A Falcon 9 rocket is displayed outside the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) headquarters on January 28, 2021 in Hawthorne, California.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
The U.S. Department of Justice sued SpaceX on Thursday, alleging Elon Musk’s space company discriminated in its hiring practices against refugees and other people granted asylum within the U.S.
The lawsuit says between 2018 and 2022, SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that export control laws limited its hiring to U.S. residents and lawful everlasting residents.
The DOJ has been investigating SpaceX since June 2020, when the department’s Immigrant and Worker Rights Section received a grievance of employment discrimination from a non-U.S. citizen.
“Our investigation found that SpaceX didn’t 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, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said in a press release.
Clarke added that the DOJ’s investigation found “SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from looking for work opportunities at the corporate.”
In line with data SpaceX provided, the DOJ said that over a virtually 4 period and across greater than 10,000 hires, the corporate “hired just one individual who was an asylee and identified as such in his application.”
That lone hire got here about 4 months after the DOJ notified SpaceX of its investigation.
SpaceX didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment. The suit was filed within the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a division of the DOJ that adjudicates immigration cases.
The DOJ lawsuit seeks to win “fair consideration and back pay for asylees and refugees who were deterred or denied employment at SpaceX attributable to the alleged discrimination,” in addition to civil penalties and policy changes from the corporate.
In 2021, the DOJ’s Immigrant and Worker Rights Section alleged that SpaceX was stonewalling a subpoena related to its investigation and requested a judge order that SpaceX comply with its request for documents related to how the corporate hires. SpaceX had filed a petition with a DOJ administrative tribunal to dismiss the subpoena on grounds that it exceeded the scope of IER’s authority, but that petition was denied.
IER opened its probe after a person named Fabian Hutter complained that SpaceX discriminated against him in March 2020 when he was asked about his citizenship status during a job interview for a technical strategy associate position.
Hutter just isn’t a U.S. citizen, but in keeping with a document filed by SpaceX in response to a DOJ subpoena in 2021, he’s a “lawful everlasting [U.S.] resident holding dual citizenship from Austria and Canada.”
Hutter declined to comment on the suit when contacted by CNBC.
Read the DOJ’s lawsuit below:
– CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct that the U.S. Department of Justice sued SpaceX, alleging the corporate discriminated in its hiring practices against refugees and other people granted asylum within the U.S. A previous version misstated the character of the alleged violation.