After being assaulted by a romantic partner in 2000 while living in Los Angeles County, Maria Gutierrez Salagon turned to family friends and said she could help secure immigration documents.
She was a victim of a crime, so a friend said, he could help her get permission to stay in the US.
It is true that victims of immigrant crimes are eligible for special benefits in some cases, but there is a promise to acquire Gutierrez Salagon citizenship within three months at a discount for over 10 years. A housekeeper with a modest income, she slowly bleed over $100,000 due to a mix of false assurances and threats.
“I had to give him all the money, not to be able to buy what my kids need,” she said during the interview during her sob. “It was like torture. Every time the phone rang, or every time the paper arrived for me, they wanted more money.”
She is a victim of what is called notario fraud, and the fraudster acting as a lawyer extracted large sums of money from vulnerable immigrants.
Scams are nothing new. But despite a long-standing campaign to raise awareness, supporters and law enforcement officials say they are concerned about a revival under the second Trump administration. The sweep of federal agents and military deployments into Los Angeles has created a ripe and fear environment of exploitation, they say.
Hundreds of people caught up in recent attacks are seeking affordable legal assistance to fight to sustain the lives they have built in the United States. Compound interest issues, lawyers specializing in immigration law say there is a shortage of qualified people working in the field. People in civil immigration cases generally do not have the rights of court-appointed lawyers unless they appear separately in state or federal courts regarding criminal charges.
The scam that twins Gutierrez Saragon from Mexico falls into confusion about what the notary is doing in the US and how it differs from Latin America and elsewhere.
US notaries act as impartial witnesses when important documents are signed. However, in other parts of the world, the term refers to a specially qualified lawyer, equivalent to a legal license, according to Victor D. Lopez, a professor of legal studies at Hofstra University.
The types of fraud may vary. Some victims pay Notarios, who promises to represent them at a hearing with immigration officers and who promises to never show up. Others believe that the deportation order will terminate the valid asylum claim because the information submitted is false.
“It’s the type of crime that preys on the poorest and most hopeless people,” Lopez said.
He and others said there is little reliable data on how many fraud victims are each year due to underreporting. Many who suffered losses are afraid to contact law enforcement for their immigration status.
Gutierrez Saragon spoke in Spanish how she was fooled by Notario.
It started small, recalled Gutierrez Saragon: hundreds of dollars to process her fingerprints. Hundreds more for background checks. A trip to New York and Washington, DC claimed he needed to take to collect her passport. Every time, she said she gave him money to pay for flights, hotels, car rentals and gas, but he always came back with excuses for why he needed more time and cash.
Whenever she pushed back, she claimed that Marquez Cortez warned him that he would lose his chance of citizenship. She recalled how he would show her official documents he allegedly claimed from the Orange County Law Office.
She then said she learned that he had created a fake letterhead for the law firm and used the money she gave him to spend his back taxes, child support and even speeding tickets.
Eventually, in February 2011, Gutierrez Salagon found the lifeline of the Immigration Rights Project, a Los Angeles nonprofit organization that offers free services to those seeking citizenship or a path to permanent residence. She came to their office and was afraid that it would be her last day, lawyer Gina Amato Laf recalled.
“She was shaking,” Raff said.
Her new client’s first words said she suggested that she thought she was directing herself to the authorities rather than seeking a free lawyer.
Lough encouraged him to submit a police report at the Olympic Division Station the next day. However, the front desk officers drove her away saying it wasn’t a crime and that she had to go to court to file a civil complaint. Lough accompanied her the next day and was told by another officer that he had not reported “Because it is so common in LA, we were unable to prosecute it.”
After Lough protested, police agreed to get a report, and the man was eventually charged with grand larceny and convicted.
Despite Lough’s describing a “sufficient number of reputable immigration lawyers,” despite helping people help people through the Labyrinthine US immigration process, her group fought against the proposals of the State Bar Association and to help them bridge the gap in justice by creating a secondary classification.
I was worried that such changes would cause more confusion and lead to more fraud. She urged local authorities to take issues that are often overlooked seriously.
Most district attorneys are reluctant to indict them unless they have “multiple cases and hundreds of dollars losses,” she said. “There’s a big lack of enforcement within LA County.”
Los Angeles County superintendent Hilda Solis reflected that sentiment.
Solis said he fought for stronger regulations for issues not confined to Latino communities, pointing to recent incidents in counties involving immigrants from Asian and European countries.
“How do you stop behaviour if the law doesn’t have teeth?” Solis asked.
Some lawyers who practice immigration laws have come across scams that unfold entirely online, allowing perpetrators to disappear before authorities have even had the opportunity to investigate.
Lindsay Tozzi Lawski, executive director of the Immigration Defenderslow Centre, said he recently arrived to his client saying he was hoping to collect green cards after sending money to someone he was communicating on WhatsApp.
A WhatsApp person told clients that they could pick up evidence of permanent residence at Toczylowski’s organization.
“Essentially, the person was spoofing a nonprofit organization,” Tozzilovsky said, adding that her group was preparing public services announcements to warn about fraud.
She also said that immigration consultants don’t scam clients, but they still “promise that they can’t keep it.”
Toczylowski’s centre relies on local, state and federal funding, the latter being threatened. This is a nasty development that comedian John Oliver highlighted in his show “Last Week Tonight.” After the episode aired, Tozzilowski said the centre received a flood of online donations, but it was not enough to offset the potential cuts in federal funding.
The center is also the plaintiff in an ongoing federal lawsuit from Northern California against the Department of Human Welfare over slashed funds, she said.
When Marquez Cortez, the man who fraudulent Gutiels Salagon, was involved, he was found guilty when he was finally tried, and a superior court judge ordered three installments in which he faced a total of $66,000 in compensation or two years in prison.
He eventually fled to Mexico, where bail bonds tracked him down and he was arrested by local police, according to Raff.
Raf said she pushed the man to be handed over to the United States to serve his sentence, but to this day she doesn’t know what his fate is. Gutierrez Saragon has not recovered her loss.
“She’s never seen a dime,” Raff said. “And he’s never spent a day in prison.”
Source link
