A worker without legal status at Glen Valley Foods Meat Packing Plant in Omaha, Nebraska, has reportedly contributed to the deaths of over 100 Americans through what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials describe as a significant identity theft scheme.
ICE agents raided the Glen Valley Foods facility on June 10 and found over 70 undocumented workers employed there.
This operation helped create job openings for legal immigrants and some U.S. citizens.
Executives at Glen Valley Foods have claimed there is a lawful workforce, utilizing e-verify, a federal program aimed at curtailing illegal employment practices.
ICE has now disclosed that undocumented employees at Glen Valley Foods were involved in an elaborate identity theft operation, enabling them to bypass electronic verification by using the stolen Social Security numbers of American citizens.
“Recently, someone referred to an arrested identity thief as ‘good, hardworking, honest’,” stated Mark Zito from ICE. statement:
These so-called honest workers have inflicted significant economic and emotional hardships on innocent Americans. If you’re assuming another person’s identity to steal from them, I don’t think you can call that criminality dishonest.
In one instance, disabled Americans in Texas faced challenges obtaining Social Security benefits because undocumented workers from Glen Valley Foods were exploiting their identities to earn wages.
Similarly, an individual in Pennsylvania was unable to secure an essential prescription due to his identity being taken by someone illegally working at Glen Valley Foods.
A California resident has spent 15 years attempting to reclaim his identity and address the financial fallout after an undocumented employee from Glen Valley Foods used it for factory work.
Additionally, a Missouri nursing student lost her tuition fees after an illegal alien at Glen Valley Foods took her identity. This theft hindered several Americans from renewing their driver’s licenses, as the identity thief had accrued multiple unpaid traffic violations.
In Colorado, individuals were targeted by the IRS and forced to pay over $5,000 after illegal aliens at Glen Valley Foods inflated their income by stealing their identities.
“The individuals who perpetrated these identity thefts not only violated the law; they disrupted lives,” Zito remarked. “These victims are not just numbers. They are real people who have been denied medical care and missed educational opportunities.”
A similar mass identity theft operation came to light in September 2019 when ICE conducted raids at various food processing plants in Mississippi, marking the largest single-state operation in U.S. history.
In that instance, some undocumented workers applied for jobs, were initially turned down for not being legal residents, but returned weeks later with valid Social Security numbers and were subsequently hired.
As seen at Glen Valley Foods, some unauthorized workers in food processing facilities maintained employment for up to a decade using stolen identities of U.S. citizens.
A thorough investigation by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) found 39 million lawsuits filed between 2012 and 2016 related to stolen Social Security numbers belonging to American citizens.
