There is no doubt this country has frustrating and convoluted laws and rules when it comes to dealing with illegal immigration.
The Weld County case in which some 1,300 illegal immigrants filing tax returns were ensnared in a criminal probe neatly illustrates some of those problems.
But the case offers another important lesson that’s easily lost in the heated debate surrounding the raid on Amalia’s Tax and Translation Service: You can’t shortcut the U.S. Constitution, no matter how right you think you are.
And it sounds a warning shot for local authorities about the limits of their reach when trying to become, in essence, immigration officers.
There’s no justifying fishing expeditions, in which law enforcement rifles through private records without sufficient evidence of a crime. What of the thousands of others, accused of no wrongdoing, whose records were scooped up in the raid?
On Monday, Larimer District Court Judge James Hiatt ruled Weld County deputies wrongly seized some 5,000 records from a tax preparer’s office.
Authorities suspected illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers were utilizing the service, and got a warrant to raid the business.
However, the search warrant “lacked particularity” as to what was to be seized and failed to identify probable cause, the judge said. He was the second judge to rule the search illegal. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects people against unreasonable government search and seizure.
At first blush, it might be easy to support such a broad raid. These are folks who are in the country illegally, using someone else’s Social Security number to get a job, and filing tax returns with an Internal Revenue Service that must know they are in the country illegally.
There’s a lot to criticize here. It’s crazy that we have such a porous border, and we don’t have a workable guest-laborer program that would eliminate illegal immigrants’ motivation to steal identities in order to work.
That way, we would cut down on the bizarre circumstance in which the IRS essentially looks the other way when people who are likely illegal immigrants file tax returns based on income earned with someone else’s Social Security number.
But those are federal issues that must be addressed by Congress. We hope President Obama’s recent immigration reform comments will jumpstart that discussion. This case only reinforces the need for comprehensive immigration reform.
Hiatt, who was presiding over a civil lawsuit filed with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, ordered all seized evidence to be returned or destroyed within seven days.
And rightly so. Though this case hits two big hot-button issues of the day — illegal immigration and identity theft — we’re glad to see that in the end the core issue was one of legal sufficiency and not political expediency.
