Kudos to the Courier Tribune of Liberty for reporting a hugely significant story that the Kansas City Star did not apparently find newsworthy: namely the arrest of sixteen illegal aliens and one naturalized citizen in a sophisticated identity theft scheme. More troubling, at least 100 illegal aliens had already received their official non-driver’s license in this scheme through the one license bureau in Gladstone.
On Tuesday, December 11, a dozen Guatemalans, with the help of four facilitators–also illegally in the country–and a translator, attempted to secure official non-driver’s licenses from the Department of Motor Vehicles in Gladstone. This is all the identification they would need to vote anywhere.
Courier Tribune reporter Sean Roberts does an excellent job of explaining how the identity theft scheme worked. Kevin J. Friend, a special agent with the State of Missouri’s Compliance and Investigations Bureau, got a tip in early December that illegal aliens were coming from Oklahoma and western Kansas to secure non-driver licenses from the Gladstone license bureau. Friend learned that more than 100 licenses already granted were registered to the same Kansas City address. Friend checked out the address, and it proved to be a single-family home inhabited by a woman named Nohemi F. Lara.
When shown a photo of Lara, the manager of the Gladstone license office identified her, reports Roberts, “as a person who would bring multiple people to the office to be processed for non-driver licenses.”
According to the probable cause statement, Friend actually ran into Lara at the Gladstone office, and she told him about the people she was helping. Bizarrely, as Friend was confronting Lara, she continued to get messages from her illegal clients. Choosing to cooperate with Friend, Lara had her clients come to the Gladstone office. There, they walked through the registration process and were promptly busted. Writes Roberts, “Friend said that many of those charged were emotional during the arrest process and admitted to knowing what they did was a crime.”
Sixteen of the 17 arrested were from Guatemala and were in the country illegally. Three of the 17 were unlawful re-entrants, two women were identified as ICE fugitives, and another was undergoing deportation proceedings.
The reason for the Star’s silence on identity theft is not hard to deduce. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is running for governor of Kansas. He has achieved national prominence for his legal work on the issues of illegal immigration and vote fraud. the Star needs to maintain the illusion that illegal immigration is a minor issue and vote fraud is a myth. The best way to accomplish that is to suppress stories that suggest otherwise. And that is exactly what the editors have done with what in a sane world have been a headline story.