Massive Immigration Benefit Fraud a Threat to National Security
On January 13, the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a press release announcing the takedown of a large-scale immigration benefit fraud scheme in the Newark, New Jersey area. The ICE announcement noted the arrest of an Indian citizen suspect named Narendra Mandalapa who was charged with the Federal violation of Fraud and Misuse of Visas, 18 United States Code, Section 1546.
The investigation, conducted jointly between ICE and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), the immigration benefits agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is reported to have found nearly 1000 suspected fraudulent labor-based immigration visa petitions filed on behalf of Indian and Pakistani aliens seeking entry into the United States. The ICE announcement states the investigation is continuing to determine how many such aliens may actually have made entry into the US.
The case highlights an extremely important aspect of the link between immigration and national security, and how vulnerable our immigration system is to abuse by all manner of violators, but particularly those who engage in fraud. Immigration fraud has been rampant for decades. Our visa and immigration benefit issuance system has been, for far too long, treated by both the Government and the recipients as something akin to an entitlement system for foreign nationals. Resources devoted to system integrity and detection of fraud have never been commensurate with the degree of the problem.
Cases such as the one just announced by ICE are, unfortunately, far too rare an occurrence due to a historical lack of dedicated investigative resources combined with an institutional reluctance on the part of many US Attorney’s Offices to prosecute immigration fraud cases because they are, after all, “only” immigration fraud cases.
Never mind, of course, those “mere” immigration violations have often been the only avenue of approach to many significant criminal and terrorist suspects in the past. The investigation and prosecution of Fawaz Damra, a long-time support operative of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) who was the Imam of the largest mosque in Ohio, is but one good example. Damra was prosecuted and convicted in 2004 of naturalization fraud linked to his PIJ support activities, stripped of his US citizenship and just recently ordered deported from the US.
The use of immigration violations against major drug traffickers and violent street gangsters from the mid-1980s through the 1990s in multi-agency task forces proved to be invaluable, and set the stage for this approach in the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until after the 9/11 attacks the Federal Government began more aggressively employing immigration law enforcement efforts in counter-terrorism cases throughout the country. Even with that, the decommissioning of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into three DHS agencies - Customs and Border Protection (CBP), ICE and CIS has realized only mixed success and some experts believe the new structures have resulted in a less effective immigration enforcement approach.
At a time when national security matters, particularly counter-terrorism efforts, are literally on a wartime footing, and those matters are intrinsically linked to immigration issues, how the Nation deals with its immigration law enforcement should be a top priority. While this most recent large-scale fraud case is encouraging since at least one suspected operation has hopefully been taken down, it points out how widespread the immigration fraud problem really is. One alleged fraud schemer generated nearly 1000 bogus visa petitions in the temporary worker category. Presumably these would be the “H” (temporary skilled worker) and/or “L” (intra-company transferee) visa categories.
Ironically, in the ongoing debate over national immigration and the “guest worker” issue, these “H” and “L” visa categories are quite arguably the country’s already existing guest worker system. And if our existing system is subject to widespread fraud and abuse, how can we possibly expect some new and untested “guest worker” program that will ostensibly allow untold numbers of illegal and other aliens to apply to not also be subject to extreme levels of fraud and abuse.
The ICE announcement states the 1000 or so fraudulent petitions involved aliens from India and Pakistan. Clearly, the latter country generates significant counter-terrorism concern. If there are hundreds of Pakistani aliens who were fraudulently admitted into the US under this scheme, who really are these people? Are any of them terrorists or terror supporters? How will we know?
Unfortunately, the Government has a very poor track record for tracking down and doing anything with the “malafide” beneficiary aliens of such large-scale immigration benefit fraud schemes. A number of Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (DOJ/OIG) reviews of the INS (pre-DHS) in the 1990s determined that when INS, in rare form, actually investigated and prosecuted large-scale benefit fraud perpetrators (often as the result of DOJ/OIG referrals because there were corrupt INS benefit employees involved), there was almost never any significant effort to do anything relative to the aliens who fraudulently received their immigration status. And sometimes there were hundreds of such aliens who, by virtue of the fraud scheme arranger being prosecuted and convicted (and usually cooperative in a plea agreement), with all the attendant immigration records available, those fraud status aliens were entirely identified. It was a matter of tracking them down and either prosecuting them criminally as co-defendants and/or placing them into deportation proceedings. The DOJ/OIG found, for the most part, the INS did nothing with those aliens.
The odd reason for this was a strange Cattch-22 Government (il)logic. Given the large numbers of fraud alien beneficiaries involved, DOJ would never prosecute them criminally, so they were viewed by INS as mere “status violators” and therefore low priority targets for very limited law enforcement investigative resources to pursue. As a result, almost always, nothing happened to these aliens unless they were inadvertently encountered in other circumstances. Even with that, how many continued to slip through the system and ultimately became lawful permanent residents and even naturalized US citizens? We may never know, because INS may not have even logged those fraud beneficiary aliens into internal lookout systems in some cases.
Given the fractured and demoralized state of ICE (notwithstanding pronouncements from ICE and DHS management) it is likely not much has changed from the old INS approach in this regard. Hopefully, at least the bogus beneficiaries will be flagged in the appropriate lookout systems.
Which means that of those nearly 1000 suspected fraudulent alien worker entrants, a large number being from a terror-producing country, it is possible that few will really be tracked down, arrested and prosecuted or deported, at least no time soon. We can hope for a change; and perhaps in this particular case there will be some effort in this regard.
However, this is one notable case in one city. Immigration benefit fraud is hugely widespread and the resources to attack it are few and spread very thinly. The proposed new immigration policies floating between the Administration and Congress, with a “guest worker” program that “won’t be an amnesty,” if passed will only overtax our already overwhelmed immigration agencies beyond the breaking point. For too many years we have had a broken immigration system that has barely limped along with one attempted band-aid fix after another.
Until the Congress and our Executive Branch political leaders genuinely get serious about fixing the institutional immigration enforcement systems, and that includes a properly structured and resourced stand-alone immigration enforcement agency with a senior management cadre that has genuine and long-term immigration law enforcement experience, nothing much will really change.
