Counterfeit green cards tied to plant

By TONY LEYS

Des Moines Register - Iowa

July 30, 2008

Postville, Ia. — Federal agents who raided the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant here in May found evidence that a human resources department employee helped distribute false immigration documents to workers, court papers say.

The agents said they found about 96 fraudulent resident-alien cards in the human resources department. Many of the cards were grouped in stacks. Most of the cards, commonly known as green cards, appeared to have been made by the same forger, the court papers say.

About a dozen of the cards had photos of people who worked at the plant but different names than those people used on the job, the court papers say.

The court papers do not say who is suspected of making the cards.

The green cards were discovered during the May 12 raid at Agriprocessors, in which 389 workers were arrested. Most of the workers were charged with using false identities to obtain jobs even though they were in the country illegally.

The raid, the largest in U.S. history at a single site, took nearly half of Agriprocessors' work force. Members of the family that owns the plant say the workers duped company executives into believing they were in the United States legally. A company representative declined to comment on the allegations in the court papers, saying lawyers have told company leaders not to speak about any part of the investigation.

The allegations about the human resources department are contained in papers that federal prosecutors filed this month to support criminal charges against Agriprocessors supervisor Juan Guerrero-Espinoza, who oversaw the beef kill department. He and another supervisor were charged with aiding the use of fraudulent identity documents and encouraging immigrants to reside illegally in the United States. Guerrero-Espinoza also faces one count of aiding and abetting identity theft.

The plant's owners and top executives have not been charged in the case, but court documents indicate a federal grand jury continues to look into the matter.

Immigration agents said in court papers that several former plant workers who were in the United States illegally said Guerrero-Espinoza told them that they needed new cards and Social Security numbers and that they should give him $200 to $220 and a photograph of themselves.

The workers told authorities that a few days later, an unidentified human resources employee handed them the false cards.

A national expert was surprised to hear that an employee in a company's human resources department was accused of helping distribute false green cards. "I've never heard of that before," said Nadine Wettstein, legal director of the American Immigration Law Foundation. "That doesn't mean it's never happened, but we don't usually see that kind of smoking gun."

An immigration lawyer representing 49 of the former plant workers said the allegations dovetail with what her clients have told her. Sonia Parras Konrad, who works for the Benzoni firm in Des Moines, said former workers told her that in the weeks before the raid, supervisors told them that they had to pay for new identification cards. "The choice was pay $200 and get a new card or be fired," she said. Supervisors did not say why the new cards were needed, but they reportedly offered to let the workers borrow the money, if need be, she said.

Parras Konrad said some workers told her that they received their new cards from the human resources department. She said they told her the process seemed official. "You might think they were naive or they're lying, but some of them thought these were good documents," she said.

Most of the workers who were arrested were immigrants from Guatemala. Supporters have said they were poor, uneducated people who came to Postville looking to work. Immigration lawyers have argued that their clients are not guilty of purposely stealing identities, because they didn't understand what was involved in obtaining the false identification cards.

Wettstein said that if prosecutors hadn't pressured the former workers into quickly pleading guilty, defense lawyers might have been able to use evidence of the human resources official's complicity to argue that their clients did not intend to commit the crime of identity theft.

Nobody from the human resources department has been charged publicly. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office declined to comment on the matter.

Members of the Rubashkin family, which owns the plant, have said the company unknowingly hired immigrants who presented false papers.

"People coming there looking for jobs - they bring ID with a photo, with a number," company founder Aaron Rubashkin told the Jewish news agency JTA in June. "With the same card, the person go to the bank. With the same card, he got his credit card. With the same card he bought a car."

Rubashkin's grandson, Getzel Rubashkin, made a similar point to reporters Sunday in Postville. "The high number of illegal people who were working here is more a testimony to the quality of their deceit, of their papers," Getzel Rubashkin said, emphasizing that he was not speaking as a representative of the company.

Company leaders say their replacement employees now are being hired by staffing agencies that use a national, computerized system to ensure that immigration papers are valid.

desmoinesregister.com