Advocates are calling out Florida Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater for allegedly targeting undocumented immigrants who acquired agricultural jobs with fake IDs, rather than the companies who hired them.

According to The Associated Press, over 100 immigrant agriculture workers of the Oakes farm and fruit and vegetable processing plant, located in the Napes area, were arrested last July. The move was promoted as an effort to fight workers' compensation fraud.

It was mostly Mexicans and Central Americans, many undocumented, who were charged by the state attorney's office with felony charges of using a fake ID to get a job and workers' compensation insurance.

Most of the workers have agreed to "a pretrial diversion deal akin to probation," according to AP. Donald Day, Naples attorney, said the workers would see charges dropped if they did not commit any more crimes.

Still, some advocates, such as Rebecca Smith, deputy director of the nonprofit National Employment Law Project, says companies purposely let workers' with fake IDs slide in order to get cheap labor. She added that Atwater is undermining the federal government's responsibility of handling immigration.

"In Florida this is a new wrinkle, where the state is going after people who haven't even filed a workers' comp claim, and is essentially taking enforcement of immigration laws into its own hands," Smith said.

Ashley Carr, a spokeswoman for Atwater, said the investigation is still underway and at least 36 people's identities were stolen by the workers.

"This case has nothing to do with immigration," she said. "They [the 36 people] are the real victims."

Atwater has been fighting workers' compensation fraud since taking office in 2011. According to annual reports' statistics cited by AP, the most number of cases and arrests between July 2012 and June 2013 were not from fake claims, however, but from fake IDs, which are usually connected to those who are not legally allowed to work.

In 2012, 97 people were convicted for ID theft -- three times more than four years ago.

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Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @ScharHar.

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