With over 220,000 refugees flowing into New York State over the past two years, there has been a recent surge in immigration-related fraud, including impersonation of immigration attorneys. A Catholic charity operating in New York City announced on the 13th that the number of immigration service-related fraud reports received by the state’s Office for New Immigrants (ONA) since the beginning of the year has reached 58. This is a 2.4-fold increase compared to 21 cases in the same period last year.
According to statistics from the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, as of January this year, there were 39 complaints against immigration service providers, the highest since 2015.
The reasons for complaints against immigration service providers were diverse, including
▲misleading ads
▲false descriptions of immigration services
▲non-completion of services
▲non-refunds
▲lost or missing documents.
Impersonation of immigration lawyers and even impersonation of immigration judges were reported to be frequent. For example, a Spanish-speaking woman paid $1,400 for an online court hearing to obtain a work permit, but both the online court and the judge were fake.
There have also been reports of fraudulent acts impersonating immigration lawyers, such as demanding $10,000 for bail to remove a family member from a deportation facility and defrauding $1,500 by offering to help write an asylum application.
According to immigration lawyers, the most common fraud method is the ’10-year green card fraud’, in which even illegal immigrants at risk of deportation are approached with the promise that they can obtain permanent residency if they have resided in the United States for 10 years.
This is an obvious fraud in that to obtain permanent residency, they must already be in the process of being deported from the court and must prove that a certain family member will face extremely unusual and exceptional hardship if they do not receive a green card.
The New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigration and Naturalization advises, “We strongly recommend that you receive immigration services through a qualified attorney,” and “Be suspicious of unqualified brokers and immigration service providers.”
According to a 2016 report by the American Immigration Council, non-citizens who hired a qualified attorney were more than twice as likely to be released from detention and win their deportation case than those who did not. If they were not detained, the possibility of winning their deportation case was a whopping five times higher.