Criminals with connections to the gang MS-13 are openly selling fake IDs and social security cards to illegal immigrants in New York City.
The New York Post saw at least 10 individuals across Queens advertising the false documents for $80-$250.
The documents may allow the migrant to create a bank account and possibly obtain a driver’s license, the outlet noted.
If illegal immigrants obtain fake IDs, one could “load up a truck with bombs … and bring it underneath the Holland Tunnel and create something major and disastrous,” former special agent in Homeland Security investigations Bruce Foucart said. “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 added that under the United States’ illegal immigration issue,” the country is “just waiting for another 9/11.”
The Post described several encounters between the document forgers and customers, writing, “One black-market seller brought a reporter into a stairwell beneath a barber shop, where he asked the scribe to enter his name, age and country of origin into a phone. The salesmen initially asked for $200 for a green card and social security card, but the price was negotiated down to $80. The Post didn’t buy the cards.”
In another incident, one salesman told a reporter that the cards “work.” To make an ID, the individual said he needed “your name, your whole name, your age . . . I can take your picture.”
Although the social security cards are fake, the numbers are real and affect U.S. citizens.
Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Justice at the Citadel, South Carolina, Roy Fenoff, said, “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.”
