Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court announced it will step into the issue of illegal immigrants and their use of fraudulent identities when securing employment. The Court will decide whether an individual can be convicted of aggravated identity theft for using false identification information when they don’t know whether the information belongs to an actual person.

As Adam Liptak over at the New York Times frames it, the question before the Court is “whether workers who use false Social Security and alien registration numbers must know that they belong to a real person to be subject to a two-year sentence extension for “aggravated identity theft.” Put another way: Is it identity theft to pick nine random numbers out of the air and submit them as a Social Security number if that number turns out to belong to a real person?”

While legally the decision will impact any individual who uses false identification information that belongs to another person during the commission of an offense, realistically it will impact the illegal immigrant community the most. In recent years, the federal government – led by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) – has been using the aggravated identity theft statute to prosecute illegal immigrants arrested during large-scale workplace raids around the country.

The case will be watched closely by the illegal immigrant community, illegal immigration foes and Congress alike.

If the Court decides that federal prosecutors need not prove that an individual using false identification information know the information actually belonged to a real person in order to sustain a charge of aggravated identity theft and the mandatory two-year prison sentence available under the statute, look for the increased use of the statute in illegal immigration cases.

If the Court decides that prosecutors must prove the individual knew the identifying information belonged to an actual person, look for a push in Congress to amend the statute by removing the “knowingly” standard.

Either way, the decision is certain to be just as controversial as the issue of illegal immigration.