An examination of a sampling of the 77 Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) records of those involved in this very large case shows a nuanced range of punishments and probation conditions seemingly individualized to meet the specific situations
- The five major co-conspirators got prison sentences ranging from six years down to time served while waiting trial (which seemed to be one or more years) and in a couple of cases were told to report to ICE should they be put into deportation proceedings
- 72 others, either citizens or aliens who engaged in the phony marriages, all of whom faced a serious federal trial, got shorter prison terms, or periods of house arrest, and/or periods of probation
The Scheme
- Ashley Yen Nguyen, 58, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for being the ringleader in a scheme that produced more than $15 million in illicit proceeds
- She sold fake marriages to Vietnamese while recruiting Hispanics to be the nominal spouses
- Of the 77 "ex parte" names in the repeated PACER (i.e., court) files, 41 are Asian, 30 are Hispanic, and six are in neither camp
What Nguyen and her colleagues apparently did was to link advantaged aliens, largely Vietnamese, who had money and were willing to spend it on securing legal status, with disadvantaged Hispanics, often with gang or drug problems, who were willing, for money, to go through fake marriages.
- Having large numbers of such marriages should have raised eyebrows in the city clerk's office, and in that part of USCIS that handles citizen-alien marriages. But was anyone in those offices looking for suspicious patterns? We do not know.
https://cis.org/North/What-Happens-When-MarriageRelated-Immigration-Fraud-Ring-Busted
No comments:
Post a Comment