Amnesty's Forgotten Victims

I’m sure many illegal aliens are excited about tomorrow’s announcement by President Obama that 5 million of them will become legal by the stroke of his pen.

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But have you given a thought to how many of those border scofflaws stole someone’s Social Security  numbers, or other identity documents in order to work in the United States?

And what of those American citizens whose identities were used fraudulently? In tens of thousands of cases, their lives were turned upside down, their credit ruined, their privacy egregiously violated.

As Michelle Malkin points out at NRO, President Obama’s executive amnesty is a slap in the face to those people:

Center for Immigration Studies analyst Jon Feere reported at the time that ethnic lobbyists and open-borders businesses lobbied the Obama administration hard “to keep American victims of ID theft in the dark while shielding unscrupulous businesses from enforcement.” As an Obama official told the New York Times, DHS employees are “not interested in using this as a way to identify one-off cases where some individual may have violated some federal law in an employment relationship.”

Translation: See no identity theft. Hear no identity theft. Speak no identity theft.

A high-profile immigration attorney crowed: “Good news for deferred-action applicants: If you used a false Social Security card, you need not reveal the number on your deferred-action application forms. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has clarified that when the forms ask for an applicant’s Social Security number, it refers to Social Security numbers issued to the applicant. If you used a friend’s number, a made-up number or a stolen number, you should answer N/A for ‘not applicable’ where it asks for the number.”

Since then, more than 500,000 DACA applications have been approved with abysmal oversight, little public disclosure, and total absolution for identity-rip-off artists. The latest planned administrative amnesty will dwarf that ongoing fiasco.

Victimless crimes? Tell that to those who have been harmed by the estimated 75 percent of working-age illegal aliens who have fraudulently used Social Security cards to obtain employment. Tell it to victims in border states with the highest percentages of illegal aliens, where job-related identity theft is rampant.

Tell it to hardworking Americans like Wisconsinite Robert Guenterberg, whose Social Security number was exploited by illegal aliens for years to buy homes and cars — while the IRS refused to tell the victims about the fraud to protect the thieves’ privacy rights.

Tell it to U.S. Air Force veteran Marcos Miranda, whose name and Social Security card were filched by an illegal alien to work at a pork slaughterhouse. He was even thrown in jail for unpaid traffic tickets racked up by his identity thief. “Even though I am Hispanic, I am against illegal immigration,” Miranda told the Associated Press. “Even though a lot of them come to work, there are always bad apples. (Identity theft) has really made my perspective . . . negative about immigration.”

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The Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that prosecutors could not charge illegal aliens who “unknowingly” used someone’s Social Security number to get a job. The ruling robbed prosecutors of a valuable tool in prosecuting illegals.

But recent actions by the Obama administration in dealing with illegals who steal other people’s identities go beyond refusing to prosecute.

Washington Times:

The Obama administration told federal immigration lawyers to release illegal immigrants with “old” drunken-driving convictions and those found guilty of stealing other people’s identities, according to a lawsuit filed by one of the lawyers at the center of the operation.

Patricia M. Vroom, a top attorney for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona, filed a 67-page discrimination complaint that details repeated battles with agency higher-ups who told her to close cases and not deport people whom President Obama deemed low-priority.

Federal officials were particularly dismissive of identity theft convictions from Arizona, arguing that the state’s laws were too strict and stealing an ID to get a job wasn’t a serious enough offense to get kicked out of the country.

“This was a very significant development, as generally, criminal aliens, particularly convicted felons, are, under the [prosecutorial discretion] memos, ‘priority’ cases that should be aggressively pursued,” Ms. Vroom said in her complaint.

But she said her superiors deemed the identity theft felons low-level offenders “since the typical alien defendant convicted under these provisions of Arizona criminal law had simply been using a fake I.D. to get and keep employment.”

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No, they were not “simply using a fake ID” to get work. They were using that ID, in many cases, to obtain credit and loans, open bank accounts, run up debt, and generally sully the good names and reputations — not to mention invading the privacy — of decent, hard working, law abiding Americans.

And the victims of ID theft are going to get another kick in the teeth from Obama tomorrow.

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