Thread: Despite Immigration Raid, Fake IDs Still For Sale

http://wcco.com/local/local_story_348115241.html

Dec 14, 2006 10:47 am US/Central
Despite Immigration Raid, Fake IDs Still For Sale

(AP) Minneapolis A spot notorious for the sales of fake identifications was open for business this week despite the message immigration enforcers hoped to send with the recent high-profile raid on a Worthington meat packing plant.

Even the New York Times reported last summer on the spot -- the parking lot of the KMart department store on Lake Street -- and when a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio went there he found four young men with fake IDs to sell.

One young man, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, acknowledged that he sold false identifications, but he said they weren't stolen. He said the only way some people could find work was with his documents, and he was glad to help them.

The raid in Worthington that resulted in 230 arrests wouldn't slow down the trade in fake IDs, he said, because thousands of people will move in to replace those who were arrested.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say that any immigrant caught without documents can be deported. However, immigrants using stolen a stolen identification documents or a piggybacking on a legitimate Social Security number can be sent to prison.

In the most recent national raid of facilities owned by Swift & Co., a Greeley, Colo.-based meat processor, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said about 5 percent of the 1,282 arrests resulted in identity theft charges.

However, he said that number could rise as agents look into more workers' cases and into rings of vendors who steal and sell illegal documents.

Because of the low percentage of identity theft arrests, Katherine Fennelly, a professor of public affairs at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, said the government's focus on identity theft was misleading.

She said illegal immigrants take on false identities to making a living for themselves, not to run up another person's credit card account.

"As there are with any group, there are going to be people who are breaking the law intentionally in that regard," she said. "But the bulk of people are just here to work, and trying to find some kind of document that will permit them to work -- not to steal identity and steal funds from others, but just to work."

She said the nation's failed immigration policy was to blame for turning otherwise honest workers who want to better their lives into criminals.

Nonetheless, the law is the law, said Tim Counts, spokesman for ICE in Bloomington. "In working with the Federal Trade Commission, they have identified possibly hundreds of victims who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants, who may have had their identities stolen and used by individuals to get jobs at Swift," Counts said. "So that absolutely was the priority. But we also have an obligation to enforce the nation's immigration laws, and that includes arresting people who are in the country illegally."

Counts said the recent raids did focus on those using use the false documents, but he said ICE also routinely patrols that KMart parking lot and other places to shut down the fake ID trade in Minnesota.

These fake ID sellers are like drug dealers. You shut one down and another one or two take over. If they don't like the area they move somewhere else. As long as there is a demand for fake ID, they will keep doing it. We need tougher laws and more enforcement at all levels starting from the border on.