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IOWA CITY, Iowa – The Mexican man accused of kidnapping and killing a student from Iowa had been known for years on the dairy farm where he worked under another name: John Budd.
The alias appeared when Cristhian Bahena Rivera's employer, a cattle farm owned by a prominent Republican family, wondered whether its leaders knew of any warnings that it was illegally in the country.
The name under which Rivera was hired and paid in the last four years has been confirmed by three people with a professional background. They spoke under cover of anonymity because they were not allowed to disclose the information during an ongoing criminal investigation. One of the individuals stated that Rivera's professional identity as John Budd is included in official government documents.
The employer, Yarrabee Farms, refused to confirm or deny Rivera's professional identity. Lori Chesser, an immigrant lawyer who advises the farm, said companies can not discriminate against workers based on how they look or how their names sound.
Farm officials said Rivera had presented a photo ID and a Social Security number when hired in 2014, and they thought he was the person represented in these documents until 39 to his arrest last month.
The farm followed the legal requirements to review the documents and determined "that they seemed authentic and related to the person who was presenting them," said Chesser. "Questioning a name or other characteristic would violate the anti-discrimination provisions of the law."
During his four years at the farm near the small town of Brooklyn, Iowa, Rivera "was called and answered the name he used in the recruitment process," said Mr. Chesser. He lived in a farm trailer for the benefit of his job, as did half of his ten workers.
The farm did not use the government's voluntary E-Verify system, which allows businesses to confirm the identity and eligibility of employees in the United States. Dane Lang apologizes for making a mistake claiming to have used E-Verify's statement on the arrest of Rivera on August 21, a few hours after he allegedly drove the police to Mollie Tibbetts' body in a corn field nearby.
It is unclear whether E-Verify detected red flags with Rivera's declared identity, but the farm reported using a different government service to confirm that the name and social security number matched.
Police said Rivera had followed and confronted Tibbetts while she was on the run on July 18 and then stabbed her to death. He was sentenced to $ 5 million in jail pending a trial for first degree murder, punishable by a life sentence. The federal government has also applied for immigration, which means that it could be deported if it was acquitted.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to comment on whether the agency was investigating Yarrabee Farms, which said it had received dozens of angry phone calls after Rivera 's arrest.
Tibbetts' father, Rob Tibbetts, has urged the public not to kill his daughter's death in the controversial racial debate over immigration.
"The person who is accused of taking Mollie's life is no longer a reflection of the Hispanic community, because white supremacists are whites," he writes in an article for the Monks' Registry.
Employers generally do not suffer the legal consequences of hiring a worker under false documents until they have been involved in obtaining them and had no other obvious reason to suspect that they were fraudulent. said Bob Teig, retired federal attorney in Iowa.
"In the absence of unusual circumstances, it would be difficult to show that they knew more than what they had been told," Teig said, adding that he would be "quite racist" "to assume that a John Budd could not be Hispanic.
If anyone else knew Rivera like John Budd is not clear. The 24-year-old had a Facebook page under his real name and his account showed many friends in central Iowa. He has a girlfriend and a girl, said his former lawyer.
Rivera did not possess any identification issued by Iowa under any name, nor any known criminal history nor any interaction with the police. It is not known who owned the car he would have used to encircle Tibbetts.
Former Rivera lawyer Allan Richards has accused the farm and other employers in the field of "turning a blind eye" to the fact that many of their workers are in the United States illegally and employed under false documents. He said that Rivera arrived in the United States when he was about 17 years old and had the equivalent of a secondary education.
Erica Johnson, a lawyer who heads the American Friends Service Committee's immigration program in Iowa, said the case highlighted the "precarious situation" of immigrant workers and their employers.
"We have an immigration system that does not take into account the labor needs or economic realities of Iowa businesses and farms," she said. "So what are you doing, are you right not to racially profile people and take the information that they give you because you need workers?"
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