Doctor convicted of surgery to alter immigrant fingerprints

BOSTON, (Reuters) – A doctor from the Dominican  Republic was convicted and sentenced in Boston on Thursday of  offering to surgically alter the fingerprints of illegal  aliens, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
The case is one of a number of attempts in recent years to  subvert the federal government’s new biometric border security  program, known as the Integrated Automated Fingerprint  Identification System.
Jose Elias Zaiter-Pou, 62, pleaded guilty of conspiring to  conceal illegal aliens from detection by law enforcement  authorities, by surgically altering their fingerprints in  exchange for payment.
He was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, followed by  deportation and three years of supervised release.
Authorities said Zaiter-Pou met at a hotel in Woburn,  Massachusetts, with a government informant who was posing as an  illegal alien, and agreed to alter the informant’s fingerprints  for $4,500.
The doctor brought surgical equipment, antibiotics and pain  medication to the meeting, which was secretly recorded.
Zaiter-Pou described how he would surgically remove a  portion of the fingertip, then suture the tip back together to  make a new, unrecognizable fingerprint.
Every person entering the United States, whether through  ports of entry or caught sneaking over the border, have their  digits run through the fingerprinting system.
In seconds, the prints are checked against law enforcement  databases for previous immigration violations or outstanding  warrants for the person’s arrest.
Some illegal immigrants have been known to burn their  fingertips, file them down with an emery board, dip them in  acid or even resort to surgery to avoid a match.
In 2007 a Mexican doctor was charged in Pennsylvania with  surgically removing drug traffickers’ fingerprints,  substituting skin from the soles of their feet.