Profiting on Desperation

In 2014, Los Angeles resident Suhail Haiyas was desperate. Syria’s escalating civil war trapped his family in their home country. Two years earlier, his family fled to a neighboring city as gangs took control of their town, looting their home before it was ravaged by missiles and set ablaze. Working as a liquor store cashier in Los Angeles, Haiyas could do little to help.

Zadorian in an inmate photo from April 2013. Provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Haiyas came to the United States in 2005 and became a citizen in 2010. He was familiar with the immigration process and knew it would be difficult for his brothers. He hired a lawyer who told him it could take 10 years to get them into the country. The news devastated Haiyas. Then, Romina Zadorian came into his store, offering hope.

“I trusted her,” Haiyas said. “She spoke so beautifully and she seemed to be really compassionate, like she really cared and wanted to help me.”

Zadorian claimed to be an immigration lawyer who could expedite the process.

Haiyas had no reason to distrust her. She had been a regular customer for several months, always friendly, always charming. When they first met, she said she was new to the neighborhood, which was true. Unbeknownst to Haiyas, she moved into his neighborhood after serving five years in jail for eight counts of grand theft, all related to immigration fraud.

When Zadorian met Haiyas, she found an ideal client. When Haiyas met Zadorian, he became another countless victim of a sprawling industry of fraudulent immigration service providers—more commonly known as “notarios”—who have plagued Los Angeles County for decades, according to Clemente Franco, a civil litigation lawyer who has handled a number of these cases, often as pro bono work.

“It’s not even an open secret, it’s just out there and I can’t believe our law enforcement allows this to go on,” Franco said. “You can hold someone up with a gun and take $20 from them and end up in prison, but if you take $5,000 from them with a pen, nothing is going to happen.”

Operating out of storefronts and homes, some masquerading as nonprofits, “they’re a dime a dozen here in Los Angeles,” Franco said.

Blending into strip malls and advertising in immigrant communities, these consultants and lawyers offer citizenship, work permits, and the American Dream. But after waiting—weeks, months, years, decades—victims lose thousands of dollars and are often left more vulnerable, if they’re left in the country at all.

...an industry of charlatans and con artists who are profiting on desperation.

Los Angeles County officials cannot say how rampant this problem is because it often goes unreported. Through a public records request, Annenberg Media acquired every complaint related to notario fraud filed with the Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs over the past five years. Some 100 complaints have been filed every year since 2012 with the county, but Franco said that he would be surprised if this represented even 5 percent of the total victims.

In February, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office created a small team to prosecute these cases—two lawyers and two investigators, led by deputy district attorney Leonard Torrealba. In most of the cases that he has prosecuted, Torrealba said he discovered that defendants had been running illicit businesses for decades.

The Department of Consumer and Business Affairs does not keep a record of complaints filed before 2012, making it difficult to know how long these businesses were operating and whether complaints were filed and ignored, or simply not filed at all. This touches on the the most difficult part of these cases: Getting victims to come forward. Alan Diamante, a well-known immigration lawyer with an office across the street from the immigration courts, knows this problem too well.

Given the nature of the crime and the profile of the victim—often undocumented immigrants—victims are afraid to come forward, Diamante said. When they do, they have little chance of recourse. Their immigration status can rarely be salvaged and their stolen assets are seldom recovered. By pursuing legal action against their defrauders, victims expose themselves to government scrutiny and risk deportation, Diamante said. Instead, they often cut their losses and try to remedy their situation in immigration court, not civil or criminal litigation against their defrauders.

This poses a problem for prosecutors and civil litigators alike. To take down any of these bad actors, both need multiple victims to come forward. For high-volume operators like Zadorian, this can take upwards of a year. For lower-volume, less brazen, or more subtle actors, it may never happen at all.

Every year, the city attorney or attorney’s general office takes down a handful of notarios—typically high-volume individuals with hundreds, if not thousands of victims—but this is a “drop in the bucket,” Franco said.

