Immigrants Claim Lawyers Defrauded Them and They May Be Deported

By Liz Robbins
May 3, 2018

At the time, Martin Torres Reyes thought he had found a path to a green card.

It was early 2015, and Mr. Torres, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, heard about a lawyer who was promising legal permanent residency to people who had lived in the United States for 10 years and had American-born children.

Mr. Torres went to see the lawyer, Thomas T. Hecht, at his Times Square office, and for an initial fee of $750, the lawyer said that he would get a work permit in six months, and then some time later, the green card.

According to a lawsuit filed late Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, this was fraud. Mr. Hecht and his son, Leonard H. Hecht, the complaint said, tricked Mr. Reyes and at least 25 other undocumented immigrants from New York.

The plaintiffs all thought they were applying for a green card, but instead, they claimed in the suit that the lawyers filed different paperwork, for asylum, without their knowledge.

“Our community is under attack from all directions, and they know it,” Mr. Torres, 40, said in Spanish in an interview this week, referring to immigration lawyers. He paid a total of $1,100 to the Hechts in installments before leaving the firm.

The “10-year scheme,” lawyers say, is a two-step process, beginning with an asylum application. To qualify for asylum, applicants must show they were persecuted or fear persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion in their home country. Applications must be filed within a year of arrival, with narrow exceptions.

But the plaintiffs said that neither Thomas Hecht nor Leonard Hecht, who speaks Spanish, asked them specific questions about persecution before filing asylum applications without their knowledge.

Generally, once an applicant is found not to be eligible for asylum, the case is sent to the immigration courts and the deportation process begins. A lawyer can try to get the deportation canceled based on a client’s 10-year residency and U.S. citizen children. In some cases, the applicant could be then eligible for a green card, but the bar is very high: “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a U.S. citizen spouse, parent or child if he or she is deported. And even then, only 4,000 of these cases can be approved in a year.

According to federal statistics requested and compiled by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law’s immigration clinic, which is a co-counsel in the suit, the Hecht firm had filed 1,039 asylum applications from November 2006 through January 2017. Cardozo said it could only confirm two asylum applications that were approved during that time. The data also shows that the Hechts had subsequently filed 188 applications for “cancellation of removal,” and that only six were listed as granted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/n...portation.html