Thread: CO-Judge halts Colorado ID-theft investigation

Judge halts Colorado ID-theft investigation
Apr 13, 2009 12:55 PM (45 mins ago) By IVAN MORENO


11 hrs ago: Ruling expected on legality of Colo. ID-theft case

GREELEY, Colo. (Map, News) - A judge has halted an identity theft investigation targeting illegal immigrants in Colorado, saying prosecutors wrongly seized federal income tax records to pursue suspects.

The judge on Monday ordered Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck and the Weld County Sheriff's Department to return or destroy the evidence within seven days.

Buck will appeal the ruling, said his attorney, Lisa Hogan.

Buck and sheriff's investigators allege that up to 1,300 immigrants were filing tax returns using false or stolen identities. They launched an investigation dubbed "Operation Numbers Game" last year after a Texas man alerted Weld County authorities that someone was using his identity.


The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to stop the investigation, contending the seizure of thousands of documents from Amalia's Translation and Tax Services in Greeley was illegal.

The ACLU contends the records are confidential under federal law. Weld County authorities say the records were never in possession of the IRS and are therefore not confidential.

Weld County District Judge James Hiatt ruled the seizure was over-broad and violated the privacy rights of the people whose tax records were taken. He issued a temporary injunction halting the investigation.

Charges had already been filed against at least 60 people, and some defendants pleaded guilty to identity theft and criminal impersonation. Hiatt said he couldn't overturn those case but expected at least some of the defendants to seek to withdraw their pleas.

Immigrant advocates say the people charged were being punished for doing what the law requires them to do - pay taxes.

Everyone who earns income in the U.S. is required to pay taxes regardless of legal status. To streamline the process for those who don't have Social Security numbers, people can get an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, from the Internal Revenue Service.

Immigration attorneys say that's what the people arrested in Weld County were doing to file their taxes.

Buck argues the defendants were violating U.S. law by being in the country illegally in the first place.



http://www.examiner.com/a-1958217~Judge ... ation.html

Immigrant advocates say the people charged were being punished for doing what the law requires them to do - pay taxes.

The law requires them to go home and get in line as a legal immigrant...if you want to say they need to follow the law, they need to follow all of it, not just the convenient part that gets them a tax return...

Weld County District Judge James Hiatt ruled the seizure was over-broad and violated the privacy rights of the people whose tax records were taken. He issued a temporary injunction halting the investigation.

Is there any government agency working to full capacity?

Immigrant advocates say the people charged were being punished for doing what the law requires them to do - pay taxes.

LOL.....I'm required to pay taxes, pay bills, does robbing a bank count as obeying the law to be able to do so?

Throw this judge off the bench. Some poor American is going to find out that he/she owes a lot more taxes for simultaneously working in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

Buck and sheriff's investigators allege that up to 1,300 immigrants were filing tax returns using false or stolen identities. They launched an investigation dubbed "Operation Numbers Game" last year after a Texas man alerted Weld County authorities that someone was using his identity.

This translation and tax service could very well have used a SSN multiple times. It sounds like the illegal is innocent, but the victim is the one guilty.

Here is the New York Times version:

April 14, 2009
Judge Halts Investigation Into ID Theft In Colorado
By DAN FROSCH
GREELEY, Colo. — A state judge here ordered a halt Monday to a controversial identity theft investigation that has implicated more than 1,000 suspected illegal immigrants, ruling that the search at the start of the investigation was unlawful and violated privacy rights.

The judge, James H. Hiatt of Colorado District Court, ruled that the Weld County Sheriff’s Office lacked probable cause last October when investigators seized thousands of tax returns and other documents from a Greeley tax preparer, Amalia Cerrillo, the owner of Amalia’s Translation and Tax Services.

Local authorities used the documents in arresting dozens of suspects, most of them illegal immigrants, on charges involving fraudulent Social Security numbers. Illegal immigrants often use such numbers to get jobs.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado against the Weld County district attorney, Kenneth R. Buck, and Sheriff John Cooke, who led the investigation.

