Gee, that's a lot more than the paltry $1,000 "fine" (fee) the US Government charged Illegals for a Section 245(i) Amnesty.
Clinton, Bush, and Daschle sure know how to crack down on foreign-born lawlessness.
Gee, that's a lot more than the paltry $1,000 "fine" (fee) the US Government charged Illegals for a Section 245(i) Amnesty.
Clinton, Bush, and Daschle sure know how to crack down on foreign-born lawlessness.
JusT some hard working Legal guys working hard to safeguard this country and make sure we have adequate help , /sarcasm!
I'm beginning to think that the immigration lawyer industry is one big criminal syndicate. James Ziglar might need a calculator to figure out how much dough he got screwed out of.
This is what bugs me. They don't have the willingness. Well. that is their job. Just do it. Yesterday I read in The Dallas Morning News that the Marshalls office is coming after thousands of people with outstanding warrants for traffic violations because the city needs money. How many times have I said on this forum that they will arrest you or me for a traffic violation while they let illegals run wild? I'll post a link to the story if it is still up.
The judge also ordered the assets of both men frozen.
Now we're getting somewhere. This should happen in every case. Guys like Kooritzky are the sugar that is drawing these people here. Take away the sugar and the ants will leave.
07/24/2002
By CHRIS HEINBAUGH / WFAA-TV
The Dallas City Marshal's office hit the streets Tuesday, rounding up dozens of suspects on outstanding warrants.
With Dallas facing an $81 million budget shortfall, the city wants millions of dollars in overdue fines and penalties paid.
By early afternoon, the holding cells at the jail were already filling up - a good indication that the marshals will call their latest warrant roundup a success.
Dallas cracking down on outstanding warrants.
To coin an old Rush Limbaugh saying - I told you so!! Chances are these Marshals will drive past parking lots full of illegals that are drinking beer and throwing sandwich wrappers all over the parking lot just to arrest a person for a $50.00 traffic warrant.
One set of rules for them and an entirely different set for us. 'Nuff said.
Virginia DMV and 9-11 Hijackers
Two Men Sentenced For Helping 9-11 Terrorists Get Fake ID At Virginia DMV
Profile: Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles and the September 11th hijackers
NPR: All Things Considered
Copyright 2001 National Public Radio,Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
October 18, 2001
ROBERT SIEGEL, host: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, host: And I'm Linda Wertheimer.
The attacks of September 11th and their aftermath have led to many changes in the way Americans perform everyday tasks. Airports and airlines have changed their routines; so have mail rooms. In one state, the September hijackings have led to reforms in a seemingly benign system: the issuance of driver's licenses.
SIEGEL: Last month when FBI agents retraced the steps of the men they concluded had done the hijackings, they found that the trail often passed through an unlikely venue, the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.
Unidentified Computer Voice: Now serving A-6, A-7 at the window number 20.
SIEGEL: According to the FBI, on August 1st, 2001, two of the suspected hijackers had gotten Virginia ID cards from the DMV. They had gone to Arlington, Virginia, found an obliging stranger, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador and paid him $100. In exchange, he took them to a notary public, where he signed a DL 51 form saying that he, a resident of Virginia, knew them to be residents of the state too. They weren't, of course, but he let them use his old address in Falls Church.
The following day, four more of the suspected hijackers got Virginia DMV ID cards. On some of their proof of residency forms, the Virginia residents who vouched for them were their own comrades, who had just gotten their cards the day before. Later in August, another of the suspects got his Virginia ID.
They had all taken advantage of an unusually loose policy which has since been ended. It was a policy that the DMV's own investigators had campaigned unsuccessfully to end before it was linked to at least seven of the men suspected in three of the September 11th hijackings.
Ms. PAM GOHEEN (Virginia DMV): The agency really did try to create a service--a system that would aid people who legitimately needed this type of service.
SIEGEL: Pam Goheen(ph) of the Virginia DMV says that in 1994, the agency liberalized its guidelines for getting an ID card or applying for a driver's license. An applicant would only need the notarized DL 51 form, which showed proof of Virginia residence, and a DL 6, an identity affidavit signed by a Virginia lawyer.
