Markwayne Mullin’s DHS Readies Lawsuits Against Migrants Who Push Fraudulent Asylum Claims



Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images

by Neil Munro 26 May 2026

Markwayne Mullin’s Department of Homeland Security is threatening to file charges against the many economic migrants — and their lawyers — who submit fake asylum claims.

“For many years, millions of illegal aliens have committed fraud in our immigration system,” said a Tuesday statement from James Percival, the General Counsel at the DHS. He continued:

No place is this more rampant than in immigration court. Protection claims like asylum are intended to cover unique and narrow circumstances, but it is standard practice for immigration attorneys representing illegal aliens to assert that virtually every illegal alien is going to be persecuted or tortured in his or her home country.

Historically, ICE has depended on the discipline of immigration judges and the enforcement of criminal fraud laws to deter this conduct, but ICE has its own tools. Now, thanks to this directive, ICE attorneys have greater authority to enforce the law and stop the abuse of our asylum system by illegal aliens and attorneys.”

The statement said that DHS headquarters has directed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to “develop anti-fraud policies that will further enforce 8 U.S.C. § 1324c(d), a law that establishes penalties for violations of document fraud.”

The instruction would also help judges deny asylum claims and help ICE deport migrants who submit fake asylum claims.

This is a huge shift from President Joe Biden, whose officials urged millions of economic migrants to file asylum cases so they could get work permits and jobs.

The resulting backlog of more than 3,5 million cases allowed Biden’s agents to settle a nation-sized population of renters, consumers, and workers in Democratic-run amnesty zones, such as Chicago, New York, Boston, and California. The asylum claims also allowed Biden’s officials to provide fast-track green cards and citizenship to roughly half of the claimants who got into court.

But surveys of migrants show that only a tiny percentage were actually seeking asylum from political threats. The vast majority claimed asylum so they could get jobs.

Over the last several years, amid the flood of bogus asylum claims, the federal government has indicted only a few lawyers — and fake lawyers — for asylum fraud.

In 2005, for example, federal officials charged a Tibetan man, Tenzin Norbu, with filing fraudulent asylum claims:

Norbu engaged in a deliberate, brazen fraud scheme in which he and others sold fraudulent asylum applications to immigrants seeking asylum in the United States for over a decade. Those false asylum applications all contained a boilerplate narrative that the applicant was a Tibetan and would thus face persecution if removed to China-controlled Tibet. These boilerplate narratives were lies conjured up by Norbu and his associates. Norbu also coached his customers on how to answer questions about the fake narratives and provided them with fake identification documents, all in exchange for a fee…

The government estimates that Norbu charged approximately $5,000 for each client for whom he prepared and submitted a false asylum application. The forfeiture amount of $170,000 represents the total proceeds traceable to the offense to which Norbu pleaded guilty.

In 2023, a federal official described a plea agreement with two lawyers:

The defendants — a husband and wife team of licensed immigration attorneys and a writer who worked with them — invented offensive lies to cheat our country’s asylum process, which is meant to protect vulnerable people who legitimately fear persecution because of their race, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. When attorneys cynically exploit those fears for financial gain by peddling false claims and coaching clients to lie under oath, they abuse the trust placed in them and make a mockery of the asylum system. With their guilty pleas, the defendants are being held accountable for their serious crimes.

In a 2018 case, officials said:

[Lawyer Andreea] Dumitru submitted over 100 applications in which she knowingly made false statements and representations about, among other things, the applicants’ personal narratives of alleged persecution, criminal histories, and travel histories. Dumitru deliberately fabricated detailed personal stories of purported mistreatment of her clients, forged her clients’ signatures, and falsely notarized affidavits.

The new policy is just one of many bureaucratic and regulatory steps that DHS is taking to curb the migration industry amid Congress’s refusal to update or reform the nation’s immigration laws.

Last week, for example, DHS declared that most migrants in the United States — such as migrants given parole or Temporary Protected Status — will have to first go home before they can apply for a legalized status and a green card.

D. Scott @eclipsethis2003
@eclipsethis2003
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10:17 AM · Dec 9, 2025

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