Thread: IMMIGRATION-FRAUD BOOM

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedc ... /62205.htm

IMMIGRATION-FRAUD BOOM
By ABBY WISSE SCHACHTER

April 10, 2006 -- MARIA Maximo - the "Bad Samaritan" charged last week with scamming illegal immigrants - highlights an ugly truth about today's immigration system: Fraud is booming.

The number of such predators is growing - exploiting desperate and poor folks willing to pay huge sums to gain the legal right to stay here and work. One immigration official told me, "The profit margin is incredible because the clientele is so desperate." Sadly, the Senate's immigration reform seems likely to make this problem grow.

Maria Maximo was supposed to be one of the good guys. A Honduran immigrant of Garifunan descent, she worked to help Garifunans (Hondurans of West-African origin) and other immigrants in her role as a community-board member, as an advocate for the survivors of 1990's Happy Land fire and as president of Jamalali Uagucha, Inc., an immigrant-services nonprofit in The Bronx.

Instead, she allegedly stole their money. Lots of it.

Last week, federal prosecutors charged Maximo with defrauding hundreds of undocumented immigrants of over $1 million in filing fees. She offered her services to naive people looking for a way to get legal work permits and green cards. She advertised that she'd file applications with the U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) for work permits and green cards at a cost of $500 to $2,500. But she surely knew full well that the applicants were ineligible.

In 2004 and 2005, the U.S. Attorney's office says she filed 500 applications for work permits and 800 applications for green cards. She collected over $1 million in fees for these 1,300 applications - and all were denied. She faces up to 20 years in jail and $250,000 in fines if she's convicted.

But this isn't an isolated incident - immigration-benefit fraud is booming.

In January, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Newark arrested Narendra Mandalapa, an Indian immigrant, charging him with fraud and misuse of visas. They seized nearly $6 million in assets - all from fees Mandalapa collected for filing over 1,000 possibly fraudulent petitions for work permits.

ICE spokesman Dean Boyd says the problem is nationwide: "We are discovering very large-scale criminal organization and the trend is getting a lot more sophisticated. The clientele is desperate because they need an immigration benefit to enter, reside and work here. And we are even seeing professionals getting involved - lawyers, presidents of nonprofits and immigration consultants - because of the amount of money involved."

It's already a proven national-security issue, Boyd notes: "Who gets these fraudulent documents?" he asked rhetorically. "Ramzi Yousef, the man who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, got a fraudulently filed petition for immigration status."

The good news is that law-enforcement officials and the immigration services aren't sitting on their hands. Maria Maximo was caught because alert CIS adjudicators flagged the 1,300 petitions she had filed, and passed their suspicions on to ICE agents. ICE gathered evidence, then sent the case to the U.S. Attorney's office.

Just last week, ICE announced a joint task force, with 10 new offices across the country, to combat document and benefit fraud. Immigration-enforcement agents will now be working more closely with the Justice and Labor Departments and the Social Security Administration, sharing information to catch more of these bottom-feeders.

The bad news is that the immigration system is already so overloaded with paperwork that officials simply can't be all that vigilant. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office faults the CIS's anti-fraud efforts.

The GAO audit found, for example, that nearly a third of all the applications filed for permanent residence for religious workers (one green-card category) over six months in 2004 were fraudulent. "Some findings of the religious-worker assessment," the report concluded, "demonstrate that USCIS adjudicators do not always detect fraud during the adjudications process, thus allowing applicants to receive benefits for which they were not eligible."

The report also concluded that many of those rejected for permanent residence may still get temporary work authorization, with which they can go off and get legitimate driver's licenses.

Seven of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 had done just that.

The GAO reports that USCIS doesn't monitor all available sources of "strategic threat" information to ensure it doesn't grant a benefit to the wrong - dangerous - person. And some of the adjudicators the GAO interviewed admitted that their managers have been emphasizing "meeting production goals, designed to reduce the backlog of applications, almost exclusively." Fighting fraud isn't as big a priority.

Here's the really bad news: If Congress passes a new amnesty - or any reform that "legalizes" many of the 12 million illegals now estimated to be here - CIS is going to be flooded with new applications.

If speed was of the essence for processing immigration applications before, what will it be like when the system has four times the number of applicants?

The last time the government allowed illegal immigrants to gain legal permanent residency, some 2.7 million people were granted asylum. Investigators later showed that one in seven applications were fraudulent.

Here we go again.

awschachter@nypost.com

Woman Pleads Guilty to Million-Dollar Immigration Fraud
March 24, 2007 04:29 PM EST


by Jim Kouri - NEW YORK -- Maria Maximo, 56, pleaded guilty today in Manhattan federal court to charges relating to two schemes to defraud immigrants by charging them between $500 and $2,500 to file immigration applications that Maximo knew were baseless and would ultimately be denied. According to the felony Information to which Maximo pleaded guilty, and other documents publicly filed in this case:


Between June 2004 and early 2005, Maximo, on behalf of approximately 500 illegal immigrants, prepared applications to a purported "work permit program" through which, Maximo claimed, the immigrants would receive valid United States work permits. Maximo charged $500 for the preparation of each of these approximately 500 applications. United States Citizenship and Information Services (USCIS) had no such "work permit program" and offers employment identification cards only to immigrants who have visas allowing them to work in the United States, or who are applying for immigration status which, if granted, would allow them to work. As a result, USCIS denied the approximately 500 invalid applications.

In another facet of the scheme, between May 2005 and January 2006, Maximo charged approximately 1,700 people between $500 and $2,500 for the preparation of applications to what she promoted as a "legalization program" open to virtually any illegal immigrant. Maximo claimed that through the "legalization program" applicants could receive work permits and ultimately green cards. Instead, Maximo filed applications for what is known as the LULAC program (named after a lawsuit involving the League of United Latin American Citizens), a limited amnesty program of which one of the eligibility requirements is that applicants have resided in the United States since at least January 1, 1982. Nevertheless, Maximo told applicants who had resided in the United States for a shorter period that they were eligible for a green card under the LULAC program and submitted applications on their behalf. As a result, at the time charges were filed against Maximo on March 29, 2006, USCIS had already rejected more than 750 of Maximo's LULAC applications on the ground that the immigrant had not lived in the United States since 1982. Hundreds of additional applications are in the process of being evaluated and appear not to be legitimate.

Maximo received well in excess of $1,000,000 from these immigration schemes.

Maximo was arrested in connection with these charges on April 4, 2006. She pleaded guilty today to two counts of mail fraud -- one for the "work permit" scheme and one for the "legalization" scheme. During her plea, Maximo admitted that she knew some of the applicants did not qualify for the programs and that she failed to tell the applicants that they did not qualify but rather took their money and submitted their applications to USCIS.

On each count, Maximo faces a maximum sentence of 20 years' imprisonment and a maximum fine of the greater of $250,000, or twice the gross gain or gross loss from the offense. Maximo may also be required to make restitution to her victims and forfeit to the United States the proceeds of her schemes. To date, the government has seized approximately $998,000 in funds that constitute or are derived from proceeds traceable to the commission of the offenses.

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