PROVIDENCE — Nine months after Governor Carcieri issued an executive order requiring contractors doing business with the state to check the immigration status of new hires through the federal E-Verify system, Rhode Islanders got their first chance yesterday to comment on the controversial program.

Supporters applauded the mandate as helping to keep jobs in the hands of legal citizens at a time when unemployment has soared.

But critics, including the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, lambasted the program, saying it relies on a faulty federal database that has been known to wrongly identify people as illegal immigrants.

Worse, they say the state took months to draft regulations governing the program –– relying first on emergency rules –– and asked for public input only after it compiled a permanent set of regulations.

“If the administration actually cared about people’s comments and doing the process correctly, they wouldn’t have gone ahead [with the executive order] without issuing regulations in the first place,” Shannah Kurland of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association testified.

Yesterday’s hearing came a day after a Superior Court judge rejected a bid by the ACLU and others to block the administration from continuing to implement the emergency regulations without a hearing.

Putting the legal wrangling aside, ACLU coordinator Amy Vitale testified yesterday that the order’s permanent rules are too vague, leaving room for misuse or abuse.

Martha Yager knows all about the pitfalls of E-Verify. Before moving to Rhode Island several months ago, Yager took a job with a New Hampshire nonprofit organization that voluntarily screened new hires using E-Verify. When her employer ran her name, Yager came back as a possible non-match –– program lingo for someone who may be in the country illegally.

Yager, an American citizen, knew immediately what had gone wrong. She had recently married and the Social Security Administration had apparently misspelled her new name. It took her nine months to straighten out the problem.

“I’m the self-professed poster child for what can go wrong with E-Verify,” Yager testified yesterday.

But supporters of the executive order said errors are the exception and praised employers who have signed up for the program.

“The only people it would harm would be the people who are here illegally,” said Terry Gorman, president of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement.

A total of 2,500 vendors doing business with –– or hoping to do business with –– the state have enrolled in E-Verify, according to a Carcieri spokeswoman. Their continued use of the system will be monitored through random audits, she said.

The governor’s executive order applies only to companies applying for state contracts. A separate proposal before the legislature this year would have required all Rhode Island businesses to use the federal screening system. But that bill died in the final days of the session.

Though it was months in the making, yesterday’s hearing came as a surprise to some who attended, having learned of it only after reading about it in the newspaper. Notice of the event could not be found on the state Web page where state and local meeting notices are posted. The governor’s office said Tuesday it believed it had followed state law, but later agreed to hold a second hearing on Jan. 8 “in an abundance of caution.”

Carcieri administration lawyer Peter Dennehy told yesterday’s participants that an additional meeting is necessary to accommodate the large volume of citizens who wished to offer testimony.

But as he spoke, fewer than a dozen people sat before him. The hearing lasted just 45 minutes.

cneedham@projo.com