Washington yesterday pledged to step up enforcement efforts against companies that hire illegal immigrants after announcing that a major raid on manufacturer IFCO Systems had uncovered evidence that more than half of its employees were illegal immigrants.

More than 1,100 people at more than 40 IFCO sites in America were arrested and could be deported, the Associated Press reported. IFCO is based in the Netherlands.

Some observers said the action, just days before the Senate will resume work on an immigration bill, was likely a strategic move by the Bush administration. The secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, however, said the timing was just a coincidence.

“Our nation’s communities cannot be a wild frontier where illegal aliens and unscrupulous employees subvert our nation’s laws,” the assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Julie Myers, said. Among those arrested were seven company managers, six of whom, if convicted on charges of felony conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens, could face 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each illegal immigrant involved.

Under a new House bill that passed last year, such an unlawful presence in America would be a felony.

That bill has led millions of immigrants and their supporters to rally around the country behind the slogan: “We are not criminals.”

Other activists, meanwhile, have been trying to call attention to what they say is the country’s mistreatment of its noncitizen criminals.

More than 30,000 immigrant New Yorkers, many of them permanent legal residents, have been deported since Congress passed laws 10 years ago removing discretion from judges to decide their cases. All were convicted criminals, and thousands had grown up in this country and were raising American citizen children.

On Monday, the 10th anniversary of the immigration law, family members of the deported will travel to Washington to attempt to place a human face on those left behind when immigrants are banished permanently.The primary target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, criminal aliens are a generally unpopular cause, but some who are planning to attend the demonstration say their loved ones still should have been afforded the right to have a judge to decide their case.

In the nation’s capital, the demonstrators will greet senators as they return from recess and resume their attempt to iron out an immigration bill. At the forefront of the agenda will be the fate of the nation’s 12 million illegal immigrants. The senators are expected to move to step up the enforcement measures enacted in 1996, as House members did in a bill passed last year.

“We don’t want to see history repeat itself,” an organizer with the Brooklyn-based group Families for Freedom, Aarti Shahani, said. “Deportation is a mandatory minimum, and in our society it is not acceptable to rubber stamp the lifelong exile of a mom or dad or child.”

The key shift that the 1996 law ushered in was that immigrants, including those convicted of infractions as minor as jumping turnstiles, could face an automatic deportation. As a result, veterans, grandfathers, and children of American citizens have been permanently banished from America.

Those who favor stricter enforcement say the 1996 law sent the right message: America will not tolerate criminal aliens. “I think we made it clear that we were serious about going after criminals,” a former senior special agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and an advocate for tightening the borders, Michael Cutler, said.

The bill the House passed last year, and those currently under consideration in the Senate, would make enforcement tighter, such as making drunk driving or suspicion of gang activity a deportable offense for legal immigrants. “It’s going to make it worse, even the good law that came out of the Senate,” an immigration lawyer specializing in criminal deportation cases, Cheryl David, said.