Rooting out fraud in the immigration system has been one of the key missions of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under the Trump administration. So far, not much has surfaced.
It’s “shocking” to see “how little fraud they have found,” Angelo Paparelli of Seyfarth Shaw in Los Angeles told Bloomberg Law. The focus on “the prevalence of fraud and abuse” in the immigration system appears to be a “tempest in a teapot,” he said.
Of more than 23,000 site visits conducted in fiscal year 2018, the USCIS only referred 1,117 cases to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for benefit fraud, according to data provided exclusively to Bloomberg Law. Another 11,886 cases were referred for public safety concerns.
The agency’s two email boxes for fraud tips also have yielded little. One box is for the H-1B skilled guest-worker program, while the other is for the H-2B low-skilled, seasonal guest-worker program.
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