To Be Announced...

The NY Times has a story linked to day at Land & Landscape (don't ask) involving an update on the Swift raid of a few months ago. Not much new information, but a few observations.

As you know, many of the illegal aliens were immediately deported...others (148 of them) are being charged with identity theft. Someone found the real person attached to the phoney documents these "undocumented immigrants" used to get jobs. It's a very long piece and you should read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

Illegal Worker, Troubled Citizen and Stolen Name

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 (Eloisa Nunez Galeana) who went to work slicing pork in a meat-packing plant here after her husband left her with three children. The other is a single American mother in California (Violeta Blanco) who has never held a job, struggles with drug addiction and is fighting to keep the state from taking her children.

...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 March 26.

Interviewed in jail in Des Moines, Nuñez said she used Ms. 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).

That alone says everything you need to know about the lack of immigration enforcement in the United States. An illegal alien almost expects to work illegally in the United States long enough for her children to graduate.

"What's the harm," I hear illegal immigrant advocates say. They didn't use the illegal documents to raid bank accounts, apply for credit cards or anything. All they did was pay taxes and never file...

Still, Matthew C. 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.

148 charged with identity theft from the Swift raid...but 326 Americans affected. I'm assuming there were duplicates of duplicate Social Security numbers.

Complications in this case, like being on disability and having the Social Security Administration cut off your aid because the records show the person attached to the SS number is making payments through a job. And the IRS showing income, but nobody filing for taxes. Anyone want to say that illegal aliens are still harmless?

Nuñez said she was reluctant to use identity documents that did not belong to her, but she said she did not know that she could be committing a federal offense, since buying documents was routine among illegal immigrants here.

Routine. She apparently didn't think entering the country illegally would be a problem either. That's become fairly routine too.

At the mention of her children during an interview in Des Moines, Nuñez, hunched in a gray-and-white striped jail uniform, began to cry.

"I risked everything so they could grow up in the United States," she said. "I'm only asking for permission to do honest work."

Try doing honest work honestly. You never asked permission to begin with. Sorry...but I don't feel a bit sorry for you or your children.

Nuñez and several other immigrant women detained in the Iowa raid who have children who are American 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.

"She's a mother who cut my pork chops and gave Social Security a lot of money," said Michael H. Said, a lawyer representing Nuñez. "She deserves a medal, not an indictment."

Yeah. A medal for screwing up someone elses life? Sadly, the article doesn't say in the actual American victim of this sad affair has a lawyer helping her clean up the mess created by Nunez...

Waving a file of wrinkled papers that she keeps in a cellophane bag, she said thatNuñez's employment under her name was only a small part of problems she attributed to identity theft.

She said she had difficulty renewing her driver's license because someone else using her identity had taken out a license in Arkansas. A bank where she tried to open an account told her that it already had one in her name in another state — not Iowa.

"I know that when I get ready, I'm going to get everything all filed up, and I'm going to try to take care of it," Blanco said. "I don't know how, but I'm going to try."

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Labels: illegal aliens, swift