US prosecutor suggests asylum review for visa scam victims

Updated July 1, 2009 09:09:30

A successful sting operation by the US Attorney's department of special prosecutions has crushed a major scam involving around one thousand potential asylum seekers - primarily Indian, Romanian, Fijian and Nepali. Between the late 1990s and 2004, lawyers fraudulently filed applications for asylum with the US Citizenship and Immigration Service on behalf of clients.

The department of special prosecutions in California sent in an undercover agent which wound-up in a conviction of fraud for three lawyers and two intrepreters.

Presenter: Geraldine Coutts
Speaker: Ben Wagner, Sacramento California's Assistant US Attorney and Chief of the Special Prosecutions Unit

WAGNER: The case focussed on a period from about 2000 to 2004, when the law firm and their interpreters were processing asylum claims, on behalf of their clients. They specialised in immigration law and the charges against them were essentially that these lawyers were creating fictitious narratives of persecution in their home countries and creating counterfeit documents to corroborate those claims and the jury's verdict last week essentially convicted them of knowingly participating in this long running fraud scheme.

COUTTS: So a little bit more about the scam, so what methods were used to get asylum seeker accreditation. You said they were giving false reports of their actual situations. Was that the sole discretion of their case?

WAGNER: The way the process works here in the United States is an applicant submits an application to what is now called Citizenship and Immigration Services. They are interviewed by an asylum officer who may grant asylum or refer it to an immigration court in which case there is a hearing. What the lawyers in this case were charged with doing is preparing applications which attached narratives to justify their application, narratives that described detentions, beating, torture, rape, that sort of thing by government authorities in their home countries. And in order to establish your right to asylum in this country, you need to show a bona fide fear of persecution if you returned to your home country. So essentially they were making up these stories, then they were coaching their clients, drilling them on these false stories, drilling them to memorise them and repeat them to the asylum officer in the immigration court and finally they were creating declarations and affidavits from people like doctors, which purported to demonstrate that these doctors or other witnesses had treated the asylum claimants for injuries as a result of their persecution and the evidence was that many of those documents were simply created on computers here in Sacramento.

COUTTS: Now Mr. Wagner, because the lawyers were running these cases, and the narrative must have been pretty convincing and tight. So how did you, your department actually get onto it in the end and know that these people were being falsely given asylum status?

WAGNER: The case began in the asylum office in San Francisco, when a number of the asylum claimants of these lawyers were from Romania and these defendants had the misfortune, I suppose, of receiving hearings on those claims before an asylum officer who had previously worked for the US State Department in Romania as a human rights officer and was very familiar with conditions in Romania. He read a number of these claims and was highly suspicious, based on his own experience that these were legitimate claims. He spoke Romanian. He went online on a Romanian language web site, sort of posing as an immigrant seeking asylum status and was immediately directed to this law firm and that's what helped start the investigation. It started with Romanian claims and then broaden into Indians, Nepalese and Fijians.

COUTTS: Well, that's our patch of interest, the Pacific and the Fijians. Now, what do you know about them and were there many of them involved in this scam, the Fijians?

WAGNER: There was a fair number. Most of the evidence at trial related to Romanian claims and Indian claims. The lawyers were of Indian extraction. They spoke Punjabi and so they attracted a clientele that was heavily Indian speaking and among those were people from Fiji of Indian extraction. So they had quite a few Fijian claims, although as a proportion they were much smaller than the Indian and Romanian claims.

COUTTS: Well, there are a thousand cases that were involved in this scam. How many of those are you going to have to redo, how many of them remain genuine or are you still trying to process that?

WAGNER: Well, we're still trying to process that, we don't know. Certainly some of them were genuine. We believe that a very large number of them were false in one way or another. Our job from the prosecutors' standpoint is essentially done now, or it will be done when these defendants are sentenced. Citizenship and Immigration Services has a lot of work to do in the future. They will be able to go back to these claims, examine them individually, and if they think a particular claim is false, they can reopen it and essentially demand that the claimant come back and justify their claim.

COUTTS: Mr. Wagner just briefly, is it likely that other US jurisdictions will also uncover similar scams or has that been done already?

WAGNER: Well, there have been a few other prosecutions in the United States recently for what we call asylum fraud. I think this is certainly the largest one that we're aware of recently, but there have been other cases out there. They are quite difficult to uncover, because by their nature, the claims are based on evidence that is very difficult to verify, claims about what happened to these people in countries where there have been civil disorders of one sort or another.