Thread: CO - Undocumented Greeley woman faces second criminal case for fraud

By Sharon Dunn

April 12, 2012

A Greeley woman is accused of defrauding the county welfare office of nearly $50,000 over five years, and also working two jobs with a stolen Social Security number while she was receiving welfare benefits.

Maria Lara-Morua, 40, and a self-described illegal immigrant, is charged with 11 counts of forgery of a government document, two counts of theft of more than $20,000, and two counts of criminal impersonation. All are felonies, the most serious being theft, for which she could face up to 12 years in prison upon conviction, or up to 24 with aggravating circumstances.

In that five years, she’s suspected of defrauding the welfare system of $23,395 in food stamp benefits and $26,328 in family medical benefits. The Human Services department, as a result, will ask for a restitution of $49,723, according to an arrest affidavit. In that time, she served a two-year probation sentence for a similar case, in which she was accused of using two different people’s Social Security numbers to gain employment in Greeley.

In Weld District Court on Thursday, she asked through a Spanish-language interpreter for more time to figure out what she was going to do.

“I don’t think this is fair,” she said through a court interpreter.

Weld District Court Judge Thomas Quammen referred her to the state public defender for representation. She is due to return to court at 9 a.m. April 26.

According to the arrest affidavit, Lara-Morua had been receiving food stamps and family medical benefits from October 2005 to April 2010, stating that her household consisted of her and her children, omitting the fact that Luis Rey, her children’s father, also was living in the home.

She told an investigator in June 2010 that Rey was living in her home, and she failed to report him on her applications.

The affidavit stated that she was able to work at two jobs in that time, using a stolen Social Security number, netting the criminal impersonation charges. The affidavit stated that both Lara-Morua and her husband were self-declared illegal immigrants, working under someone else’s Social Security numbers.

Lara-Morua pleaded guilty in 2007 in Weld County to forgery of government-issued document, receiving a two-year probation sentence with a requirement to perform 40 hours of community service work. Her plea agreement called for dismissing one charge of criminal impersonation and one count of identity theft.

In her most recent case, though she was formally charged in June 2011, she was arrested March 23, posting a $25,000 bond to get out of jail.

Undocumented Greeley woman faces second criminal case for fraud | Greeley Tribune

Originally Posted by Jean

By Sharon Dunn

April 12, 2012

A Greeley woman is accused of defrauding the county welfare office of nearly $50,000 over five years, and also working two jobs with a stolen Social Security number while she was receiving welfare benefits.

Maria Lara-Morua, 40, and a self-described illegal immigrant, is charged with 11 counts of forgery of a government document, two counts of theft of more than $20,000, and two counts of criminal impersonation. All are felonies, the most serious being theft, for which she could face up to 12 years in prison upon conviction, or up to 24 with aggravating circumstances.

In that five years, she’s suspected of defrauding the welfare system of $23,395 in food stamp benefits and $26,328 in family medical benefits. The Human Services department, as a result, will ask for a restitution of $49,723, according to an arrest affidavit. In that time, she served a two-year probation sentence for a similar case, in which she was accused of using two different people’s Social Security numbers to gain employment in Greeley.

In Weld District Court on Thursday, she asked through a Spanish-language interpreter for more time to figure out what she was going to do.

“I don’t think this is fair,” she said through a court interpreter.

Weld District Court Judge Thomas Quammen referred her to the state public defender for representation. She is due to return to court at 9 a.m. April 26.

According to the arrest affidavit, Lara-Morua had been receiving food stamps and family medical benefits from October 2005 to April 2010, stating that her household consisted of her and her children, omitting the fact that Luis Rey, her children’s father, also was living in the home.

She told an investigator in June 2010 that Rey was living in her home, and she failed to report him on her applications.

The affidavit stated that she was able to work at two jobs in that time, using a stolen Social Security number, netting the criminal impersonation charges. The affidavit stated that both Lara-Morua and her husband were self-declared illegal immigrants, working under someone else’s Social Security numbers.

Lara-Morua pleaded guilty in 2007 in Weld County to forgery of government-issued document, receiving a two-year probation sentence with a requirement to perform 40 hours of community service work. Her plea agreement called for dismissing one charge of criminal impersonation and one count of identity theft.

In her most recent case, though she was formally charged in June 2011, she was arrested March 23, posting a $25,000 bond to get out of jail.

