A year after Judicial Watch reported
a rise in illegal aliens using fake Puerto Rican birth certificates to
obtain authentic U.S. passports and drivers’ licenses, the feds have
busted a Massachusetts operation run by corrupt state workers. The state
employees sold drivers’ licenses and state identification cards
to illegal immigrants who bought Puerto Rican documents on the black
market, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). The operation
perpetuated voter fraud because some of the false identities and
addresses were used to vote in Boston, the state’s capital and largest
city.
The case is the latest of many illustrating that there’s an epidemic
of voter fraud in the U.S. that’s seldom reported in the mainstream
media. It’s not clear how many false identities and addresses were used
to fraudulently register to vote in Boston, but the feds indicate that
it occurred in multiple cases and Judicial Watch is investigating the
matter as part of a five-year-old Election Integrity Project.
The scheme was operated by four taxpayer-funded employees at the
Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) along with two outside
accomplices who sold Puerto Rican documents to illegal aliens. All six
were recently arrested and charged with aggravated identity theft. They
probably never would have been caught if not for an anonymous tip
received by the Massachusetts State Police nearly two years ago and
there’s no telling how long the illicit scheme operated.
The anonymous letter said that a corrupt RMV employee was providing
stolen identifications and drivers’ licenses to individuals seeking
false IDs, the DOJ announcement states. An investigation ensued and
authorities discovered that the four clerks were working with a document
vendor and document dealer to provide the licenses and official state
ID cards to illegal immigrants in exchange for cash. “The scheme
involved several steps,” the DOJ says. First, the document dealer sold a
Puerto Rican birth certificate and U.S. Social Security card to the
document vendor for approximately $900. The vendor would then sell the
stolen identities for more than $2,000 to illegal aliens—some with
criminal records—seeking legitimate identities in Massachusetts. After
the first layer of illicit transactions occurred, the counterfeit
documents and false identities and addresses were used to fraudulently
register clients to vote in Boston.
Illegal aliens would then bring the stolen identities to the RMV
where the corrupt clerks worked and they would accept cash to illegally
issue authentic documents, including drivers’ licenses and ID cards.
“The clerks also accepted cash to use the RMV’s system to run queries,
including Social Security number audits, to confirm that the identities
the clients were stealing actually belonged to verifiable individuals,”
the DOJ announcement states. The unscrupulous state workers face up to
two years in prison, according to the feds, who won’t reveal the
magnitude of the operation and how many authentic state documents were
issued fraudulently to illegal aliens.
Last year Judicial Watch published a story about the increasing
number of illegal aliens using fake Puerto Rican birth certificates to
obtain authentic American documents. Located about 1,000 miles southeast
of Florida, Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory about two decades after
the Caribbean island was acquired from Spain at the end of the
Spanish-American war. Puerto Ricans are American citizens at birth
though they don’t have the right to vote in federal elections and the
island has only one non-voting representative in Congress. In recent
years a record number of Puerto Ricans have left their troubled island
for the U.S. and a big chunk has settled on Florida. A recent study found
that the island’s ongoing economic recession has led to a mass exodus
not seen in more than five decades. The U.S. government and its various
agencies accept Puerto Rican birth certificates blindly even though
fraud involving the easily forged documents has been pervasive for
years.
No comments:
Post a Comment