When undocumented immigrants use stolen identities, Americans are victimized | Opinion
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway’s investigation into potential undocumented immigrants employed by the signature gathering company Advanced Micro Targeting looks at first like a political stunt, but the investigation is targeting a crime that Kansas went to the Supreme Court to be able to prosecute just five years ago.
Undocumented immigrants using stolen information to fill out their federal I-9 forms — the paperwork that proves it is legal for you to work as a citizen, green card holder or other legal immigrant — are not just committing a minor paperwork infraction. As many as 1 million cases of this kind of fraud have happened across the country, The New York Times reported last week. Such fraud can wreck people’s lives.
Back in June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided an Omaha meat-packer where 70 undocumented immigrants were employed. Among the paperwork the dozens of men and women had deployed to foil federal efforts to reserve jobs for legal residents was information from the identities of over 100 innocent Americans.
Among them was a Kansas City nursing student who was getting by with federal financial aid she was eligible for because she came from a low-income family. Last year, her help for school disappeared when the IRS reported to the financial aid office that she was earning a hefty salary fueled by lots of overtime in a Nebraska meat-packing plant.
Derailed school plans are just the start of consequences for Americans who have their identities stolen by undocumented immigrants using their data. Among the stories of victims uncovered by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in that Omaha raid were:
- A man in Pennsylvania lost access to his heart medication when someone else used insurance with personal data.
- A disabled man in Texas was investigated for disability fraud when mysterious earnings from the plant were reported to the IRS.
- The IRS demanded back taxes from a family in Colorado when one of the parent’s identity was stolen by one of the undocumented workers in Omaha.
- One victim in California had their world turned upside down as they worked for 15 years to untangle their life from an undocumented immigrant working in Nebraska.
Last week, The New York Times went in deep on the story of Dan Kluver, a Minnesota man whose life was sabotaged for years by a criminal undocumented immigrant who sometimes worked in Missouri using Kluver’s Social Security number, name and other data. At times, police pulled him over, looking for a Mexican man who was a habitual drunk driver with a suspended license. Kluver’s license.
Investigators began to untangle the case of identity theft slowly when a sharp-eyed St. Joseph police officer noticed something suspicious and got the investigation rolling. That luck did more good than filing police reports about identity theft at home in Minnesota or with the feds.
Undocumented immigrants aren’t the only villains in these stories. Sometimes businesses facilitate the fraud to get cheap workers. In other cases Americans are behind the groups that set undocumented immigrants up with stolen identities.
But more typical is a case came to public attention in October when a federal grand jury in Grand Rapids, Michigan, indicted three Guatemalans for dealing in fake immigration documents and stolen Social Security numbers. A decade ago, a larger group of criminals from Guatemala and Mexico was busted running a multimillion-dollar identity theft ring out of St. Joe that delivered false documents to more than 3,000 undocumented immigrants from around the country with co-conspirators as far away as the East Coast and Texas.
If the liberals on the Supreme Court had their way in Kansas v. Garcia, state officials couldn’t investigate these identity frauds because they center on a federal document that all workers have to sign, the I-9. Along with it, you provide a copy of your Social Security card and birth certificate or a U.S. passport.
Justice Stephen Breyer, writing a dissent for the then-four liberals on the court, cited the usual pablum about law-abiding immigrants just trying to feed their families, arguing that Congress despite not saying so, actually implied that it “took from the States — the power to prosecute people for misrepresenting material information in an effort to convince their employer that they are authorized to work in this country.”
It was a stretch to say that in outlawing the use of false information to make it appear as if you had a right to work, Congress was saying that states couldn’t help make sure that law was obeyed with their own laws. That’s cooperation with the federal government, not preemption, the Supreme Court’s conservatives ruled.
On the surface, undocumented immigration may seem like a victimless crime. But the fact that so many Americans have their lives thrown into turmoil through stolen identities shows that it is not. Stamping out that crime is worth doing, even when it looks like a political stunt.
David Mastio is a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published December 3, 2025 at 6:07 AM with the headline "When undocumented immigrants use stolen identities, Americans are victimized | Opinion."
