MVA Maryland, Corruption and the Terrorist Threat (2)

More MVA Maryland antics…

Welcome back, patriots! CLICK HERE if you missed part one of this article. As you’ll see here, illegal immigrants could use payday loans to pay for backwater licensing services… if I believed in that kind of thing, which I don’t…

But the red flags are on the public record. For instance, on January 16, 2008, a woman named Gabriel Beatriz Wekid came to Maryland with an Argentina passport. She gave the address of a Delaware farm and provided a cell phone bill with the same address. It wasn’t until a document from a Delaware agency appeared that an examiner noticed a discrepancy.

Wekid lived in Newark, Delaware, but had never been to been employed by the farm she’d cited in her application. Wekid was charged with two violations of fraud law, which amounted to a $55 fine and 60 days probation. What a slap!

That’s just the tip of the iceberg

The process to obtain a Maryland driver’s license using foreign documents without visa stamps involves calling a toll-free number to schedule an appointment. MVA officials report that the volume of out-of-state calls that number receives is tremendous, on the order of one in four from 53 states and territories outside Maryland. Officials have responded by blocking out-of-state calls.

In comes industry. Someone came up with the bright (and entirely legal) idea to charge immigrants hundreds of dollars to help them get licenses. The business makes appointments, reviews documents and provides transportation and translation services. Many who don’t have the money to pay for the service face as much as an eight-month wait to get an appointment. Using false licenses has been the path for some, as the arrest numbers in Maryland can testify: they prosecuted 507 immigrants in 2008. Surely there were many that went undetected. ... click here to read the rest of the article titled "MVA Maryland, Corruption and the Terrorist Threat (2)"