Undocumented Greeley woman faces second criminal case for fraud | Greeley Tribune

I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this. Instead of getting probation back in 2007, why wasn't the lady and the father of her children deported? They both admitted to being illegal aliens. Remember, this was before ICE came out with their policy granting virtually every illegal except felons temporary amnesty.

Originally Posted by MW

I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this. Instead of getting probation back in 2007, why wasn't the lady and the father of her children deported? They both admitted to being illegal aliens. Remember, this was before ICE came out with their policy granting virtually every illegal except felons temporary amnesty.

If she had produced a new American citizen in 2007, she was probably allowed to stay and keep on stealing, we wouldn't want to separate a family. I wonder how many more children she "produced" since 2007.

Multiply this by several million Maria Lara-Moruas and Luis Reys. They steal identities and they lie to the welfare department to get benefits.

“I don’t think this is fair,” she said through a court interpreter.

Still can't or won't speak English. There is nothing "fair" about the way she cheated, lied and stole.

Interesting article on "migration".

July 2009 Volume 15 Number 3

Agriprocessors, Greeley, Poultry

The immigration raid at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa continues to reverberate among residents and in court. The US Supreme Court on May 4, 2009 ruled unanimously that federal identity-theft laws may not be used against unauthorized workers who used false Social Security numbers to get jobs unless they knew the SSN that they were using belonged to someone else.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on May 12, 2008 arrested 389 workers at Agriprocessors. Within eight days 297 mostly Guatemalans pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that resulted in five-month sentences followed by deportation for "knowingly" using SSNs that belonged to others to get jobs at Agriprocessors. Prosecutors warned the arrested workers that, if they did not plead guilty, they would be charged with aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory two-year sentence.

This "rush to judgment" was criticized by migrant advocates, who argued that the illiterate migrants did not understand that they were pleading guilty to criminal charges. After the Supreme Court decision, immigration lawyers asked the US Attorney General to dismiss the guilty pleas of the Guatemalans.

In the Flores-Figueroa vs US case (No. 08-10, the Supreme Court struck down the additional two years of prison added to the sentence of a Mexican steel worker who first used a false SSN that belonged to no one and later used an SSN belonging to someone else. Lower courts added two years to his prison time for "knowingly" using another person's SSN. The Supreme Court decision removes a weapon that has been used by federal prosecutors to quickly extract guilty pleas from some unauthorized workers.

A Los Angeles Times article on May 12, 2009 chronicled the fate of Postville, reporting that the town is facing bankruptcy. During the raid, 500 agents descended on Postville, making it the largest immigration raid in US history. Most of the workers were immediately deported or pleaded guilty to immigration or document charges, served some jail time and were sent home. Several dozen immigrants, mostly women, were released to care for children. They are still in Postville, wearing electronic ankle bracelets as they resist removal.

Many Postville businesses closed; the population of the town has shrunk by half, to about 1,800 residents. There are diverging views over the ICE raid. Advocates for stricter immigration say that employers in Postville should not have been allowed to become dependent on illegal labor. Critics say the raid symbolizes problems with US immigration enforcement, which removes workers but may not target employers.

Agriprocessors opened in the late 1980s with mostly Orthodox Jews working as kosher butchers. About 10 years later, single male Guatemalans began arriving and working in the plant. After a turkey processing plant burned and did not reopen, the employment of displaced Hispanic workers at Agriprocessors increased.

Greeley. The Weld county (CO) sheriff and district attorney, under Operation Numbers Game, began their own version of immigration enforcement in October 2008, searching the records of Amalia's Translation and Tax Services in Greeley to find individuals using false Social Security numbers. According to District Attorney Ken Buck, the average return among the 1,300 suspect returns that were seized showed $800 in federal taxes paid in 2007 and, because of exemptions and earned income and child care tax credits, about $2,000 in refunds.

The sheriff used these tax return data to make arrests for identity theft; many of those arrested worked at the JBS-Swift plant in Greeley. Those arrested used other people's Social Security numbers to get hired at JBS-Swift, but used separate Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers to pay their taxes (about $50 billion in income taxes was paid by persons using ITINs, available to those who cannot get SSNs, between 1996-2003).

