Text size:

Fraud, false IDs fought

BY BART JONES | Newsday Staff Writer

April 6, 2006

U.S. immigration and law enforcement authorities yesterday announced they are creating task forces in 10 cities including New York to combat the burgeoning problem of document and immigration benefits fraud.

The agencies plan to fight problems including fake driver's licenses, birth certificates, social security cards and passports, as well as benefits fraud such as improperly obtaining U.S. citizenship or political asylum.

"One of the lessons from 9/11 is that false identities and fraudulent documents present serious risks to national security," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. . . . We must deny criminals the identification tools they need to threaten our country, cross our borders illegally and violate our immigration laws without detection."

The task forces will be set up in cities including Boston, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, Philadelphia and St. Paul, Minn. Led by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agencies involved include the Justice, Labor and State departments.

Authorities noted that at least seven of the Sept. 11 terrorists obtained genuine Virginia identity documents by submitting fraudulent Virginia residency papers. They also said the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, engaged in asylum fraud to enter the United States.

In many cases, large-scale criminal organizations have taken over the lucrative phony document business, authorities said. In Denver recently, authorities discovered that members of the Mexico-based Castorena family controlled counterfeit document "cells" in at least 33 U.S. states. Cell "heads" pay as much as $15,000 per month to the Castorena organization to run the operations.

Local immigration activists said that while they favor a crackdown on immigration fraud and terrorism, the problem also is a product of a "broken" immigration system that has helped produce 12 million undocumented immigrants who simply want to work.

"It's attacking the symptom rather than the cause," said Patrick Young of the Long Island Immigrant Alliance. "There has been an expansion of fraudulent documents over the last several years but that's largely because IDs people used to be able to obtain lawfully, like driver's licenses, are no longer attainable."