Ms. GOHEEN: The guidelines really made it possible for individuals such as immigrants who may have left their native country under some sort of extreme circumstance or without appropriate identification to legitimately apply for and receive driver's licenses and ID cards. And the guidelines also benefit people who were new to Virginia, who maybe hadn't yet received an electric bill or some other document that would help them establish their residency in order to be processed at DMV.
SIEGEL: Other states required a utility bill showing the person's name and address, or a Social Security card to establish identity. In the populous Northeast, Virginia became synonymous with easy ID. If you were a Brazilian immigrant in Newark, New Jersey, in this country with no visa, you would see ads in the Brazilian-American paper. If you were an ethnic Chinese immigrant from Indonesia, you might see it in a Chinese language paper. If you were a Salvadoran or Colombian in, say, Bridgeport, Connecticut, you might see a flyer in Spanish like this one.
Unidentified Man: (Through Translator) Legal identifications from DMV. (Spanish Flyer) It's so easy. With only your passport you can obtain a legal identification card from DMV. Come with a resident of Virginia and this coupon and pay only $35 for your legal identification card. This is the lowest price in the area. Everything is confidential. Call for more information. Jenny Wren & Associates(ph).
SIEGEL: Unscrupulous lawyers and notaries who were willing to sell their signatures established a thriving, illicit market. The $35 price tag on that coupon only covered them. Drivers who took immigrants in vanloads from the Northeast to Virginia charged them as much as $700. Vlas Martinez, a career enforcement officer, was an investigator for the Virginia DMV for 11 years.
Mr. VLAS MARTINEZ (Former DMV Investigator): It was like organized crime. Groups, reams of people working. It takes a transporter to bring people from out of state. Then it takes another person to receive them at this end and to transport them to the source of the documents; for example, the notary public. And then it takes another person to transport them to the Department of Motor Vehicles office and to help them apply for the identity card or driver's license or permit, whatever they're going to get. So we're looking at a conspiracy there, all the way from the state where they reside down to the DMV.
SIEGEL: What the September 11th hijack suspects did required no genius. It was common knowledge among immigrants that Virginia DMV ID cards or learners permits were easy to get. And you could take that to the DMV where you really lived and file for a change of address or you could use it to open a checking account or to show an employer. Vlas Martinez found that fraud was so rife that some of the addresses provided by the middlemen had dozens of fake Virginia residents supposedly living in them.
Mr. MARTINEZ: One specifically I remember. I had 80 names registered to one address.
SIEGEL: Martinez and other Virginia DMV investigators alerted their bosses in Richmond, the state capital. Mr. MARTINEZ: Back in '98, we did everything that we possibly could to get all the evidence that we needed to convince our commissioner and his staff that this form was really a problem.
SIEGEL: And what was their response to all this?
Mr. MARTINEZ: Nothing was being done that I could see.
Ms. GOHEEN: The agency has investigated these type cases for a very long time; in fact, for years.
SIEGEL: Again, the DMV's Pam Goheen.
Ms. GOHEEN: And since the beginning of the year, at least, the agency has been aggressively, extensively reviewing our entire list of acceptable documents for proof of identity and residency.
SIEGEL: But that raises a question of what defines aggressive or extensive when a state agency's practices are under fire? On February 26th of this year, federal authorities in Virginia busted a ring led by a Falls Church notary public and real estate agent named Jennifer Wren, the woman whose Spanish language flyer we read a couple of minutes ago. At a bank across the street across from her office, Wren had a safety deposit box with $170,000 in $50 and $100 bills. She was notarizing hundreds of fake residents a month. The middlemen who drove her customers to Virginia pleaded guilty. The lawyer who signed the identity documents had his license suspended. And Jennifer Wren has been convicted of fraud and money laundering.
Federal law enforcement officers, who declined to be identified, told us that she was just one of several corrupt Virginians running this racket, and she alone had a clientele of about 10,000 a year. With the Wren indictment there was suddenly local media coverage of the DMV's problems, but Vlas Martinez still saw no action on the Virginia ID and residency forms.
