Fake robberies, real bills

On Oct. 22, a federal judge in Chicago sentenced Parth Nayi to two years in prison and fined him $50,000 for organizing hundreds of staged armed robberies. Fake bandits, replica guns, and paid-off store owners gave customers a crime to report, because the U visa is reserved for victims of real ones. Participants paid up to $30,000 each to play victim. Hollywood would call it a heist hoax film. Honest applicants and taxpayers get to call it a rigged system.I’m a father of three who coached youth football and rugby for years. Coaching teaches one simple rule: The whistle only means something if it blows the same way for everyone. Immigration and benefit programs skip that principle, and organized fraud has noticed. Programs that approve or pay on unchecked paperwork invite it, and taxpayers and honest applicants have to cover the loss.Nayi is not alone. A federal court in Boston sentenced Rambhai Patel in 2025 to 20 months and ordered forfeiture of $850,000 for staging robberies at 18 or more stores and restaurants. In Houston, Ana Silvia Garcia used a U.S. citizen’s Social Security number from 1992 and collected more than $278,000 in disability and Medicare benefits between 2013 and 2026. She got 27 months and a $278,385 restitution order. DOJ’s announcement mentions no asylum claim. The case still shows what happens when a borrowed number goes unchecked for decades. Asylum has its own fraud factories. Attorney Feng Ling Liu ran two New York law firms that filed thousands of applications built on invented persecution stories and earned tens of millions of dollars. Employees coached clients to lie to immigration officers. A jury convicted Liu in 2014, and the sentence was five years. Gatekeepers certify, nobody checks, and the money flows.Then there’s the asylum line. DHS reports that more than 1.4 million affirmative asylum applications sat pending at the end of fiscal 2025, and applicants may wait over 7.3 years. DHS counts 444,724 pending applications filed more than a year after the applicant’s last entry or with no entry date. For the 129,525 filed ten or more years after entry, USCIS says filers often want a path into court to seek cancellation of removal. A line that slow rewards people for filing, whether or not the claim is any good.Fraud has no passport, and plenty of these cases involve no immigrants at all. Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future, a $250 million child nutrition fraud, has produced at least 68 convictions. Its payments grew from about $3.4 million in 2019 to nearly $200 million in 2021, and the Minnesota Department of Education received at least 30 complaints in the process. The legislative auditor found that weak oversight at the highest levels created opportunities for fraud. Pay first, chase later is a business model, and the crooks figured that out before the bureaucrats did.A fair objection is that fraud convictions don’t prove most applicants lie, and that skipping interviews could sweep up valid claims. DHS concedes the second point and calls it rare, and referred applicants still get a fresh hearing before an immigration judge. I agree on the first. Honest applicants pay the highest price. A Florida man posing as a lawyer filed more than 225 phony asylum applications in clients’ names and drew more than 20 years. Federal prosecutors in New York said such fraud makes it “more difficult for genuine victims.”ASYLUM COURTS GOT A RESET. CONGRESS SHOULD MAKE IT STICKStart with verification: agencies should confirm that the crime or the identity is real instead of accepting a form as proof. Then go after the middlemen. Nayi’s conviction carried a five-year maximum, and two years is a modest price for hundreds of staged crimes. Finally, fund asylum officers and back the July rule that lets them refer time-barred claims to court without an interview, so the line moves.Aristotle wrote that the law is reason unaffected by desire, a line Professor Stromwell later borrowed in Legally Blonde. Americans are generous people, but I believe anyone who comes here should be able to pay their own way. Check their ID’s and validate their stories. Generosity depends on it.Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.