Black market fake green cards and social security identification are being openly hawked to illegal migrants on the streets of New York City, a report revealed.
Criminals linked to MS-13 and other gangs have been spotted selling the fabricated documents this week in Queens, the New York Post reported.
At least ten men were selling the bogus cards for $80 to $250 while “camped out in broad daylight at four corners along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens,” according to the outlet.
Roy Fenoff, an associate professor at the Department of Criminal Justice at the Citadel, South Carolina, said the documents grant migrants access to almost everything a citizen has.
“Once people have these fake cards, they can work, they can travel, they can access a lot of aspects and services in the United States,” he said. “There are people getting these cards that are not here just to get a job, that they have other intentions, and this helps them carry out criminal activity.”
Venezuelan migrants wait in a line to get paperwork to be admitted to shelters at a migrant processing center on May 9, 2023, in Denver, Colorado (Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty),
While the social security cards are fake, the numbers can belong to real U.S. citizens.
“If I’m using a social security number that’s of another person, and then I’m committing crimes, and I’m using [their] name, you potentially have warrants out there for innocent people’s arrest, because you don’t really know who this person was,” Fenoff said.
Bruce Foucart, a former special agent in charge of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) investigations in New England, also said the fake identification cards could be utilized by someone with dark intentions.
With fake IDs, illegal migrants could “load up a truck with bombs … and bring it underneath the Holland Tunnel and create something major and disastrous,” Foucart warned.
“For someone that wants to do terrorist activity or is a national security threat, it’s easy to establish this second life within the US,” he said.
“I guarantee right now, we’re just waiting for another 9/11.”
A police source told the Post that the Roosevelt Avenue hawkers are affiliated with the 18th Street gang as well as MS-13.
“It’s big business,” the source said.
Roosevelt Avenue is known to law enforcement as the “East Coast epicenter” for fake identification documents, the Post added.
“If they’re doing social security number [sic] and nobody says s–t, next time it’ll be weapons and passports,” one local resident and shop employee on the avenue said. “Everyone can do what they want now.”
“People from other boroughs are coming specifically to this area to get the IDs, all the new migrants are coming here,” another resident said.
Illegal aliens can even skirt past criminal charges by giving fake identities to law enforcement.
“If they’ve never been fingerprinted before, under their fake name they can get arrested five, six, seven, eight times… and they themselves would never have a record,” said John Cutter, retired NYPD deputy chief of the Intelligence Division.
“With fake IDs, they become [a] ghost, so they become more emboldened and more willing to break the law and potentially do something that’s really serious,” he added.
The brother of Jose Antonio Ibarra, the illegal migrant who allegedly killed 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley, has been charged with allegedly possessing a fake green card, which he used to get a job at the University of Georgia.
Diego Ibarra, 29, was taken into custody by the Clarke County Sheriff’s Office after being fired from his dishwasher job at one of the school’s dining halls upon refusing to provide additional identifying documents, Breitbart News reported.
Diego has “been linked to a brutal Venezuelan gang,” according to the New York Post.