Mr. MARTINEZ: The driver's license issuing system was reviewed a couple of times, the latest being this year. This went on and on and on--I mean, four years, and nothing was ever done.
SIEGEL: Last spring, Martinez and other DMV investigators wrote a memo to their boss, the agency's inspector general. The last paragraph of that May 2001 report was prescient.
Mr. MARTINEZ: Quite possibly, the scariest aspect of the misuse and abuse of the DL 51 is that we truly do not know to whom we're giving identifications. That person could be the next gunrunner. And it's possible that the person who just drove away from Virginia's DMV could also supply the gun that is responsible for the next drive-by shooting, that accident that claimed the life of an innocent child. And could that customer be the next drug smuggler, or could that person be an international terrorist? It could be and quite possibly is and probably has been. This document was submitted in May of 2001, and by September 11 we still had those forms in use.
SIEGEL: How could a state agency fail to repair a system that was so blatantly abused? Here's what we heard. First, the DMV was mindful of groups that advocate a very low threshold for documentation. The National Council of La Raza, a Latino rights organization, is one such group. Cecilia Munoz is La Raza's vice president for policy, and she argues that immigrants who are in the country illegally should be able to get driver's licenses, for their good and for ours.
Ms. CECILIA MUNOZ (La Raza Vice President for Policy): You gain more by giving people access to licenses because they are in the community. They're driving cars. And you lose something if you fail to do that in terms of public safety because there are significant numbers of unlicensed drivers.
SIEGEL: Then there's the tension between security and efficiency at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Unidentified Computer Voice: Now serving A685 at window number 5. Now serving...
SIEGEL: A modern 20-window automated system of processing customers made going to this northern Virginia DMV bearable. To scrutinize customers, to take time to check their addresses for multiple registrations or to flag ID documents signed by a particular lawyer who was suspected of fraud--all that would made service slower for everyone. As it was, DMV offices routinely disposed of DL 6 and Dl 51 forms after a couple of days, leaving no easily accessible record of whose signatures were recurring in suspicious patterns.
It took the glare of national publicity, when the FBI traced several of the hijackers to Virginia, to change things. DMV spokesperson Pam Goheen insists the agency acted with vigilance.
Ms. GOHEEN: Our goal all along throughout the entire evaluation process, like I said, that had been ongoing was to eliminate the use of the forms. The agency was well aware. The agency had investigated numerous cases.
SIEGEL: But part of the question here is whether the people in Richmond act on the information that your investigators are sending you, and it seems as if they were learning about all this and not getting the response from headquarters that they thought was appropriate.
Ms. GOHEEN: The agency takes these situations very seriously, and we respond with investigations and prosecution when applicable. And in this case we took action. We have eliminated the use of these forms. It was a long and extensive process to get to this point, and I think the agency is confident behind the decision to do that.
SIEGEL: Vlas Martinez, who is now retired from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, is not nearly so charitable to nor so proud of his old agency.
Mr. MARTINEZ: I actually feel angry today because if some of these terrorists and some people who are presently in custody obtained documents through this system, shame on DMV.
SIEGEL: The very fact that a state Department of Motor Vehicles somehow figured in the story of international terrorism reflects a conflict in our country's approach to official ID documents. In theory we don't require any, but in practice we do--to open bank accounts, to cash checks, collect train tickets or board airplanes. Some Americans carry passports, but most show a driver's license. So informally we've assigned a task of guaranteeing who we are and where we live to agencies that really care more about whether we know to signal when changing lanes. And in Virginia, that clash of priorities kept the door to fraud wide open long after the fraud had been discovered.
Hug your kids, the idiots are in charge
Illegal immigrants lobby for licenses
Driver's licenses for terrorists
Immigrants line up for licenses
No driver's licenses for illegals
The wind whispers through the halls of congress, why we need a national I.D. card, we need a national I.D. card....
Driver's Licenses Could Serve as National IDs
Immigrant Licenses Debated ( ILLEGAL ALIENS... AGAIN )