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Transcript:
The US government has empowered a secret police force to round up people they suspect of being undocumented immigrants and disappearing them off the streets, out of schools, and even away from their scheduled immigration hearings without bothering to show their faces or identifying themselves in any way. What could go wrong?
A lot, obviously, but today I’ll be talking about how this new dystopia doesn’t JUST hurt the people who are being detained, deported, and separated from their families. Today I want to focus on how the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants has enabled and encouraged an entirely new field of con artists.
Well, not entirely new–con artists have been carving out niches to target different vulnerable people for centuries. Millennia, even! And the targeting of immigrants isn’t completely new, as they have continued to be marginalized here in the US throughout even Democratic majority administrations, because ever since 9/11 Dems have adopted Republican talking points on dangerous immigrants coming to steal our jobs and rape our women. But these new efforts by the Trump administration have made it trivially easy for con artists to find, target, and extract money and other resources from immigrants. In fact, the victims in this case seek out and hire the con artists.
First, let me lay out the major points that led to this for those who don’t know, and also offer some personal experience. Upon taking office, Donald Trump’s administration ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to capture and deport more immigrants than it is possible to do in a first world country with due process, which is the phrase we use to refer to the idea that we should make sure a person is who we think they are and have done the things we think they’ve done before figuring out the appropriate action to take. Without due process, even US citizens who have never broken a law can be imprisoned and sent to concentration camps because without due process, how do we know they’re US citizens who have never broken a law?
And so ICE was challenged to gather up as many immigrants as possible who have gotten into SOME kind of trouble, or who plausibly may have gotten into some kind of trouble. They could do that by investigating crimes or something, but a much easier thing to do is to simply go to the place with the highest concentration of immigrants, where odds are some of them may have some outstanding issue with their documentation. That place is immigration court, where immigrants trying to follow the law and secure their right to remain in the US go to meet with judges and submit their documents.
In order to catch as many people as possible, the ICE officers wear plain clothes and don’t identify themselves.
Which, by the way, brings me to the first way that predators are exploiting this situation: this week in Philly, a man pretending to be an ICE agent robbed a car repair garage, because no one really knows who is and is not ICE and robbing a place is actually pretty low down on the list of shitty things ICE agents do, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Anyway, the real ICE agents wait for immigrants to show up and they grab them and throw them in a van, sometimes with the rest of their family, sometimes not. Sometimes with their children, and sometimes children are just left alone to figure things out for themselves. Likely hundreds of people have been black bagged in this manner, though we don’t know exactly how many because this neo-Gestapo operates with little to no oversight or accountability.
And to be clear, while this is all the worst for Black and brown immigrants, and low income immigrants, it’s also happening to middle class white Trump supporting immigrants from Europe, like this stupid asshole who was grabbed by ICE at his citizenship hearing, probably because he forgot to file one form during a time when his wife had suffered a miscarriage.
None of this is shocking, if you’ve been paying attention. So my friends and family and I weren’t surprised, except for a bit of disbelief over how quickly it was happening. Several people close to me are pursuing citizenship as a small but very real and important way to protect themselves, because even without due process, the chances of a US citizen clawing their way back to the US from a Salvadoran concentration camp are better than those of a permanent resident with no criminal history.
Seeing even white Trumpy dipshits get snatched out of immigration hearings led everyone I know to immediately hire an immigration lawyer who would be able to watch over the process, make sure every “i” is dotted and “t” crossed, attend all in-person meetings, and also be on speed dial in case of any, you know, kidnappings. And we all have the privilege of having the time, the money, the internet access, and the language skills to be able to research those lawyers, check their credentials, and afford their fees.
Many immigrants across the country do NOT have that privilege, and that’s where the con artists step in.
In a recent piece for Documented NY, journalist Rommel H. Ojeda profiles some of the victims in a growing trend, in which con artists pose as immigration lawyers on social media and wait for their victims to contact them. One immigrant from Honduras, N., reported that he had previously attended virtual court appointments when he first arrived in the US seeking asylum. When he realized that Trump had a good chance of getting a second term, he got worried and decided that he needed a lawyer. On Facebook, he found a group of supposed legal experts who told him to switch over to talking on WhatsApp, at which point they charged him $5,000, which he could pay in installments.
They then took him through a series of virtual hearings that featured his “lawyer,” an “immigration officer,” and finally a “judge” wearing robes, who informed him that he had been fully pardoned and just needed to pay a few more thousands of dollars in fees and he was home free.
Crucially, throughout these virtual hearings, N.’s “lawyer” advised him to avoid going to any in-person meetings he might be scheduled for, assuring him that the lawyer would handle it all. So not only did N. eventually realize that he had NOT been pardoned; not only did he realize he had wasted thousands of dollars that he couldn’t afford to lose; but also, he learned that those in-person meetings he had skipped resulted in a REAL judge ordering him to ACTUALLY be deported.
I cover scams for a living, and even I am just sitting here stunned at the utter sociopathy required to completely and utterly destroy a person like this. His money, his hopes and dreams, and even his actual home, dashed. He has since found a real lawyer through Envision Freedom Fund and they are attempting to overturn the deportation ruling.
It’s really worth highlighting that N. said he hooked up with these scammers because of the mere possibility that Trump would be elected in November and would institute the policies he was bragging about on the campaign trail. Now that Trump really is doing those things, now that immigrants know they will not be safe going to an immigration court to continue the legal process of becoming a permanent resident or citizen, these scam artists are surely making bank. And much like we have little information on what ICE is doing, how many people they’re disappearing or deporting, we have even less information about the immigrants who are getting scammed. The few people interviewed for Documented were those who had testified at a hearing about the fraud, but how many more people will never step forward?
It’s always difficult to get people who have been conned to speak out about their experience, sometimes because they refuse to accept that they’ve been conned, but also often because they’re embarrassed. In the case of undocumented immigrants who sought out the con artists specifically because they do not – can not – trust American law enforcement officers to abide by the law and protect their rights, how can we expect them to go to the police, or the FBI, or even their local city council meetings? We as a society have abandoned them, and an abandoned person is just fresh meat for the next predator to come along.
If you want to help, there are many organizations trying to protect our immigrant neighbors. They’re often very localized, so I suggest searching for one in your community. That said, I did ask my BlueSky followers for their favorite orgs so I could give them a signal boost. Eric Azevedo recommended Respond: Crisis Translation, where you can help vulnerable people overcome language barriers either using your translation skills or your donations. Slyderon recommends Immigration Law & Justice Network, which provides legal services for immigrants throughout the US. Caelia recommended the Colorado Rapid Response Team, which gives me a good reason to mention that there are Rapid Response teams across the US that you can join, and they usually can train you on what they need. Here’s a list of networks in California thanks to the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.
Got another group I didn’t mention? Drop them in the comments below!