Investigators are hamstrung by the resource-intensive nature of these cases. It can take an experienced investigator between six months and a year to put one of these cases together, according to Rigoberto Reyes, chief investigator for the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs. For a county with two dozen investigators dedicated to fraud, this is an untenable situation.

With every case pursued by Reyes’ department, investigators call police departments in the area looking for complaints. What do they typically find? “Nothing,” Reyes said. “Not one single complaint.” Police departments do not understand the nature of the crime and often do not take reports, Reyes said. In the past, some have turned away victims and told them that their case was a civil matter.

Annenberg Media called all 46 police departments in the county. A handful of departments—Alhambra, Azusa, Beverly Hills, and Gardena—take complaints regardless of the circumstances, but most say that taking the report depends on the facts available and admit that there is a chance they will turn away victims without taking a report.

But, Reyes notes that most undocumented immigrants are reluctant to approach any law enforcement agency.  And because the crime is so underreported, the county’s limited investigative resources are often dedicated to more pressing, or more apparent problems.  

Reyes has lectured at police departments about the nature of these crimes, encouraging them to take complaints on the rare occasions that immigrants do come in, but his efforts have yet to bear fruit. To add, Reyes and the Department of Consumer and Business affairs, alongside several other agencies, and nonprofit groups have done extensive community outreach to educate consumers and help them protect themselves, yet the problem persists.

Ho damn

It persists in strip malls and advertisement fliers; on AM radio and local television stations. It is responsible for millions, if not billions of dollars in losses. It has split up families and destroyed lives. It has irreparably damaged the eligibility of prospective legal immigrants and given false hope to ineligible, undocumented immigrants, expediting their removal and defrauding them in the process. It is an effective and efficient line of work for fraudsters, with little recourse for victims and minimal or no punishment for offenders. Police departments are ill equipped to handle these cases and, despite their good intentions, county officials are struggling to contain the problem—a problem whose full extent is still an unknown, despite decades of existence. Today, it has become an unmanageable illicit industry that preys on the county’s most vulnerable citizens—an industry of charlatans and con artists who are profiting on desperation.

If only Suhail Haiyas had searched the internet for Romina Zadorian, he would have found news articles and victim accounts dating back to 2004. As a former paralegal to an immigration lawyer, Zadorian knew the system well enough to make more than a million dollars in four years. In 2008, she was arrested and later pleaded no contest to eight counts of grand theft after defrauding hundreds of hopeful immigrants and their families.

Zadorian was released from prison in 2013 after serving five years. She was not required to check in with a probation officer. Less than a year later, she walked into Haiyas’ liquor store and offered to help get his family out of Syria.

She invited him into her home where Haiyas met her brother and mother. They all ate dinner together, spoke about his family, and reviewed the paperwork from his earlier immigration applications. She told him that other lawyers want to sit around and wait, but that she could get both of his brothers, his sister-in-law, and his nephews into the country quickly. She only asked that Haiyas pay for the immigration fees—about $3,000 for two applications, one for each of his brothers.

Haiyas told her that he didn’t have the money. Work on it, Haiyas recalled her saying. She was a professional. She could make things happen.

Haiyas withdrew all his savings, about $1,500 in cash, and gave it to Zadorian. His boss loaned him another $1,500, providing him with several money orders, each labeled for specific forms that Zadorian needed to submit.

After a month, Haiyas received a curious phone call from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). One of his brothers had an appointment in Los Angeles to get a green card—but his brother was still in Syria. When Haiyas asked Zadorian about this, she told him that someone made a mistake, but she would fix it. He accused her of playing games. Until this, he hadn’t seen anything from immigration, not even recognition that they received his applications. Reflecting on his own experiences, he knew something wasn’t right.

When he pushed harder, Zadorian allegedly produced falsified copies of official documents, Haiyas said, which she held up as proof that she had paid the appropriate fees to USCIS. When he demanded to see the originals, she became irate, telling him that she was the lawyer and the matter was between her and immigration.

