Amazing: The New York Times Profiles an Illegal Alien Who Stole an American Man's Identity and Caused Him 20 Years of Legal Nightmares.
The Times Say They're Both Victims.

Via David Strom, who quotes the New York Times asserting that both the citizen whose identity was stolen, and the identity thief himself, are both victims of the same broken system and equally deserving of our sympathies.

Dan Kluver saw the police lights flashing in his rearview mirror late last year and eased his car onto the shoulder, thinking there had been some kind of mistake. He had spent four decades in rural Minnesota without ever getting into trouble. He prided himself on a life built around dependability and routine, working at the same factory where his father once did and spending his weekends coaching baseball and teaching Sunday school. He had never fired a gun, or smoked a cigarette, or missed a payment, or been arrested.

"License and registration, please," the officer said. Kluver, 42, handed them over and waited while the officer went back to his patrol car. He listened to the church bells that rang every hour and watched sunlight reflect off the grain silos in downtown Olivia, where he knew most of the 2,400 residents, including the officer who was walking back to his car.

"Is everything all right?" Kluver asked.

"It's strange, but it looks like your license has been suspended," the officer said. "You've got another driver's license with some issues down in Missouri."

"What?" Kluver said. "I've barely ever been to Missouri. How's that possible?"

The officer had no answers, but Kluver feared he might know what was happening. Over the years, there had been signs that something wasn't right -- stray letters about wages earned in unfamiliar towns and collection notices for debt that wasn't his. Kluver had tried to untangle the mess several times by hiring tax specialists and driving to government offices across the state only to run into the same bureaucratic dead ends. But now the problem was bigger than unpaid taxes. Someone was impersonating him, moving through the world as Dan Kluver, building a life in his name with a government-issued ID.

The identity thief used his Social Security to illegally work. The thief kept the money paid for his illegal labor -- but this citizen got "credited" with the thief's salary, which pushed his tax liabilities up, pushing him, in fact, into a higher tax bracket.

He was expected to pay the taxes on the thief's earnings while the thief kept the earnings himself.

As you can see, they were both victims here.

...

Some years the other Dan Kluver had earned more than his own salary at a local sugar beet factory, which pushed the total income under his Social Security number into a higher tax bracket as the debt started to mount. Twice, he'd contacted law enforcement and filed an identity theft report with the federal government, where it landed in a pile along with tens of thousands of similar reports filed each year. He waited for relief while the I.R.S. docked his annual tax returns and garnished a few of his paychecks, costing him thousands. Finally, a few months before their wedding in 2012, Kristy decided to pay off the balance, emptying her savings and sending in a check for $6,000. Their relief lasted until the next tax season, when a new bill arrived -- this one for $22,000.

They spent the next decade living with the consequences -- annual tax audits, budgets that never added up, whispered arguments after the kids went to bed. Kluver kept calling government numbers and waiting on hold until he eventually resigned himself to a payment plan. He agreed to send the I.R.S. $150 each month, which he'd done more than 35 times. "I can't keep obsessing over this and getting nowhere," he told Kristy. "I need to think about something else."

Now the Times turns to the thief. I mean, The Other, More Deserving Victim.

He had lived under enough names and numbers in the United States that they started to blur together. Vincent Trujillo. Reynaldo Guerra. And then, for more than a decade, Daniel Kluver -- the name he used until he could barely remember what it felt like to exist as himself: Romeo Pérez-Bravo, 42, a Guatemalan immigrant who had spent most of his adult life working under borrowed identities.

"Borrowed." They won't even say "stolen."

...

Perez-Bravo had come to the United States for the first time at 16 to help earn money for his family, traveling alone to join his father in Marshall, Minn. He hiked out of the Guatemalan highlands, rode atop a freight train for three weeks across Mexico, nearly drowned in the Rio Grande and took a Greyhound to Middle America, where life somehow felt harder. He slept on a couch in his father's apartment and enrolled in high school despite speaking almost no English. Then he began to look for a job, but no one would hire an underage worker without papers.

No one would hire an illegal immigrant barred by the law from working, you mean.

He's definitely the victim. He was forced to steal Dan Kluvin's identity and make his life a living hell.

Read the whole thing from David Strom. The New York Times continues doubling down on the narrative that the first victim of Perez-Bravo's serial identity theft was... Perez-Bravo himself.

The narrative, man. Stick to the narrative. The law-abiding citizen whose life is being turned upside-down may be a victim, but Perez-Bravo has a story to tell, too.

This is exactly the kind of logic that lets criminals walk the streets after tens of arrests. They are people too, so if you look at it the right way, everybody is a victim.

And Kluver is white, so really, he is the privileged one and should be happy to help out his brown brother, who suffers from oppression that is almost as bad as Michelle Obama's.

And he also "paid the price."

He was charged with aggravated identity theft and false representation of a Social Security number and was held in detention for six weeks before an initial bond hearing in April. The State of Missouri argued that he was a flight risk who needed to remain in custody until the trial. "What's to stop him from going out and getting another identity and just living underneath that," the prosecutor told the judge. "We've seen that before."

But Perez-Bravo had most of his family and several members of his church at the hearing, and his lawyer said that he was "connected to the city in deep ways."

The Times believes that it was outrageous for the prosecutor to assert that this serial identity thief might just steal another identity and flee the court's jurisdiction under a new name if he were set free.

Absolutely outrageous! He has "deep" "connections" to the city he's currently living illegally in!

Amber Duke was herself a victim of a identity thief.

Almost as much a victim of identity thief as the identity thief herself.

She doesn't think her identity thief was the Real Victim Here.

About seven years ago, my identity was stolen in a data breach. I found out fairly quickly because one of the thieves made a mistake: the receipts for their fraudulent purchases were sent to my email address. It still took almost two weeks to shut down the accounts opened in my name and clear them from my credit reports. I was constantly stressed and paranoid and couldn't focus on anything else in my life until my credit was cleared and locked down.

I was lucky that I caught the identity theft early. Some people spend years digging themselves out after someone else pretends to be them.

...

Pérez-Bravo had stolen multiple identities throughout his time in the U.S. While living here, he got several DUIs. He was deported in 2005, 2008 and 2009 but came back each time and stole another American's info.

...

The story gets even more unbelievable from there. Pérez-Bravo was involved in a fatal accident that killed a 68-year-old grandfather and injured his 9-year-old granddaughter. He was cleared of wrongdoing but the family filed a wrongful death suit against Kluver, whose name was on the fake license Pérez-Bravo provided at the scene.

The police eventually found Pérez-Bravo and he has been charged for his crimes. Nonetheless, the NYT report paints him as just as much a sympathetic victim as Kluver, describing him as a family man and hard worker who essentially had no choice but to steal an identity so he could make money for his family.

I'm so sick of it.

If liberals want to impose liberal policies on the country, they have to at least make sure the worst excesses of those policies are checked.

They cannot allow maniacs to prowl the subway stations throwing grandmothers in front of trains, for example.

And they cannot lionize criminal identity thief illegals.

They have to show that they can demonstrate compassion without turning all of society into violent chaos.

But they can't -- and the new breed doesn't even try.

Their attitude is You deserve it, Colonialist Oppressors.

So all of the illegals will have to go. If there's no protection for the citizens, there is certainly no protection for the fucking illegals.

Kick them out. Kick them all out.

posted by Ace at 05:20 PM

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