By Tanya Snyder, Reporter | Capitol News Connection

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If you’re lucky enough to have had your social security number falsely used by an illegal immigrant, you’ll have their hard-earned wages to draw on once you retire. And now, maybe they won’t serve two years in jail for it.

Almost a year after the biggest single-site immigration raid in U.S. history, the Supreme Court has ruled that the sentences meted out for faking social security numbers were unconstitutional.

Immigrants have often been charged with aggravated identity theft if they gave an employer a fake social security number that happened to belong to a real person. (If the number they picked didn’t belong to anybody, they were off the hook.) The charge carried a two-year prison sentence.

But the Court ruled Monday that the immigrant needs to know that the number belongs to someone else in order to prosecute for identity theft.

The New York Times says the ruling won’t help the scores of people who were deported under the old interpretation of the law after the Postville raid last year. That operation led to the detention of nearly 400 meat-packing workers in Postville, Iowa.

You can hear my stories on ICE raids in North and South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas at Capitol News Connection's Web site.