One for our side!

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — A federal identity-theft law that has become a favorite tool of the government in immigration prosecutions appeared imperiled on Wednesday after the Supreme Court heard arguments about it.

Prosecutors have relied on the law to seek or threaten two-year sentence extensions in immigration cases against people who used fake Social Security numbers that turned out to belong to real people.

The case, Flores-Figueroa v. United States, No. 08-108, turns on whether a person using a false social security number KNOWINGLY used that belonging to another person. Besides its implications for undercutting one of the more common — and egregious methods — of applying criminal law to unregistered alien cases (which are a matter of administrative, not criminal, law):

After nearly 400 illegal immigrants were arrested in May in a raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, prosecutors brought identity-theft charges against about 270 of them who were found to have used identity information, like Social Security numbers, that corresponded to other real people and were not simply fabrications.

The Iowa criminal prosecutions were an abrupt departure from past immigration enforcement practice, in which illegal work cases had generally been handled under civil law.

Prosecutors used the charges to pressure the immigrants both to plead guilty to lesser charges of document fraud and to agree to summary deportation, waiving their immigration rights. Almost all the immigrants did, and they have served their sentences and been deported.

But a court interpreter who worked in the hearings, Prof. Erik Camayd-Freixas of Florida International University, later broke his professional silence. He testified before Congress that most of the immigrants for whom he translated, many from Guatemala, did not know what a Social Security card was or whether the numbers they used at the Postville plant belonged to other people.

There is a Mexfiles connection to this. The laptop I’m writing this on (at the famous Cafelibría el Péndulo — located somewhat fittingly for a literary cafe on calle Alexandro Dumas in Polanco) was formerly owned by the defense attorney quoted in the New York Times article, Kevin Russell. Kevin, in the loose Mexican way of determining things, would count as a relation… the boyfriend of a niece who can be persuasive when convincing guys they have too much electronic stuff around that could be put to other use.

Good work Kevin!