Preying on Immigrants in Need, Chapter 79b

TODAY I BRING YOU A GUEST POST by immigration attorney and friend Dave Bennion. I found a page in my everyday reading and sent him an email asking for a response so that I could quote him for my own post on the topic. He hashed out an answer, read it over, expanded it and before long it was long enough to be its own post, which I said I’d be happy to publish here for the UMX readership, many of whom would be interested. Gracias, Dave.

—Nezua

Dave is an attorney at a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia, PA, where he helps immigrants to the U.S. navigate the complex immigration legal system. Opinions expressed are solely his and not those of his employer. Dave also blogs on immigration issues for change.org.

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Newsday highlighted yesterday New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s recent announcement of a crackdown on three NYC-area businesses charged with defrauding clients looking to resolve their immigration status.

The article is vague on this point, but I’m going to assume from the context and my experience that the three businesses are run by nonlawyer “notarios” who routinely abuse their positions of influence in immigrant communities to defraud newly arriving immigrants or those desperate enough to try anything to resolve their legal status.

Cuomo is right when he says the consequences of bad legal advice can rip families apart and destroy lives, but I wonder why it is that the authorities always seem to go after the “notarios” and other nonlawyers, when every low-income immigrant knows that immigration lawyers can be even worse than notarios.  New York State has even set up a backchannel fund to compensate immigrants defrauded by attorneys in what looks to me like an effort to keep the “bad immigration attorney” stories out of the papers.  Maybe I am missing something, maybe I don’t know the whole story, but that’s what it looked like to me on the ground during my two years of immigration practice at a Catholic nonprofit in Brooklyn.

There are some very competent, very dedicated immigration attorneys in New York and elsewhere who do good work for their clients.  Many of these attorneys are members of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), the national immigration bar association.  But lots of low-income immigrants are priced out of that market and have to settle for attorneys who exploit and manipulate them.  When a client walks into an office and sees that law degree up on the wall, she says “I can trust this person.”  That means unscrupulous lawyers can bilk unknowing immigrants out of far greater sums than can storefront notarios.

I know this happens all the time because after the unscrupulous lawyer is done draining a client’s entire family of their savings (tens of thousands of dollars in some cases), the clients show up in desperation at nonprofit and faith-based community offices like the one where I work.  The bad lawyers know this is how it works, that the nonprofits serve as a safety valve so they can continue scamming immigrant communities.  And the legal profession is almost entirely self-regulated, so law enforcement only seems to step in when there is a truly egregious case, to “make an example” and avoid dealing with the underlying problems.  Scamming immigrants is a very profitable endeavor.

While the AILA and the American Bar Association have set up notario fraud response websites, a great first step, the issue of attorney fraud has gone largely unaddressed.  The DOJ’s Executive Office of Immigration Reform has a process for attorney discipline (see this list of disciplined attorneys), but the number of bad actors is much greater than the number of practitioners on the list.  Unfortunately, I believe AILA, city and state prosecutors, and regulators are jointly invested in the outcomes this damaged system produces, and I fail to see any real movement towards resolving the problem of immigration attorneys who repeatedly defraud their clients.  Do we need to start naming names?  Lack of accountability for immigration lawyers is a serious problem that must be addressed.