Four people living in Los Angeles, California, have been sentenced in Boston after operating a huge marriage fraud “agency” to help migrants skirt immigration laws to get green cards.
Authorities say the Philippine nationals recruited Americans to marry clients working with the agency. The group allegedly staged sham marriages for money, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Massachusetts announced Tuesday that the accused arranged the “sham marriages” and submitted fraudulent “green card” applications for more than 600 “non-citizens,” in the case.
Officials said the group obtained the green cards by using “the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) by claiming falsely that the undocumented clients had been abused by American spouses.”
In 2022, authorities charged the defendants and seven additional individuals with conspiracy to commit marriage fraud and immigration document fraud.
On March 7, the man who ran the operation, 50-year-old Marcialito Biol Benitez, was sentenced to 22 months in prison and three years of supervised release.
In a social media post on Tuesday, FBI Boston shared images of the “sham marriages” with couples during the ceremonies sitting next to each other:
As a result of an investigation led by #FBI Boston, four operators of a large-scale marriage fraud "agency" that arranged sham marriages and submitted fraudulent green card applications for over 600 non-citizen "clients" have been sentenced. https://t.co/Guq0H42VWf pic.twitter.com/UUDVZxQAYK
— FBI Boston (@FBIBoston) March 12, 2024
Officials say the price for the agency to prepare and submit documents regarding the operation was between $20,000 and $35,000 cash.
A similar instance happened in April 2017. A California woman and her father were sentenced to prison for pairing foreign nationals with American citizens at steep prices, Breitbart News reported.
“They were convicted of visa and marriage fraud for taking up to $50,000 from Chinese nationals for ‘arranging’ marriages. The foreign nationals hoped to get permanent resident status,” the outlet said.
The Center for Immigration Studies’ August 2020 report on marriage-related immigration fraud shared stories from victims.
The outlet said it had a “fascinating (and depressing) series of accounts of 22 U.S. citizens being hornswoggled by aliens pretending to love them. The stories are of 17 male and six female citizens being deceived by people from 18 different nations.”
“A minority of the cases may also involve national security matters, like the Russian woman who tried marriage fraud on both a civilian and later a military officer (see cases 15 and 16). There were four cases involving two Russian women (the only multiples on the list), and two each for Brazil and China,” the article said.
