Prepare for more of this if electronic employment eligibility verification goes national. Reports Dianne Solís of the Dallas Morning News:

Federal immigration agents executing arrest warrants for workers at the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plant in Mount Pleasant arrested the wrong Jesus García at his home near the plant – despite his repeated assurances that he was a legal permanent resident.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted workers at Pilgrim’s plants in Texas and four other states, and by Thursday, had arrested 311 workers on identity fraud charges or immigration violations.

…

“We think it is a case of mistaken identity,” said Fernando Dubove, Mr. García’s attorney. “It is the wrong Jesus García. It is really tough when you have a common name.”

This is probably just coincidence, but were an electronic employment eligibility verification system in place, illegal immigrants would affirmatively pursue this as a strategy, deepening the simple identity frauds they commit now to get ‘legal’ employment. They would acquire proof of identification as good or better than the true holder of a given identity.

In my recent paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration,” I discussed what would happen when mistaken identity/​identity fraud situations arose in the EEV systems now being debated on Capitol Hill:

[L]aw-abiding citizens would regularly stand accused of identity fraud. The SSA and DHS would not know which user of a name-SSN pair was the genuine person and which was using a false identity. EEV would tentatively nonconfirm all users of that name-SSN pair. The “true” individuals attached to fraudulently used identities would learn of identity fraud in their names when they were refused work by EEV and plunged into a bureaucratic morass.

Luckily, these victims of the system would just be denied employment and not arrested — if that’s your idea of luck …