Good news from the Supreme Court yesterday. The Court ruled unanimously in Flores-Figueroa v. United States that immigrant workers who use false Social Security numbers to get jobs without knowing  whether the numbers belong to another person may not be charged under a federal identity theft law.

NIJC submitted an amicus brief in this case, along with several other immigrant rights organizations, urging the Court to rule in favor of Mr. Flores-Figueroa. NIJC Litigation Director Chuck Roth was quoted in today's New York Times explaining the significance of the case for immigrant workers:

"The court's ruling preserves basic ideals of fairness for some of our society's most vulnerable workers," said Chuck Roth, litigation director at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago. "An immigrant who uses a false Social Security number to get a job doesn't intend to harm anyone, and it makes no sense to spend our tax dollars to imprison them for two years."

The full article is online here.

One of the reasons the Flores-Figueroa case is so important is because if the Court had ruled differently, immigrant rights advocates feared that the due process violations and unfair prosecutions that occurred following the massive immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, nearly a year ago would become routhe parts of immigration enforcement. NIJC detailed the problems with this enforcement strategy in our Winter 2009 Due Process and Human Rights Policy Brief.

Read NIJC's full statement in response to the Flores-Figueroa ruling.