Betrayal of Trust, Restoration of Hope: How to Enforce the Law and Transform the Lives of Immigrants Ripped off and Damaged by Bad Lawyers and Scammer Notarios

Authors

Vanessa Merton

Document Type

Article

Abstract

(Excerpt)

Immigrants seeking lawful status, or otherwise facing denial of entry or deportation, have no right to counsel at government expense. Not even the most sophisticated immigrant can effectively navigate the morass of U.S. immigration law, frequently described by federal judges as “labyrinthine,” “baffling,” “arcane,” and “almost as impenetrable as the Internal Revenue Code.” Competent, ethical representation is essential and, in theory, available from lawyers or accredited representatives. Yet, for most, such representation is shockingly hard to locate and prohibitively expensive. While over 200 nonprofit organizations provide low-cost or free representation to noncitizens, they can assist only a small fraction of those in need.

Due partly to the dearth of affordable and capable counsel, desperate immigrants too often end up being seduced by a well-advertised and readily available but legally fatal alternative. That is, they fall victim to a lucrative industry of greedy immigration representatives who, to enrich themselves, systematically target, deceive, defraud, and ultimately endanger their clients. This pernicious phenomenon is often referred to as “notario fraud.” But the harm these predatory actors inflict is not merely the misappropriation of their client’s hard-earned money for scams or wholesale failure to perform as promised. By filing phony petitions and applications that cannot possibly succeed, often containing forged signatures of hapless clients who have no way of knowing what their lawyers are up to, these scam artists affirmatively place their clients in harm’s way to brining those people to the attention of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) and other immigration authorities who otherwise may never have known of their existence. This almost inevitably functions as a fast track to deportation, no matter how meritorious their claims for relief might have been, if properly asserted.

Today, when potential relief becomes available and is widely reported on by popular media, the likelihood increases that immigrants—eager to take advantage of these unpredictably open windows—will fall victim to scammers and substandard attorneys. As a result, aggressive, effective deterrence against and incapacitation of notario fraud is ever more critical. Yet, virtually none of the educational resources or outreach materials for immigrants or their attorneys mention one of the most important and only potentially viable safeguards for victims of notario fraud immigration scams: the potential to investigate and to prosecute U visa-qualifying crimes committed in the course of poor legal representation.