High Court Ruling on Identity Theft Law Affects Pleas from Immigrant Raids at Iowa Meatpacking Plant
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that a conviction under the identity theft law requires a showing that those presenting false identification documents to employers knew they actually belonged to another real person. According to Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the unanimous Court, the law was intended to crack down on classic identity theft, for example, where a defendant uses another person’s information to get access to that person’s bank account. Prosecutors have been using the law, which calls for a mandatory prison term, against immigrant workers to get them to plead guilty to lesser immigration charges and accept prompt deportation.
After the Court issued its ruling on May 4, 2009, the manager of a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, raided in May 2008, sought to withdraw her plea to a charge of aggravated identity theft for allegedly helping illegal immigrants get jobs at the plant with documents she knew were false. Her lawyers reportedly argued that she had not been aware that the documents the plant’s employees used belonged to
other people and were not completely fabricated fakes. The court allowed her to withdraw the plea, but she will be sentenced May 13, 2009, on a remaining charge of conspiracy to harbor undocumented illegal immigrants for commercial and private financial gain.
After the court accepted the withdrawal of her identity theft plea, prosecutors immediately dropped the charge, an action that some say could threaten the convictions of hundreds of illegal immigrants arising from the Postville raid. An immigration lawyers’ bar association has apparently called on the Department of Justice to consider dismissing the guilty pleas of nearly 300 illegal immigrant workers who were arrested during the raid. A spokesperson for the American Immigration Lawyers Association called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to
investigate the prosecutions and was quoted as saying, “The federal prosecutors used the law as a hammer to coerce the [Postville] workers.”
According to a news source, most of the Postville immigrants who faced aggravated identity theft charges and a mandatory additional two years in prison pleaded guilty instead to charges of document fraud, served five months in prison and were deported. The aggressive use of the identity theft statute in Postville was apparently unprecedented; the workers’ main offense was simply working without authorization. See The New York Times, Meatingplace.com and BrownfieldNetwork.com, May 6, 2009.
