Supporters of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program (DACA) demonstrate on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House in Washington, Saturday, Sept. 9, 2017. President Donald Trump ordered and end of protections for young immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children, but gave Congress six months to act on it. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Back when the Clinton Administration entered office, presidential adviser Paul Begala acquired a bit of fame for saying, “Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.” The statement reflected the view of the Clinton Administration that anything the president directed became, de facto, the law of the land despite the views of Congress or even the courts. Unfortunately, Begala was right but as the events of the Obama years showed, Begala was hampered by a lack of imagination as to the possibilities of executive action. In the infamous King vs. Burwell decision, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court went along with the Obama Administration’s complete rewrite of the ObamaCare law passed by Congress. (See former RedStater Dan McLaughlin’s essay on how the courts are so ashamed of this decision that they don’t even reference it.) In Fast & Furious, federal gun laws were consciously broken in order to create sufficient carnage to warrant additional gun laws which, presumably, would also be broken by the administration.

There is no doubt that one of the most lawless acts committed by the Obama Administration was the establishment of the DACA program. This program created an entirely new immigration status which seems to protect illegals from deportation while, at the same time, locking them into a netherworld where they can never become U. S. citizens. And in order for this to work, the Obama Administration had to indulge in more than some administrative slight of hand. It had to enlist the federal government in preventing the prosecution of felonies.

Historically, the Social Security Administration has notified employers of social security number mismatches, that is, cases where the name and social security number filed by an employer conflict with the ownership of that social security number. Sometimes there are good reasons for this, like a post-marriage name change that was not filed with the SSA. In most cases, it indicates someone using a social security number to which they are not entitled. This is known by the technical name of a “felony.”

But the creation of DACA posed a special problem. On the DACA application, illegals were required to list every social security number they’d ever used. The phrasing of the question, since most of us only ever have one social security number, clearly indicates that Homeland Security was well aware of the use of identity theft among illegals. In fact, the official estimate is that 75% of illegals are using someone else’s social security number. Because filling out this form accurately meant admitting to identity theft, DHS issued some interesting guidance:

On Form I-821D, you are asked to provide your “social security number.” On Form I-765 (the work permit application) you are asked to provide all social security numbers you’ve ever used.

A lot of people are concerned – rightly so – with this question: “If I used a fake SSN, should I put it down on the forms? And if so, how?”

UPDATE: As of 9/14/2012, USCIS has indicated that when they ask you for a social security number, they are asking about real, valid social security numbers only. That means if you’ve used a fake one, you do NOT need to put it down.

But that still did not take care of the pesky “no-match” letters. So SSA took an obvious step:

At the time, DACA supporters might have argued that Social Security fraud by Dreamers, while a crime, did not directly harm any American citizen. What they may not have known, because it was concealed, was that on Aug. 23, 2012, just eight days after DACA commenced, the administration ordered the Social Security Administration (SSA) to suspend its decades-old practice of notifying employees by mail if the name and SSN under which their wages were being reported by their employers did not match the name and SSN in the SSA’s own records.

Many SSN “mismatches” are due to identity fraud, which means that many Dreamers were at risk of receiving mismatch letters from the SSA. Since awareness that they had been “flagged” as identity thieves might well have dissuaded them from disclosing their whereabouts in a DACA application, suspension of the SSA program was a logical add-on to the other actions taken by the administration to prevent fear of identity-theft prosecution from depressing DACA applications.

So the federal government assumed responsibility for covering up identity theft committed not only by DACA enrollees but anyone else interested in participating.

Never in Begala’s wildest dreams did he probably contemplate harnessing the entire power of the federal government to not only create an illegal program but to actively aid and abet the commission of felonies.