Supreme Court makes decision on identity theft

Immigrants who use false documents cannot be prosecuted for identity theft unless they know those documents belong to a real person, the Supreme Court ruled last week.

Local immigration attorneys called the ruling a "huge victory," saying government attorneys have frequently used the threat of an identity theft charge to intimidate undocumented immigrants into pleading guilty for lesser offenses. Identity theft carries a minimum sentence of two years.

"For the average undocumented immigrant who goes to the flea market and buys a social security card, how are they supposed to know if it belonged to a real person or not?" said Jodie Goodwin, a Harlingen-based lawyer who has been practicing immigration law for 14 years. "It's a huge victory in the sense that the statute will be used as it was originally intended - to combat identity theft."

The unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court was a win for Ignacio Carlos Flores-Figueroa, an undocumented immigrant turned in by his employer when he chose to change Social Security numbers and begin using his real name.

In Flores-Figueroa's case, the court could not prove that he had knowingly used the identity of a real person, so he could not be tried for identity theft.

The Brownsville-Harlingen area has one of the highest rates of identity theft, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Goodwin speculated that some of this could be attributed to immigrants who use false documents, rather than cases of credit card theft.

"There are probably more people in this area who are getting phone calls because their Social Security number was used by someone who was working at a chicken plant in Arkansas," she said. "Everyone in the Valley has known someone who has to deal with the Social Security Administration at some point, because they're informed they're making money at some pig slaughter camp in Idaho."

The ruling will make it easier for undocumented immigrants accused of misdemeanors to argue that they're innocent of those crimes, instead of simply accepting a misdemeanor sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, said Linton Joaquin, general counsel for the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles.

"What Congress intended was to punish identity theft and it has been way over interpreted," Joaquin said. "This has been used as a bargaining tool, but inappropriately so."

Ltillman@brownsvilleherald.com