Torrealba, who is currently prosecuting Zadorian, said that her methods and mannerisms are standard for fraudulent immigration service providers. She’s both charismatic and aggressive, willing to falsify documents, and lie to her clients—always shifting blame to a third party.

Zadorian saw a higher volume of clients than many other notarios, which is likely what led to her arrest, Reyes said. But unlike many other high-volume fraudsters, Zadorian was not a bonded immigration consultant.

Immigration consultants were created in California in 1987 by the state’s Immigration Consultant Act. It was a response to the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to 2.7 million immigrants.

“The idea was that it was going to deal with a one-time wave of simple applications being filed,” said Daniel Sharp, legal director for the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), a nonprofit immigration law firm.

But today, the act confers a title that’s misleading at best, wielded by individuals who fashion themselves as a budget alternative to a lawyer. Unwitting victims don’t realize that their immigration consultant is a glorified form-filler and translator, barred from providing any kind of legal advice.

“There used to be a role for these folks,” he said. “In much simpler times, the forms themselves were simpler. They didn’t have a million and one questions requiring legal judgement.”

But times have changed.

“If you have an immigration consultant in California, playing by the rules and not dispensing advice, they’re going to lose 99 percent of their clients,” Sharp said. “People just don’t come in with forms in hand, knowing their eligibility.”

But for Sharp, the problem starts before the client even sets foot in the door.

“You call them immigration consultants,” Sharp said. “How do you expect people to not consult with them? It sounds to everyone like that’s what they should be doing.”

“It’s just become so normal that there are these pseudo law offices in every corner of the state,” he said.

Sharp sees the title as an aura of legitimacy used by malicious fraudsters and well-meaning, but incompetent actors. Given the complexity of immigration law and the severe consequences stemming from even minor mistakes, whether a consultant is malicious or merely incompetent, the result is often the same: Clients lose money and their immigration status can end up in jeopardy.

While people like Zadorian are unbonded, unlicensed, and wholly fraudulent—not even a trace of legitimacy—individuals like her aren’t even the biggest problem, said Alan Diamante, who is currently engaged in civil litigation against two separate notario operations.

“The worst problem is with the bonded [consultants] who act like they have a license to steal,” Diamante said. He consults with more than a hundred new clients every month and estimates that at least half were victimized by fraudulent immigration service providers before coming to his office. Most of the time by bonded immigration consultants.

In the complaints from the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs, one of the most frequently mentioned individuals was Pedro Mejia, who is a bonded consultant. The only person whose name came up more than Mejia was a person who was already in prison—Oswaldo Cabrera.

Karina Soto in her living room.

Cabrera was one of the most prolific notarios in years, advertising on television and on radio, fashioning himself as a community activist. He was interviewed by CNN and appeared in the pages of the New York Times. In 2016, he was arrested and charged with 36 felony counts including grand theft, attempted perjury, and conspiracy to engage in the unlawful practice of law. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

In the dozens of complaints filed against Cabrera, Mejia’s name appears four times. In two instances, the complaints alleged that Mejia referred clients to Cabrera and told them that he was a lawyer. (He was not a lawyer, nor a bonded immigration consultant.)

[Mejia says something that shields himself from the Cabrera blowback, probably that he was duped by Cabrera as well.]

However, according to complaints, Mejia and Cabrera occasionally saw clients out of the same office space. It appears the two had a relationship for nearly two years, with complaints that name both dating between early 2012 and late 2013.

The Department of Consumer and Business Affairs has not investigated Mejia, citing a three-year statute of limitations on fraud cases. But, while most complaints against Mejia fall outside of that range, six are still in statute. 

[Reyes’ response goes here. Feuer’s too.]

One of those complaints was filed by Karina Soto.

When Soto met Mejia, she said she was following the advice of a representative of USCIS who told her to find an immigration consultant because her case was very simple—it only required a form to be filled out and mailed in, which is what an immigration consultant is supposed to do. Plus, a consultant would be significantly cheaper than a lawyer, the representative told her.

