Years after Judicial Watch reported that the government’s system to verify if employees are authorized to work legally in the United States approved hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, federal authorities have uncovered widespread identity theft at a meat processing plant that used the defective tool to screen 100% of its staff. A recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) worksite enforcement operation at Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, Nebraska busted over 70 illegal aliens who were using stolen Social Security numbers and identities to unlawfully obtain wages, health benefits and employment authorization, according to the agency. The criminal identity theft scheme left “more than 100 real victims to face devastating financial, emotional and legal consequences,” ICE writes in its announcement of the operation.

Incredibly, Glenn Valley Foods was reportedly 100% compliant with E-Verify, a costly government database launched nearly three decades ago that screens new employees using records from various agencies to confirm candidates are in the country legally. The web-based system claims to match information provided by new hires against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) records. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) operates it because the agency is responsible for administering the nation’s lawful immigration system. The program is available to employers in every state as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. For private businesses it is voluntary but federal contractors and subcontractors must use it to vet workers. The government has for years claimed that E-Verify is “the best means available to electronically confirm employment eligibility.”

The Republican congressman (Don Bacon) who represents Omaha in the U.S. House, confirms that Glenn Valley Foods “complied with E-Verify 100%” and therefore the company is also a “victim.” Other casualties of the Omaha identity fraud ring include a Californian who has been working for nearly 15 years to restore their identity and repair financial damage caused by the identity theft of one of the illegal immigrants; A disabled person in Texas, who was unable to work, and could not collect Social Security disability payments because an illegal alien was fraudulently using their identity and earning wages at Glenn Valley Foods; A Colorado resident ordered by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to repay over $5,000 after their income was falsely increased by the illegal immigrant’s identity theft; A full-time nursing student from Missouri who lost their college tuition assistance because it was fraudulently reported that they earned too much money after an illegal alien used their Social Security number for employment at Glenn Valley Foods.

Expressing frustration over the left’s narrative condemning recent immigration operations, the Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge of the Glenn Valley Foods case points out that individuals have gone on the record referring to the identity thieves arrested by his agents as “good, hardworking, and honest.” The reality is that “these so-called honest workers have caused an immeasurable amount of financial and emotional hardship for innocent Americans,” said the supervisory agent, Mark Zito. “If pretending to be someone you aren’t in order to steal their lives isn’t blatant, criminal dishonesty, I don’t know what is.” The DHS official goes on to confirm that the criminals who stole these identities did not just break the law, they upended lives. “These victims aren’t faceless statistics,” special agent Zito said. “They’re real people who are being denied healthcare and have lost educational opportunities.” Zito also revealed that the investigation is ongoing.

If in fact Glenn Valley Foods screened every single employee with E-Verify it clearly demonstrates that the system’s widely reported flaws, identified in federal audits for years, have not been corrected. Just a few years ago, a DHS Inspector General report blasted USCIS, exposing “deficiencies” that illustrate the program needs “additional capabilities” to effectively confirm that individuals are eligible for employment in the United States. At the time the DHS watchdog found that E-Verify authorized employment for about 280,000 non-U.S. citizens without using the photo-matching process to confirm their identities and that 613,000 individuals were approved without meeting USCIS’s own verification requirements. Those are considered illegal immigrants, the demographic the system is supposed to prevent from unlawfully obtaining wages in the U.S.

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