27 accused of falsely using IDs to get jobs (Austin American-Statesman)

27 accused of falsely using IDs to get jobs
Workers in country illegally, federal officials say.

By Steven Kreytak
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Published: 10:00 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010

More than two dozen Pflugerville nursing home workers have been accused of misusing Social Security numbers to obtain employment in one of the biggest immigration-related workplace busts in Central Texas in recent years.

The arrests last month were prompted by a unique set of circumstances and do not appear to signal a more aggressive federal attack on local workers who are in the country illegally.

In all, 27 people stand charged in U.S. District Court in Austin, including five who have not yet been arrested, said Antonio Puente, a special agent with the Social Security Administration's Office of the Inspector General, which spearheaded the investigation.

Puente testified about the case during a bail hearing Wednesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Austin regarding four of the defendants, all of them Mexican citizens whose lawyers downplayed the charges.

Austin said that after deciding on conditions designed to ensure their return to court, he would order the defendants released from federal custody this morning pending trial. Immigration authorities could still ask an immigration judge to keep them in jail. Except for one defendant facing more serious charges in the county jail, the others are in jail and scheduled for bail hearings before Austin today and Friday.

Each defendant arrested in the case faces a charge of misuse of a Social Security number, a federal felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Some face additional charges with the same possible sentence. Defense lawyers and prosecutor Ashley Hoff agreed during Wednesday's hearing that the defendants would probably receive a few months in prison or probation.

The inquiry began in October when, according to a police affidavit, a female patient at the Pflugerville Nursing and Rehabilitation Center told Pflugerville police that 38-year-old nurse's aide Mario Rojas Lara had sexually assaulted her weeks earlier.

Assistant Police Chief Jim McLean said that while trying to verify Lara's identity, police determined that he had used someone else's Social Security number and a fraudulent permanent resident card. Lara also was charged with forgery. His case is set for this month.

Later, McLean said, lawyers for the nursing home and rehabilitation center took it upon themselves to check the records of other employees and determined that there might be problems with some of the identifications the employees submitted.

McLean said because Pflugerville police do not investigate immigration crimes and do not have access to federal Social Security databases, he forwarded to Puente the list of employees the nursing home suspected had misrepresented themselves.

In his testimony Wednesday, Puente said that out of the 44 names the nursing home officials handed over, 28 were found to have misused Social Security numbers. The case against one of those people has been dismissed, he said.

Some of those Social Security numbers belonged to people who are dead, others belonged to children, and some were made up, Puente said.

Seventeen of the people used the numbers to obtain Texas certification to work as nurses aides, Puente said.

He said that aspect of the case persuaded him to pursue the investigation. "It's a health care facility with what I would consider a very vulnerable part of our society," he said.

"I was concerned about that."

Assistant federal public defenders Horatio Aldredge and Bill Ibbotson noted that with the exception of Lara, none of the defendants has a significant criminal history, and there was no indication of any problems with their work. One defendant, Elsa Gutierrez, was named employee of the month at the facility last year.

There are at least two mother-son pairs among those arrested, including Junior Bravo Reyes and his mother, Martha Reyes. Junior Bravo Reyes is a recent graduate of Georgetown High School, Ibbotson said.

Arrests of illegal workers at local employers are rare. In 2006, 34 immigrants were arrested at a Hutto pallet factory — part of a nationwide raid on a Houston company's plants.

Three were charged with illegal re-entry after a previous deportation. The rest were deported without charges.