Seeking a better life

Carrasco first discovered her identity had been stolen last year when she filed her tax return, after moving from welfare to work. She earned $5,710 at a retail job and was due a refund of $2,758 — or so she thought. Instead of the refund, she got a letter from the Internal Revenue Service saying she owed back taxes. The IRS showed Carrasco owing $4,143 for $55,266 in earnings in just one year.

"I was shocked," she says. "I didn't know what they were talking about. I wasn't working all those years. I was receiving welfare."

Carrasco says she never really thought about illegal immigration until her identity was stolen. "I know they can't issue me a new Social Security number, but something should come up to clear up victims," she says.

Back in Mexico, Naranjo knows what she did is wrong. Even so, as she sits on a bed in a room with pink plaster walls, she wonders if being split apart from her family is too harsh a punishment.

"Before I married my husband, I lived by myself with my son," she says. "That's why we look for something to work. We need to work. We need to bring some food."

Her two youngest children are staying with her at her parents' home in the rural community of Francisco Murgia, south of the city of Zacatecas. Her 12-year-old son, Jaime Jr., attends school in West Wendover, Nev.

After Naranjo's husband, Jaime, spent a week in Mexico, he returned to the couple's home in West Wendover, where he's struggling to work to support her in Mexico. After spending the summer with his mother, Jaime Jr. is back with his father for school.

Thinking of Jaime Jr. makes Maricela Naranjo the saddest. "It is very hard," she says. He understands some Spanish but isn't fluent, and he's afraid that if he went to school in Mexico, he wouldn't fit in.

Outside the system

In the afternoon, family and friends attend a party celebrating the baptism in Francisco Murgia, where Maricela Naranjo's father, Miguel Rodriguez, says, in Spanish, that his daughter is being unfairly punished for simply trying to support her family.

"She shouldn't be criminalized," he says. "She didn't rob, she didn't kill."

She shares a bedroom here with her children in the small brick and adobe home, adjacent to a small cactus farm. The town has only dirt roads, and few homes have phones.

Boxes filled with clothing and other supplies for the children sit in the corner, which her husband brought from Salt Lake City, where such products are cheaper.

Meanwhile, Jaime Naranjo is struggling to earn enough money to support two households. He's an assistant laundry manager, earning about $2,000 a month, after taxes and insurance. About $400 goes to his wife. The rest, he says, goes to the couple's mortgage on a home they purchased in Wendover, and basic necessities.

Her father believes that his daughter, who he says never racked up a bad credit rating, actually helped Carrasco by putting money in her Social Security account.