered advanced weapons technology.”
“Our investigation found that SpaceX did not fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees due to their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire no matter their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, says in a press release.
The DOJ is in search of fair consideration and back pay for asylees and refugees who “were deterred or denied employment” at SpaceX and can also be in search of civil penalties in an amount that might be determined in court. Within the meantime, the DOJ is encouraging asylees and refugees to contact the IER in the event that they applied for a job at SpaceX or were discouraged from applying to the corporate.