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 News from Around the Americas | March 2007 
ID Theft Leads Some to Jobs in US
 Julia Preston - New York Times
Marshalltown, Iowa - The two women named Violeta Blanco have never met. But for a long time they shared not only a name, but the same birth date and the same Social Security number.
One is an illegal immigrant from Mexico who went to work in a meatpacking plant here after her husband left her with three children. The other is an American, a single mother in California who has never held a job, struggles with drug addiction and is fighting to keep the state from taking her children.
With little in common but their shared identity, the two women are unwittingly linked by an illicit trade that is the focus of a new federal crackdown on illegal immigration. Detained in a raid on the Iowa plant, the Mexican worker admitted that she had used the California woman's identity to get her job. Now she is in jail on felony charges of identity theft, her trial set to begin in Des Moines on Monday.
Immigration raids at six Swift Co. meatpacking plants in six states in December, as well as more recent sweeps in Michigan, Florida and Arizona, have exposed an expanding front in the underground business that caters to illegal immigrants looking for work, officials say.
As the authorities have aggressively prosecuted employers for hiring undocumented workers, companies are examining applicants more carefully, and fake documents no longer pass inspection as easily as they did. Illegal immigrants have turned increasingly to bona fide documents, stolen or bought by traffickers from actual Americans.
With scrutiny tightening, illegal immigrants "invest more effort and money into getting better documents," said Julie Myers, the top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "More and more, that includes taking on the identities of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants."
The case of Violeta Blanco, 31, of Bakersfield, Calif., and the woman in Iowa who used her name, Eloisa Nunez Galeana, provides a rare view of the new identity trade through hard lives on both ends. On one side is an immigrant who is eager to work and who says she never thought she could be stealing from a real person; on the other is an American down on her luck who says she does not know how her personal information got onto the black market.
Interviewed in jail in Des Moines, Nunez said she used Blanco's documents - which she had purchased from a woman she did not know - in 2003 to apply for her job at Swift, but that she never used them again. She had hoped to work at the plant for many years, she said, perhaps long enough to see her children, who range in age from 2 to 15, graduate from high school (two were born in Iowa and are American citizens).
"I was innocent when I came from Mexico," said Nunez, a petite, round-faced woman who said she was devastated to find herself in a jail. "But they don't give you a job so easily anymore. To get honest work, you need good documents."
While Nunez worked at the Swift plant pushing sides of pork into a saw that sliced off the fat, Blanco was in her hometown leading a life teeming with trouble. She had been in drug rehabilitation. She had lost custody of her children to the state child welfare authorities, and then had regained it.
As a result, Blanco said she was distracted and paid little attention to letters three years ago from the Social Security Administration ordering her to report the employment income showing up under her number. She had never been close to taking a job.
"I don't know the person, but I'm upset," Blanco said of Nunez. "I think she could get more benefit from me, from my identity, than I could from her."
Of 1,282 illegal immigrants detained in the Swift raids, the majority were charged with civil immigration violations and quickly deported. But federal prosecutors brought identity-theft charges against 148 of the workers.
Court papers show that the accused did not use stolen documents to loot bank accounts or credit cards, the primary crimes that identity-theft laws seek to attack. Instead, they used the birth certificates and Social Security cards to get jobs.
Still, Matthew Allen, the senior investigations official at Immigration and Custom Enforcement, said that 326 Americans had reported financial complications and tax liabilities from having their identities used at Swift. "The victims have suffered very real consequences," Allen said.
At Swift, the workers had Social Security contributions and other taxes deducted from their paychecks, but did not file tax returns. The Social Security taxes accumulated in the accounts of the real owners. Because the documents were real, Swift managers were not alerted to any irregularities by the Social Security Administration, and no charges were brought against the company in connection with the raids.
Traffickers have devised several ways to meet the demand for authentic documents.
Along the Mexican border, immigration officials said, muggers and pickpockets have learned that selling stolen documents to black market vendors can be less risky than a shopping spree with a stolen credit card.
Some Americans willingly sell their documents.
In Corpus Christi, Texas, this month, seven people pleaded guilty to selling their birth certificates and Social Security cards for as little as $100 for both.
In another recent case, immigration officials said, an employee of a Michigan state employment bureau sold confidential identity information from state records to illegal immigrants seeking jobs.
Nunez and several other immigrant women detained in the Iowa raid who have children who are U.S. citizens say they have resolved to fight the charges against them rather than make a deal with prosecutors that would lead to their deportation with no chance of legal return. |
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