Documents, please: Pondering the illegal immigration issue

Americans are getting angrier about illegal immigration, but their ire is generally scattershot and misses the true targets in this issue.

Here’s one target. Not some ragged border-crosser, but the extremely successful Pedro Castorena-Ibarra of Guadalajara. He was one of Mexico’s phony document kingpins, manipulating a scheme that sent 3 million Mexicans across the border with legal-appearing paperwork. He made a fortune, of course, before he was indicted by U.S. authorities and extradited to Colorado, where a federal judge recently sentenced him to 57 months.

Think his organization didn’t touch Southern Nevada?

Think again.

According to one news release: “The Castorena-Ibarra organization operated Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas and New York City. During the course of the investigation, ICE seized more than 3 million counterfeit identity documents with an estimated street value of more than $20 million. The documents were linked to over 400 investigations and seizures across the United States in more than 50 cities.”