Supreme Court to hear case on immigrants' use of fake IDs
The justices will decide whether illegal workers can be convicted of identity theft if they didn't know their bogus cards used the Social Security number of a real person.
Reported from Washington — The Supreme Court said Monday that it will decide whether the government can use new identity theft laws to send illegal immigrants using fake identification cards to prison or to force them to leave the country.
The Bush administration, as part of its crackdown on workers who are here illegally, has increasingly relied on prosecutors and criminal laws to punish the offenders, rather than simply sending them into immigration courts.
"It's a bargaining chip," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tough enforcement of the laws. The prospect of a long prison term can persuade many immigrants to accept a speedy deportation, he said.
But this legal tactic has run into trouble in some areas, including California and elsewhere on the West Coast.
Four years ago, Congress added a two-year mandatory prison term for anyone who "knowingly transfers, possesses or uses . . . identification of another person." This law clearly applies to the classic cases of identity theft, such as an individual who uses another person's private information to empty a bank account or to charge items to a credit card.
But judges have divided over whether immigrants can be punished for "knowingly" stealing the identity of another person whenever they are caught using a Social Security number that is not their own. Often, the immigrants say they thought they had bought phony ID cards, not numbers assigned to real people.
Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the government must prove that an immigrant knew he was using a real person's number to win a conviction and the two-year prison term. Appellate judges in Boston and Washington, D.C., took the same view.
Meanwhile, three other U.S. appeals courts -- in St. Louis, Atlanta and Richmond, Va. -- agreed with the government and ruled that prosecutors must show only that the immigrant knew he was using a phony ID card. Both sides in this dispute said the Supreme Court would have to resolve the matter, and the justices said Monday that they would do so.
The court agreed to hear the case of Ignacio Flores-Figueroa, a Mexican who was here illegally and had worked at a steel plant in East Moline, Ill. Two years ago, he pleaded guilty to using a false document and entering the country illegally, and he pleaded not guilty to an extra charge of aggravated identity theft. At his trial, he testified about purchasing identity cards, but he said he did not know the Social Security numbers were those of real people. But the judge convicted Flores-Figueroa of identity theft as well and sentenced him to more than six years in prison.
