NYC Sentinel

By Jeremy B. White

When Carmen Duarte’s son Ramon was arrested in 2004 his status as a legal permanent resident meant that the charges – drug possession and intent to sell – placed him in deportation proceedings. Carmen knew she needed a lawyer.

The first lawyer Duarte turned to charged her in the first meeting. Soon, Duarte said, she was going straight from work to his office, paycheck in hand. Unable to keep up with payments, she was evicted from the Queens apartment she had lived in for 18 years. Ramon remained in prison.

“This is a very cruel person,” Duarte said.

A woman on a train overheard Carmen talking about her woes and suggested that she go to a man named Victor Espinal. Espinal said he could get Ramon out of prison and even his citizenship. But Duarte eventually discovered that Espinal was not certified to act as an attorney.

“I didn’t know he was not a lawyer,” Duarte said. “A lot of people was innocent, going in his office – for nothing.”

Duarte’s struggle is an emblematic case of immigration service fraud. Last Monday, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that his office had issued 30 subpoenas to people and organizations accused of immigration service fraud, expanding a sweeping investigation launched this May.

The investigation is the largest under Cuomo’s tenure, now encompassing nearly 100 businesses and individuals in New York City and Long Island. But immigrant rights advocates say the investigation underscores a perennial problem of foreign-born New Yorkers getting bilked out of their money by people offering services they cannot deliver.

“Definitely the issue of fraud, in terms of immigration service providers, is rampant,” said Valeria Treves, executive director of the Queens-based organization New Immigrant Community Empowerment. “There’s a lot of misinformation that the community has to suffer through.”

Immigrants are particularly vulnerable because of their ignorance of the complexities of U.S. immigration law. They will go to neighborhood businesses or individuals in pursuit of documentation that will allow them to work legally or that will update their legal residency status, often without being eligible.

Fraudulent organizations will mislead such clients, promising to help them obtain the necessary papers and charging accordingly. They often claim to “know someone” in immigration services that will allow them to bypass the usual legal procedures, or will invent nonexistent visa categories, Treves said.

“People are desperate for immigration papers, and they will believe a lot of things to get those papers,” Treves said.

The transactions are often informal, cash-in-hand affairs that do not leave a money trail. Treves said that a fear of authorities, particularly among undocumented immigrants, can discourage exploited immigrants from reporting their cases, although once a certain a specific person or business is publicly denounced “a lot of people come out of the woodwork.”

The consequences can be more dire than losing money. In an especially bitter piece of irony, immigrants seeking residency papers will unwittingly alert immigration services to past misdemeanors. This can be the first step in starting deportation proceedings, according to Angela Fernandez, executive director of the Northern Manhattan Immigrant Coalition.

“If they do submit paperwork, they could really put this person in violation of the law and even could get them deported,” Fernandez said.

Cuomo’s subpoenas target people who are not accredited for the services they claim to offer. For example, notary publics, or “notarios” in Spanish, are ubiquitous in heavily Latino areas of the city, Fernandez said. Although they are only legally permitted to provide services such as help with tax returns, these “notarios” often claim the authority to help clients get immigration papers.

In Latin America “notarios” have broader powers, including the ability to act as attorneys, and this discrepancy may help explain why Latin Americans continue to turn to them.

“[It’s] the comfort level of if it’s a storefront compared to a huge building downtown,” Fernandez said.

In one high profile case recently undertaken by Queens District Attorney Robert Brown’s office, a man running his operation out of a storefront church in Corona, Queens, pleaded guilty to claiming more than $50,000 from a mostly Ecuadorian clientele.

“People turn to members of their community because they trust them and because they speak the same language, and these people turn around and prey on them,” Fernandez said.

The issue is more acute in the Korean-American community because transactions with people promising immigration papers often occur in an informal setting, according to Kathy Chae, staff attorney for the Flushing based community organization YKASEC – Empowering the Korean Community.

Chae said that in New York’s Latin American neighborhoods, perpetrators of fraud such as “notarios” are often well known and established in their communities. This is not the case for many of the Korean victims Chae has dealt with, who were promised documentation by someone they did not know. When these people abscond with the money, victims have slim chances of locating them.

“The most common stereotype is ‘I was introduced by a friend,’” Chae said. “I haven’t seen anyone who can bring a case or even a specific name.”

While Treves lauded Cuomo for prosecuting these cases, she said that the issue is likely to persist if immigrants continue to receive inadequate information.

“We also need to get resources so we can take educational measures with communities and take preventative action,” she said.