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Littwin: ID theft a red herring in Tuesday's raids

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 14, 2006 at midnight

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As far as I can tell, the bust was a major bust.

As far as I can tell, ICE agents spent 10 months in which they planned, they plotted, they investigated, they synchronized their watches. And eventually, on the day itself, many would even don their riot gear. They did everything but call in the Marines, who, I guess, have enough on their plate.

And on Tuesday morning, 1,000 ICE agents raided Swift meatpacking plants in six states.

It wasn't just a raid, of course, on any illegal immigrants who dare cut our meat. This was a raid to defend Americans against identity theft. ICE agents arrested 1,282 people. You saw the headlines. You saw the photos, including the one with the guy in chains. I thought that was a nice Gitmo-style touch.

And a day after the raid, homeland security chief Michael Chertoff, whom many of us hadn't seen since Katrina, broke down the numbers at a Washington news conference. There were 1,282 arrested - of whom 65 were charged with felonies. That's as in 65. For the math-impaired, that's 5 percent of those arrested. And of those 5 percent, not all of them were even arrested for identity theft.

The other 95 percent were your standard, garden-variety - and often garden-tending - illegal immigrants, the kind you can find on any street corner, without need of riot gear.

I can see the headlines shrinking now. I can see the confused look on readers' faces.

At the Greeley plant, they arrested 262 people. And 11 were charged with felonies. Of the 11, some were charged with re-entering the country illegally, some with identity theft.

The ICE people won't break the numbers down further. I'm guessing they're embarrassed. You'd be embarrassed, too. They had TV copters flying overhead. They had families wrenched apart, just in time for the holidays. And, after the big multistate ID theft raid, they have fewer than 62 people actually charged with identity theft.

Somebody, please, get me rewrite.

I'll take it another step, Those arrested at the plants did not actually forge documents. They did not actively steal anyone's ID. They paid someone for a Social Security number in order to get a job. To use the drug-trade analogy, they were buyers, not dealers.

That's it. That's the raid. I hope everyone got a crime-stopper's badge.

Look, I know it's illegal to use someone else's ID. It's illegal to use any kind of illegal documents. Those who have them will face charges - and some will even go to jail. That's fine. That's the game as it's played - lure people across the border with a promise of jobs and no way to get them legally.

The rest will face an administrative charge - it's only a civil offense to be in this country illegally - and most will be deported. And many of those, if we can trust history, will return - whether or not anyone bothers to build a wall (prediction: no one ever will).

No ID forgery ring was found. No crime spree was thwarted. We hear the investigation, to find the actual forgers, is continuing. In other words, keep the riot gear handy.

What we saw, once again, was ICE taking a fly swatter to try to bring down an elephant.

The funny thing is, Swift apparently followed the rules on hiring. It used the Basic Pilot system by which you can check employees' Social Security numbers. It just doesn't check if more than one person uses the same number. Some numbers show up dozens of times. Is Colorado a Third World country?

It's a joke, like our immigration system is a joke. Our immigration policy - if you want to call it that - doesn't work. That much we already knew. What we still haven't figured out is how much we care whether it works.

ICE wants you to care. If you read the headlines, you'd have thought that illegal immigrants at the Swift plants were stealing IDs out of our wallets and using our credit cards to buy Xboxes at the mall.

What's happened here is that ICE has tried to conflate two stories. One is ID theft, a favorite of on-your-side local TV news, and, yes, a serious problem. The other is illegal immigration, a complex problem, and an entirely different one.

And yet, listen to Chertoff.

"This is not only a case about illegal immigration, which is bad enough," he says. "It's a case about identity theft and violation of the privacy rights and the economic rights of innocent Americans."

Sure, and that raid a while back at Buckley, netting all those roofers, was about national security.

So, what was the Swift raid about? Was it just about headlines? Fear-mongering?

It was obviously a major blow for Swift, which may follow the laws but knows - as everyone knows - that it hires illegal immigrants to do the invigorating work in its slaughterhouses. Swift sent away 400 workers before the raids. It lost 1,200 more in the raid. That's a lot of bacon at stake.

So, the blow could be a warning to those who hire illegal immigrants. But I've heard a better theory: Given a new Congress, it could be a spur to get companies like Swift to encourage their representatives - who, it turns out, often listen to multibillion-dollar companies - to produce a real immigration package, to produce a guest worker program, to allow a way for workers here to become citizens.

It's a long shot. I can't give you exact odds. But hey, if there's anything we can learn from this raid, it's that a 5 percent chance is plenty.

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