The ACLU sued, and a state judge on April 13, 2009 ordered the sheriff and district attorney to halt their enforcement actions, concluding that the sheriff did not have probable cause to seize the tax returns. The judge likened Operation Numbers Game to taking medical records from a doctor's office because one patient was a suspected drug user. IRS records are confidential, and the sheriff was told to return the tax returns or destroy them.

Before Operation Numbers Game was stopped, 70 people were arrested. Even though the US Supreme Court ruled in May 2009 that unauthorized workers cannot be charged with identity theft unless they knowingly use another person's SSN, those arrested in Weld county are likely to be deported by immigration judges, which use different standards than criminal courts.

Smithfield. Smithfield Packing in Tar Heel, North Carolina reached a four-year collective bargaining agreement with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1208 in June 2009. The Tar Heel plant, with 5,000 production workers slaughtering 32,000 hogs a day, is the largest in the US. Starting wages are about $10 an your, and will rise by 15 percent over four years.

Smithfield's Tar Heel plant opened in 1992, and the UFCW lost elections there in 1994 and 1997. In December 2008, the UFCW won an election on a 52-48 percent vote. Some attributed the UFCW's win to the changed workforce, which came about when a UFCW "Justice at Smithfield" campaign in 2006 resulted in a rescreening of employees for legal status. Hispanic workers who left were often replaced by Blacks— their share of plant workers rose from 20 percent in 2006 to 60 percent in 2008.

Poultry. A Tyson poultry processing plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee that employs 1,400 workers to process 1.3 million chickens a week reported that US workers were applying for jobs that pay $9 to $12 an hour. In Shelbyville, a city of 18,000, several factories have closed, prompting some laid-off workers to apply for jobs at Tyson.

On several occasions, US- and foreign-born workers lined up overnight to apply for jobs at Tyson, sometimes jostling one another to get near the front of the line at the off-site employment center that accepts applications.

Some of the Guatemalans who migrated to the US in the 1990s wound up in Georgetown, Delaware, a center of poultry production with about 5,200 residents. Sussex county is the nation's top broiler-producing county, with more than 223 million broilers produced on nearly 700 farms in 2007. Local poultry plants use the federal E-Verify system to check on the legal status of new hires.

Tacana, in the San Marcos area of Guatemala, an area with 80,000 residents in 150 villages, has been transformed by the remittances of those who worked in Delmarva poultry plants, many of whom have built homes with concrete blocks. Remittances to Guatemala were $4.3 billion in 2008, almost seven times more than the $646 million value of coffee exports.

Thurman Johnson and Kenneth Henry operated Henry's Turkey Service and Johnson & Johnson Egg Farm farms in six Midwestern states, hiring developmentally delayed workers and operating farms that they called "sheltered workshops." Many of the male workers were relatively old, and the bunkhouses in which they lived failed to pass inspection. After several workers in their sixties died, investigations were launched in Texas and Iowa.

Texas-based Pilgrim's Pride, which had 40,000 employees in 32 plants before May 2009 closures, lost $1 billion in 2008 and filed for bankruptcy December 1, 2008. On May 15, 2009, Pilgrim's closed its Douglas county, Georgia plant (and two others in other states), potentially adding 2,000 workers to the unemployment rolls in an area that has an 11 percent unemployment rate.

Local officials say that Pilgrim's decision to close the plant "plucked the heart" out of Douglas county. Pilgrim's acquired the plant by buying rival Gold Kist for $1.1 billion in 2006, and Douglas county officials complain that Pilgrim's demanded too high a price for the plant, $80 million, because it wanted to reduce the supply of chicken (internal documents valued the plant at $50 million). A bid of $35 million was rejected; the closure reduced the US supply of chicken by about two percent.

Summer Harlow, "Georgetown workers funnel cash home, but remittances drop during recession," News Journal (Wilmington), July 5, 2009. Steve Dinnen, "How an immigration raid changed a town," Christian Science Monitor, May 31, 2009. Clark Kauffman, "Register investigation: The last bunkhouse," Des Moines Register, May 24, 2009. Antonio Olivo, "Immigration raid leaves damaging mark on Postville, Iowa," Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2009. Richard Mial, "Postville struggling to find its way one year after raid," La Cross Tribune, May 12, 2009.

Agriprocessors, Greeley, Poultry - Rural Migration News | Migration Dialogue