Scammers are preying on America’s illegal immigrants

Federal prosecutors in New York are going after an even more elaborate scheme. There they say a group of Colombian defendants not only posed as lawyers and extorted clients, but dressed in judges’ robes and police uniforms, staged sham court hearings over video calls and issued fake documents stamped with government seals. They even convinced “clients” to skip real court hearings, leaving them more vulnerable to deportation.

Both cases expose a business that is booming in Donald Trump’s America. As the administration narrows legal pathways to citizenship and ramps up deportations, more immigrants are becoming desperate for legal protection. Scammers are cashing in.

Last year immigration arrests in America nearly tripled, yet just 42% of immigrants in deportation proceedings have a lawyer. Because immigration cases are civil, defendants have no constitutional right to one. The consequences of facing the government alone are stark, especially because most who come before a judge don’t speak English. An analysis of 1.2m cases by the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, found that immigrants facing deportation were at least three times more likely to win their cases if they had a lawyer. For detainees, the odds improved tenfold.

To scammers, immigrants’ high demand and desperation has proved irresistable, a chance to scale up a model that has worked for them for years. Unscrupulous characters have long preyed on Spanish-speakers who confuse “notarios”, the word for an expert lawyer in many Latin American countries, with “notary”, a legal witness who can get certified in America with an online application and a basic background check. For years “notarios” in Los Angeles have solicited clients outside courthouses and rode vans through immigrant neighborhoods offering “mobile services”, mostly without repercussions. But now more people are falling for it, says Gina Amato of Public Counsel, a California firm. “At a time when the stakes are so high, they’re out here selling dreams.”

What started as a network of local scams has now become much more sophisticated online. Scammers are using Facebook, TikTok and WhatsApp to mimic specific immigration lawyers and non-profits that are known to do good work. About one-third of Catholic Charities’ chapters have been impersonated. “In the past year it’s exploded,” explains Consuelo Kwee of the Diocese of Raleigh. “I receive five to ten calls a day from people who have been scammed.” One man recently asked her why, after paying the non-profit $50,000 and waiting a year, his family’s documents still hadn’t arrived in the mail. “When I told him he wasn’t one of our clients he started crying,” she says.

A careful observer can often spot a dupe: fraudsters promise results, real lawyers are not so naïve. But AI is doing away with the distinction. With as little as a minute of genuine footage, scammers are making deepfakes. Ángel Leal, an immigration lawyer in Miami, found videos falsely depicting him handing papers to a tearful family waving an American flag and advising a handcuffed man in detention. Since March he has taken down more than 6,400 fake profiles using his name, with the help of some anti-piracy gurus. Getting content deleted isn’t always easy. Jared Jaskot, a Baltimore lawyer who represents teens eligible for green cards because they have been abused, asked TikTok to remove viral clone accounts that are sharing his content to scoop up clients. The platform responded that it found “no violation” of its “community guidelines”.

The arrests in Florida and New York may deter some entrepreneurial scammers from scaling up. But the federal government has never done much to combat “notario” scams. ProPublica, an investigative news outlet, found that the number of immigration-fraud complaints filed to the Federal Trade Commission (ftc) doubled since the president returned to office. ftc webpages on immigration scams, however, haven’t been updated since Joe Biden left. For now, fraudsters seem to have found an ideal target: immigrants anxious for help, but whose desire to remain under the radar means they seldom report when they get swindled. For those trying to help “it’s a tragic game of whack-a-mole,” says Charity Anastasio of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group. “And it’s only going to get worse.”