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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