Visa fraud detectors

NY Times:

It was the kind of Brooklyn neighborhood where an unmarked car with government plates drew hostile stares, and a badge emblazoned with the words “immigration officer” could cause a panic.

“Just keep smiling,” Tamika Gray, an immigration officer, said aloud to herself as she steered the car under the elevated tracks in Bushwick, meeting the suspicious gaze of a young man hanging out between Dominican Hair and Myrtle Live Poultry. “I’m not here to drag you anywhere.”

Ms. Gray, the rookie in the tiny Fraud Detection and National Security unit at federal immigration headquarters in Lower Manhattan, was pursuing the unit’s distinctive kind of law enforcement. No guns. No raids. Just a little New York street smarts and shoe leather to uncover all types of deception, case by case, in the endless stream of visa applications.

Deceivers come in many guises. The “multinational corporation” sponsoring a foreign manager to handle nonexistent millions. The “lawyer” specializing in fleecing desperate immigrants. Bogus newlyweds, would-be citizens hiding criminal records, churches that are really developers’ construction sites, or “condos for Christ,” in the officers’ wry shorthand.

The fledgling fraud detection unit is one of the first in a nationwide operation started three years ago by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the visa-issuing arm of the immigration authority recreated in 2003 under the Department of Homeland Security.

The work of the unit’s investigators — who are not part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the branch identified with raids, detention and deportation of illegal immigrants — is a new approach to detecting trends in fraud among the six million applications made nationally each year. But the investigators are so few, and so far down the bureaucratic chain, that the payoff from their efforts can be hard to see.

On a recent visit behind the unmarked steel doors of the fraud unit’s office at 26 Federal Plaza, one wall was stacked high with suspect files — part of the flow of some 150,000 applications annually in New York alone....

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Since October, the unit has referred 187 cases to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for possible criminal investigation. Very few ever move on to prosecution by the United States attorney’s office, however. More typically, after a 60-day review, the cases bounce back to the fraud unit. Suspect applications can be denied and the holder of a fraudulent visa can face deportation.

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This report does not give me a lot of confidence in the seriousness of enforcing immigration laws. When you consider that a significant portion of illegal aliens came here on visas that have since expired or that were obtained through fraud it is unlikely that HBO will be making a law enforcement series out of this groups work.