Postville again

Here's a rare bird indeed: a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court that workers who use fake id numbers must know that they belong to a real person in order to be guilty of "aggravated identity theft."

The most sweeping use of the statute was in Iowa, after an immigration raid in May 2008 at a meatpacking plant in Postville. Nearly 300 unauthorized immigrant workers from the plant, most of them from Guatemala, pleaded guilty to document-fraud charges rather than risk being convicted at trial of the identity-theft charge. In most of those cases, the prosecutors demonstrated only that the Social Security numbers and immigration documents the workers had presented were false.

Many of the immigrants served five-month prison sentences and then faced summary deportation. The Postville cases raised an outcry among immigrant advocates, because they transformed into federal felonies a common practice by illegal immigrants of presenting fake Social Security numbers and other documents to employers.

The court’s ruling is unlikely to aid the immigrants in the Postville cases. Most of them have long since been deported.