Federal officers have charged 26 people, mostly Indonesians living in the United States, with fraudulently applying for asylum and for illegally procuring Virginia drivers' licenses. The charges, filed on Nov. 22 by Paul McNulty, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, are the result of a two-year investigation of Indonesian immigration brokers in Fairfax Station, Springfield, Burke and Manassas. Nine of the defendants live in Fairfax, three in Centreville and one in Springfield, Burke, Alexandria, Vienna and Manassas.
According to an affidavit filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent Dean McDonald, the defendants helped prepare fraudulent asylum applications for more than 1,000 immigrants living all over the country starting in 1999. They also prepared application for green cards, U.S. passports, social security cards and Virginia drivers' licenses for thousands more immigrants, often for a fee of at least $2,000 per person.
"The fraud committed by the targets in this case was unusual in size and scope," McDonald said in the affidavit.
THE AFFIDAVIT STATES that the defendants had their clients tell immigration officials almost identical stories in their asylum applications. Many of the stories claim that the immigrants were persecuted in Indonesia for their Chinese ancestry or their Christian religion. For instance, 14 female applicants for asylum recounted very similar stories of being raped by an Indonesian taxi driver on account of their Chinese origin. In another case, 11 female applicants said they had been assaulted at knife-point by two Indonesian men while jogging. Eighteen other immigrants applied for asylum claiming that their houses had been vandalized in Indonesia because their parents sought to convert Muslims to Christianity. The defendants in the case also provided applicants with interpreters during asylum hearings who "embellished many of the responses," according to the affidavit.
The 26 defendants are not under detention, said Sam Dibbley, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office.
"It's still an ongoing investigation," she said. "The next step after the criminal complaint is the indictment."
ONE OF THE immigration offices targeted by the investigation remained locked last week. No furniture was visible through the windows of the Asian American Placement Services on Loisdale Court in Springfield. Marvin Hernandez, who works at a deli next door, said he saw police officers come by the office a couple weeks ago.
"I didn't see them take anything away," he said.
The affidavit states that investigators were looking for records, passports, green cards, visas and other documents as well as computer disks and disk drives.
Agents also investigated the Chinese Indonesian American Society in Fairfax Station, an immigration brokerage called Kumala Nusantara in Burke and the Chinese Indonesian Pribumi Community Service in Manassas.