Thread: Illegal immigrant ready to return home

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Illegal immigrant ready to return home
By JAMIE SATTERFIELD, satterfield@knews.com
January 17, 2007


There's nothing like a little time behind bars to inspire a bit of soul searching.
That's what an illegal immigrant who has confessed to making and selling a couple dozen fake Permanent Resident Cards - better known as green cards - and other identification documents told a federal judge Tuesday.

"Actually being in jail has awakened me," Francisco Sebastian Andres told Senior U.S. District Judge Leon Jordan.

Andres is a Guatemalan who crossed the U.S. border illegally, came to Knoxville and set up house on Morelia Avenue. Last spring, authorities got a tip that Andres was peddling fake green cards, Social Security cards and other documents to other illegal immigrants for $150 per document, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Will Mackie.

Illegal immigrants used the documents to bolster claims of legal residency in the United States and to get jobs.

Mackie said an undercover officer used a tipster in the case as a go-between to arrange to buy a fake green card. The undercover officer and Andres met July 26, and a deal between them was struck.

The undercover officer agreed to pay Andres his $150 fee and provide at Andres' request a passport-type photograph, Mackie wrote in a plea agreement.

When Andres supplied the undercover officer with the fake green card, he was arrested and the Morelia Avenue house searched. Agents "found 15 counterfeit Permanent Resident Cards, along with a number of other items associated with production of counterfeit immigration and identity cards, such as Polaroid cameras, laminate sheets and heat sealer equipment, a typewriter, a computer scanner and miscellaneous portions of scraps of documents relating to Permanent Resident Cards, Social Security cards and a Mexican driver's license," Mackie wrote.

Andres later admitted in a plea brokered by Assistant Federal Defender Kim Tollison that he produced nearly two dozen counterfeit cards over several months for "various people," the plea stated.

Andres told Jordan at a sentencing hearing Tuesday that faking the documents was his only crime and that he is eager to return to Guatemala, where his daughter lives.

"When you are finished with your incarceration, you want to go back to Guatemala and be a good father and support your family, is that what you're telling me?" Jordan asked Andres

Via an interpreter, Andres replied, "Yes."

Deportation will put Andres back in Guatemala - after he spends the 10-month federal prison term Jordan doled out at Tuesday's hearing.

Jamie Satterfield may be reached at 865-342-6308.

Copyright 2007, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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Copyright 2007, KnoxNews. All Rights Reserved.

Isn't it amazing how they all "get religion" once they get CAUGHT?

Deportation will put Andres back in Guatemala - after he spends the 10-month federal prison term Jordan doled out at Tuesday's hearing.

Ten months, that's it??????

I wonder what an American citizen would get for committing a crime like that?

I say good put all of them in jail and throw Bush in there with them!!!