NYT lionizes illegal who stole innocent farmer's identity and left him to pay the illegal's taxes
By Monica Showalter www.americanthinker.com
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/11/nyt_lionizes_illegal_who_stole_innocent_farmer_s_identity_and_left_him_to_pay_the_illegal_s_taxes.html
The New York Times is famous for writing killer-victim stories as amoral 'lives intersect' stories. It was almost a running joke. Hardened killer meets teen girl and conducts torture-murder; it's all a matter of lives intersecting.
They're still doing that.
This time they came up with a doozy in telling the glurgy story of an illegal who stole an innocent Minnesota farmer's identity and upended his entire life, leaving him to pay the tax bills, watching his own hard-earned money get garnished away by the IRS. The illegal also left a chain of other destructive problems for the farmer, such as drunk-driving convictions, bad driving that killed a man, a suspended driver's license, and crappy credit scores, all of which were attached to the farmer's good name instead of his own.
But the Times likes to gloss it over and tell us the illegal was really a good guy. They started out with a dreamily grand and morally neutral "things happen" headline:
Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.
Who the hell cares what kind of price an identity thief in this country pays for his own crimes? The story is that the farmer was robbed of his good name and hard-earned money through no fault of his own.
But we get lots of treacle from the Times about the illegal:
He had lived under enough names and numbers in the United States that they started to blur together. Vincent Trujillo. Reynaldo Guerra. And then, for more than a decade, Daniel Kluver — the name he used until he could barely remember what it felt like to exist as himself: Romeo Pérez-Bravo, 42, a Guatemalan immigrant who had spent most of his adult life working under borrowed identities.
By the start of 2025, he was preparing for another graveyard shift in St. Joseph, Mo., lacing his work boots in the darkness of his drafty rental while his wife and five children slept. He packed their school lunches for the next day, drove to the dog-food factory and gathered with his co-workers to say their nightly prayer. Then he swiped his badge to begin another 12-hour shift as Daniel Kluver, sinking deeper into an identity that wasn’t really his own.
“Daniel?” his boss always shouted, taking attendance before they went out to their lines.
“Here,” he said.
Perez-Bravo had come to the United States for the first time at 16 to help earn money for his family, traveling alone to join his father in Marshall, Minn. He hiked out of the Guatemalan highlands, rode atop a freight train for three weeks across Mexico, nearly drowned in the Rio Grande and took a Greyhound to Middle America, where life somehow felt harder. He slept on a couch in his father’s apartment and enrolled in high school despite speaking almost no English. Then he began to look for a job, but no one would hire an underage worker without papers.
Borrowed identities? No, they were stolen identities and his behavior while using those ''borrowed" identities was to leave a string of rubble and ruin for the people whose good names got besmirched with his long, consistent record of irresponsible behavior.
Multiple drunk driving convictions and "other minor offenses," the Times explained as if drunk driving were a small thing. The illegal couldn't seem to stay away from committing crimes and doing enough of them to get caught for some of them.
Three deportations. A wrongful-death lawsuit filed by a family whose grandfather had been killed by his irresponsible driving with the innocent farmer named as the defendant.
Amid all these problems created for the farmer -- truly, a lifetime of irresponsible acts the illegal couldn't stop doing on his "borrowed" identity, the farmer, Dan Kluver, had to spend mountains of time trying to plead with the IRS that his identity had been stolen and he wasn't the person earning all the money from the dog food factory in Missouri. They didn't care. They put him on hold when he tried to call them and in the end a judge said he had to pay the illegal's taxes until he could 'prove' he was a victim of identity theft. The onus was on him. And he had to reason with these bureaucrats constantly, all for the crimes of someone else:
They spent the next decade living with the consequences — annual tax audits, budgets that never added up, whispered arguments after the kids went to bed. Kluver kept calling government numbers and waiting on hold until he eventually resigned himself to a payment plan. He agreed to send the I.R.S. $150 each month, which he’d done more than 35 times. “I can’t keep obsessing over this and getting nowhere,” he told Kristy. “I need to think about something else.”
Meanwhile, the lefty media and leftist pols kept calling illegal immigration a 'victimless crime' as churchmen ran around at protests with signs like 'Justice for Immigrants.'
As for the farmer Kluver:
But what bothered him lately was the idea he kept hearing from liberal politicians and even some relatives in Minnesota — that illegal immigration was mostly harmless, a victimless crime. His name was no longer his own. His debts were spiraling. He was still cutting checks to the I.R.S. for $150 each month, and the government said that debt was his to pay until a court determined otherwise. Even if the other Dan Kluver seemed to be a decent man — working, raising a family, going to church — his patience had limits.
Meanwhile, the illegal paid lip service to admitting the havoc he wrought with the other man's life, but excused himself as any irresponsible person would do as 'got-to-get-by.'
After the lawmen caught him, the scenario went like this:
His lawyer had advised him that he was essentially out of options. She had managed to postpone his case until at least January 2026, but he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison followed by deportation to Guatemala. During the initial court hearings, Perez-Bravo had listened to the prosecution talk about the other Dan Kluver — a loyal employee, a devoted father, a debtor sending monthly payments, a victim of a broken system.
“He sounds like me — a good worker,” Perez-Bravo told his wife, one day last month. “I don’t want to mess things up for anyone. I just want to work. It makes me crazy with no job. How many hours can I sit and pray?”
Oh how pitiful, he "had" to listen to the court describe the victim impact.
Well, he did 'mess things up' for an innocent person. Just wants to work, do the bad things he does on the side, too, and too bad about the consequences for the other guy. Don't his needs come first?
It's disgusting. And the Times goes to great ends to make him some kind of sympathetic figure, despite his actual behavior beyond the identity theft that caused those lives to 'intersect.' He's hard-working. He's a 'father.' He goes to church. His community loves him. He's like the farmer actually.
Yet one was a dirtbag, and the other was utterly blameless. The Times doesn't see any difference, giving both players equal weight in its moral-equivalance story.
Well, it isn't working. The overwhelming sympathy is with the farmer, not the illegal who belongs in jail and out of this country for the rest of his dishonest life.
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