Posted on Thu, Jul. 05, 2007
Illegal immigrants 'rent' citizens' identities
BY JON GAMBRELL
To his bosses at Pilgrim's Pride, he was Juan Jose Rodriguez -- it said so on the birth certificate and Social Security card he presented when the southwestern Arkansas chicken plant hired him six years ago.
At his De Queen, Ark., home, he was Joel Garibay-Urbina -- with a wife, three kids and a mortgage under his own name.

And to police officers responding to a domestic violence call, he was just the latest illegal immigrant to have two identities after an arrest.

It turns out that for $800, Garibay-Urbina had rented the American dream. Though local police, prosecutors and immigration agents say they don't know how widespread the practice is, federal watchdog reports dating back to 1988 have warned of the relative ease of obtaining a fraudulent birth certificate.

Assuming the identity of a U.S. citizen -- keeping the documents just long enough to convince Pilgrim's Pride he was a U.S. citizen -- Garibay-Urbina was able to get a job, buy a gun and live undetected until police arrested him after he fought with his wife in January.

Garibay-Urbina, who crossed the border at Laredo, Texas, in 1995 with a six-month visitor visa, is slated for a one-year prison term and then deportation to his native Mexico. Had Garibay-Urbina not been accused of domestic battery, it's unlikely police ever would have suspected a crime.

''Birth-certificate fraud is seldom prosecuted unless it can be linked to large dollar losses or other punishable crimes,'' said a 2000 report from the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General, its second report on such ID theft in 12 years.

When Garibay-Urbina arrived in De Queen, he met with an ''unknown individual'' to rent a birth certificate and Social Security number before his job search, according to an affidavit filed with the federal court in Texarkana, Ark. With Rodriguez's documents in hand, he started at the chicken plant in January 2001.

Garibay-Urbina worked until Jan. 22, when his wife Guillermina Avila went to the Sevier County Courthouse to tell police he had beaten her and was threatening to kill himself. During an interrogation, Garibay-Urbina told police and immigration agents of the ID ruse.

Darren Anderson, Garibay-Urbina's lawyer, said his client ''indicated it wasn't that difficult'' to rent the birth certificate, but he wouldn't describe the transaction specifically. Prosecutors and immigration officials have no idea how many times Rodriguez's ID cards have been used.

© 2007 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com