Comparing the search to a hypothetical police raid on a doctor’s office in search of medical records of drug addicts, Judge Hiatt said the authorities had operated on the premise that “somewhere in Ms. Cerrillo’s records of some customers, there would be evidence of some crime by someone.â€

The coward judge has announced his retirement from the bench.

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars this corrupt piece of excrement was paid to stop the investigation into the illegals and their tax-form lady enabler (who is back in business). I hope someone investigates the judge and puts him away for life and kicks the tax-enabling lady out of the country.

Supposedly the 1,300 tax forms will be burned in 5 days = destruction of evidence. Why don't the IRS and/or Colorado tax authorities step in and seize the tax forms which are the property of the government? The fact that they won't shows that our gov't is completely out of control and completely corrupt. They keep raising taxes on honest American citizens and paying out billions to illegals and Obama tax cheaters and fat-cat politicians.

Aside from identity theft and entering the country illegally, the illegals make false claims on their tax forms to claim money from the gov't. For example, they claim far more dependents than exist. None of them file because they want or intend to pay taxes. They all file so they can claim large refunds, based on false information on the tax forms.

Duh

editorial
No justification for Weld tax raid

By The Denver Post
Posted: 04/15/2009 12:30:00 AM MDT

There is no doubt this country has frustrating and convoluted laws and rules when it comes to dealing with illegal immigration.

The Weld County case in which some 1,300 illegal immigrants filing tax returns were ensnared in a criminal probe neatly illustrates some of those problems.

But the case offers another important lesson that's easily lost in the heated debate surrounding the raid on Amalia's Tax and Translation Service: You can't shortcut the U.S. Constitution, no matter how right you think you are.

And it sounds a warning shot for local authorities about the limits of their reach when trying to become, in essence, immigration officers.

There's no justifying fishing expeditions, in which law enforcement rifles through private records without sufficient evidence of a crime. What of the thousands of others, accused of no wrongdoing, whose records were scooped up in the raid?

On Monday, Larimer District Court Judge James Hiatt ruled Weld County deputies wrongly seized some 5,000 records from a tax preparer's office.

Authorities suspected illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers were utilizing the service, and got a warrant to raid the business.

However, the search warrant "lacked particularity" as to what was to be seized and failed to identify probable cause, the judge said. He was the second judge to rule the search illegal. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects people against unreasonable government search and seizure.

At first blush, it might be easy to support such a broad raid. These are folks who are in the country illegally, using someone else's Social Security number to get a job, and filing tax returns with an Internal Revenue Service that must know they are in the country illegally.

There's a lot to criticize here. It's crazy that we have such a porous border, and we don't have a workable guest-laborer program that would eliminate illegal immigrants' motivation to steal identities in order to work.

That way, we would cut down on the bizarre circumstance in which the IRS essentially looks the other way when people who are likely illegal immigrants file tax returns based on income earned with someone else's Social Security number.

But those are federal issues that must be addressed by Congress. We hope President Obama's recent immigration reform comments will jumpstart that discussion. This case only reinforces the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

Hiatt, who was presiding over a civil lawsuit filed with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, ordered all seized evidence to be returned or destroyed within seven days.

And rightly so. Though this case hits two big hot-button issues of the day — illegal immigration and identity theft — we're glad to see that in the end the core issue was one of legal sufficiency and not political expediency.

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_12141949

And that's why I urge anyone who subscribes to the Denver Post to cancel your subscription. Their coverage is so biased towards illegals that it is sickening.

Duh

and we don't have a workable guest-laborer program that would eliminate illegal immigrants' motivation to steal identities in order to work.

We have a lot of workable guest worker programs if these foreign workers would follow the rules. That statement alone turns the entire column into something lower than the dregs of hog slop. These people come here illegally to work, not pay taxes as they are paid under the table, while they send the remittances home and live 20 to a one bedroom apartment. They don't want anything more than our money and eventual legalization as guest workers (not citizenship, dammit!) with rights equal to or supassing any US citizen.