End the U Visa fraud factory

An Illinois resident was sentenced last week to only two years in jail after being convicted of staging hundreds of armed robberies. His sole purpose in committing these crimes was to secure work permits and deportation protection for fake victims. Not only is this not the first time someone has been convicted of staging crimes to abuse the U visa program, but the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has found that the entire program is riddled with fraud, contains no fraud protections, and is completely ineffectual at helping to solve crimes.Starting in 2022, Parth Nayi began organizing and participating in staged armed robberies at gas stations, liquor stores, and restaurants in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. The scam worked like this: An illegal immigrant would come to Nayi and pay him between $5,000 and $30,000 to obtain a work permit and protection from deportation through the U visa program.Nayi would then recruit a fake robber to commit the fake robbery and a business owner to host the fake crime. The illegal immigrant would be told when and where to be a witness. After the fake crime was committed, the business owner would report it, and the illegal immigrant would then approach the police and demand a signature certifying that the crime happened and that the illegal immigrant was a witness helping with the investigation. Just by filing that application with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the illegal immigrant witness is granted deportation protection and a work permit. No investigation into the incident was conducted at all. It is not until an average of four years later that immigration services officers complete a background check, and even then, all the government does is make sure the forms themselves are not fraudulent.Nayi is far from the first person to defraud the U visa program. In 2024, a Houston man was arrested on charges of staging a robbery in which a bystander shot and killed the fake robber while trying to stop what he believed was a real crime. After investigating the shooting, police discovered the fraud and linked the Houston man to two other fake robberies. The scheme came to light only after the fake robber was killed. The same was true for Nayi, whose fraud factory was uncovered only after an employee at one of the staged robberies was shot in the stomach by a fake robber (in that case, the employee thankfully survived).The U visa has even been abused by Democrats for political theater. After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Democratic Sheriff Javier Salazar signed U visa applications for all 50 migrants, claiming they were witnesses to DeSantis’s alleged unlawful restraint of them.The possibility for abuse goes far beyond politics. The statute supposedly gives local law enforcement agencies discretion over whether to sign illegal immigrants’ U visa applications based on whether they believe the illegal immigrant in question is cooperative and necessary to the investigation of a crime. But starting in the 2010s, illegal immigrants began hiring lawyers to sue law enforcement agencies for abusing their discretion by not signing U visa applications fast enough. As a direct result of these lawsuits, USCIS’s Center Fraud Detection Operation told the Office of Inspector General in 2022, “We have grave concerns about the reliability of the certifications from 2016 on as the threat of lawsuits has forced many law enforcement agencies to just sign and not question the certification.”In other words, after staging fake crimes, illegal immigrants are now bullying law enforcement agencies into certifying that their cooperation is necessary to investigate a crime that the agency may not even be investigating at all!Worse, once an illegal immigrant’s U visa application has finally been approved, not only does the illegal immigrant witness get a green card and a path to citizenship, but the immigrant’s entire family does, too. This is why the number of family approvals for U visas is almost double the number of U visas granted each year.BARACK OBAMA’S ANTISEMITIC DEMOCRATSConsidering the substantial fraud the U visa program has created, one would hope that there would be evidence that the program has aided in fighting crime, but there is none. In fact, when surveyed by the Office of Inspector General, 61% of law enforcement agencies said the program does not improve their ability to investigate crimes, while 54% believe illegal immigrants abuse the program. Responding law enforcement agencies stressed that the program was not helpful because the crimes cited in witness applications were often associated with old or cold cases and, in some cases, involved staged crimes and exaggerated injuries.Congress created the U visa to help police solve crimes. Instead, it has given criminals a business model: manufacture a crime, sell the victimhood, and collect the immigration benefits, while disrupting and inconveniencing law enforcement into the bargain. Real people have been shot while Washington processes the paperwork. Prosecuting individual scammers will never be enough while the federal government keeps its product on the market. Congress should shut down the fraud factory and abolish the U visa.