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AMBER ESPINOZA: The false document industry may operate under most people's radar, but it's pretty easy to find if you look in the right places. As part of the research for this story, I recently went to a Mexican restaurant in Saint Paul and asked a waitress if she knew where I could get false documents in the neighborhood. The waitress immediately said the cook in the back had told me what I needed.

Many immigrants are familiar with how easy it can be to track down document vendors. A man we'll call Ramon says he's done it several times. But Ramon insisted we not use his real name because he entered the United States illegally about five years ago and he fears deportation.

He left his home in El Salvador because he felt his life was in danger from increasingly violent gang activity. Ramon sees his story repeated all the time in spite of recent crackdowns.

SPEAKER 2: (TRANSLATED) People come here. They get false documents to work, so everything's the same. The Worthington raids haven't slowed things down or changed things at all. People are still buying.

AMBER ESPINOZA: And that's because the demand seems almost bottomless with new immigrants coming into the country all the time. The US State Department has set aside 66,000 temporary visas for unskilled, non-agricultural workers and 5,000 permanent visas. Those figures are dwarfed by the number of immigrants who want a visa to work.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, more than seven million immigrants who are in the US illegally hold jobs. So you could say the market is wide open for people who want to make money selling work papers. And they'll do so out in public. The parking lot of this Kmart in Minneapolis, which serves a sizable Latino population, has become a well-established sales location.

Mark Cangemi from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, met me there. As we stand near a row of phones looking out at the parking lot, customers push shopping carts to their cars and Cangemi points to some men near the street who may be keeping an eye out for a different kind of customer. The men are wearing jeans and hooded sweatshirts or winter jackets. They look like any other store patron, except for the fact, they're just loitering by the parking lot entrance.

Cangemi says these men could be runners for fake document rings.

MARK CANGEMI: Those runners will get paid a minimum of $25 just to bring in a potential client to bring them over to these particular phones where calls are made, prices are determined, down payments are made.

AMBER ESPINOZA: The process is familiar to Ramon, who bought documents this way after he arrived from El Salvador.

SPEAKER 2: (TRANSLATED) They take you to have your picture taken and you give them half of what the documents cost. About one or two hours later you meet at the second spot different from where you originally met. And then they give you your card. It's a fast process. About an hour and a half. That's the way it works. I've seen it with my own eyes.

AMBER ESPINOZA: Mark Cangemi from ICE says the people who put together the document packages sold here at the K-Mart parking lot probably live right in the neighborhood and their businesses offer a range of documents. Cangemi says for about $25, you can buy a low quality fake Social Security card. Green cards run around $150 to $200. They're more valuable than a Social Security card because a green card indicates someone can legally live and work in the US.

Original documents, like a stolen birth certificate or passport, cost upwards of $1,500 and take about a week for delivery. The rings that sell documents are often compared to the mafia due to their violent reputation, their secrecy, and their big profits. Cangemi says their profitability has really taken off since 9/11.

MARK CANGEMI: More emphasis has been placed on immigration enforcement and specifically, border enforcement. What has that done? It has driven up the difficulty of passing through the border and also has driven up the prices to the point where it may even be more lucrative in some respects than narcotics.

AMBER ESPINOZA: But just how lucrative is it? Government agencies won't provide estimates of the total dollar value of the document industry. They say they don't have that information. United States Attorney Pat Rynard has investigated paper networks in Iowa.

MARK CANGEMI: I would not be able to put a number on that. I mean, it's difficult trying to figure out how many angels dance on the head of a pin. I don't think I could hedge a guess as to how deep the criminal networks run in any particular state or how widespread it is in any particular area.

AMBER ESPINOZA: The government officials sometimes point to individual criminal networks to illustrate the scale of the industry. One case occurred in the late '90s when ICE cracked down on a Mexican family that operated a false document business in cities all across the US. The Castorena family had more than 100 employees. Officials say the family is linked to millions of counterfeit IDs.

At a raid on just one of the family's operations in Los Angeles, ICE seized false documents with an estimated street value of $20 million. Regardless of the scale of the document rings, immigrant advocates want one thing to be clear, the customers buying fake documents should not be seen as part of the criminal enterprises doing the counterfeiting. That's the view of John Keller of the Immigrant Law Center in Saint Paul.

JOHN KELLER: The workers themselves are not creating documents. They're not the masterminds behind the document ring. These folks simply buy documents wherever they can find them so that they will be able to work and be able to send money home.

AMBER ESPINOZA: But some government officials say the fake work papers sold to immigrants may just be a sideline for enterprises primarily involved in identity theft, credit card, or other types of fraud. Officials say the false paper networks facilitate the entry of terrorists into the country and allow others to hide criminal records with new identities.

Tim Counts of ICE says the people who buy fake papers are supporting criminal enterprises even if their motives are innocent.

TIM COUNTS: It's true, many people who are buying these documents and these identities are merely seeking to work. But if it weren't for them, the larger criminal organizations wouldn't be in business. And in any investigation, we try to get to the root of the problem.

AMBER ESPINOZA: While law enforcement officials hope immigrants using fake papers will lead them to the document networks, the immigrants themselves may just be hoping the documents they buy will pass muster. According to Ramon, who bought workpapers himself, there's a lot of uncertainty on the buyers end. The buyer could get duped.

SPEAKER 2: (TRANSLATED) There are recently arrived immigrants who buy documents that don't work. You could easily tell the documents are fake.

AMBER ESPINOZA: And of course even if the papers look good, the immigrants could get caught and deported. But if they do, there will likely be other immigrants rushing in to replace them, maybe this time with more sophisticated fake documents. With reporting from Annie Baxter, I'm Amber Espinoza, Minnesota Public Radio News.