Soto has been living in the United States since 1994. She said she came here from Chile with her mother and brother to escape her physically abusive father who would regularly hit her mother and brother. At one point he broke her mother’s ankle, Soto said. The psychological stress from living in this household was enough to stunt Soto’s speech development as a child.

Pedro Mejia in the photo submitted for his immigration consultant registration. Picture provided by California Secretary of State.

“We’d move out of the house to somewhere where he wouldn’t find us and he’d always end up finding us,” Soto said. “Coming here was a place where he couldn’t hurt us anymore.”

In 2010, Soto witnessed a shooting and testified in court. For her help, Soto and her husband were granted five-year U-Visas in 2011.

Mejia’s office was only a few blocks away from Soto’s house. It was 2014 and she had a year to renew her U-Visa before it expired permanently. She could have filled in the form and mailed it herself, but she was nervous that she might make a mistake. She felt like it was better to see a professional.

Mejia assured her that her case was simple and said it would cost $8,000 for both her and her husband. He requested cash and she paid $3,000 upfront. He quickly got her a work permit and she felt like she made the right decision. She felt like he was legitimate.

“I really trusted him,” Soto said.

After a year and a half, Soto’s case was denied when her U-Visa status expired under Mejia’s watch. Mejia told her that he could reopen her case, but it would cost $2,000. She paid him and he filed for an extension, which was granted.

Another year went by. Soto would check in with Mejia regularly and he continually assured her that he filed her paperwork and insisted that he was waiting on immigration.

In that time, Mejia moved to a new offihat he switched offices. He told her that he was friends with the mailman who knew that he switched offices and would save all the letters. She thought this sounded fishy.

Then, she learned that her case had been denied again. Mejia said it was because immigration lost some of the evidence. After he told her that he could reopen her case for a price, Soto began to suspect she had been scammed.

She paid Mejia $5,000 over four years. In the process, she was forced to file for bankruptcy, in part because she neglected other payments to afford Mejia’s services.

“I ended up losing my car because I couldn’t make the payments on time because I had to pay Pedro,” she said. All she wanted was to get her papers fixed. Nothing else mattered.

She sought help from a lawyer who told her that the case had been denied, not because the government lost her evidence, but because Mejia failed to respond to the government’s request for evidence.

Soto’s new lawyer manage to salvage her and her husband’s case. They both received their renewed U-Visas in 2017. It took four months and cost $4,000.

What Soto experienced is one of the most common scams—simply take the money and string the client as far as they’ll go. Miss deadlines, fill out the wrong paperwork. Do anything that demands more appeals or legal work, regardless of the consequences. Anything to keep the case going.

“Most of the time, I think the plan is to have them in a long, drawn out process in court where they’re going to be collecting additional fees,” Sharp said.

Sharp has seen it many times before, in a variety of forms. Another popular variation was to apply a client for asylum, regardless of their qualifications or status. (Until recently, an asylum application automatically led to a work permit because of USCIS’ massive backlog in asylum cases.)

Then, “the game plan is to get them into removal proceedings—deportation proceedings—and then apply for a cancellation of removal,” Sharp said. Rarely is this explained to victims. Rarely do they know about the years of litigation that lies ahead in deportation proceedings, or the attorney fees that come with it. Rarely are they aware of the risk they’re taking on. And when it finally ends, the victim is often deported and any problems for the fraudster are deported with them.

In creating immigration consultants, the California legislature of 1986 intended to provide a low-cost option for immigrants who have simple, straightforward cases. Immigration consultants fill a void left between high-priced private lawyers and low-cost nonprofits that can be difficult to find, said Bill Anderson, vice president of government affairs for the National Notary Organization, a lobbying group for notaries and consultants in California.

“An immigration consultant kind of hits the nice, happy medium providing a limited set of non-legal services at a price that the immigrant community can afford,” Anderson said, noting the consultants he knows who have been in business for decades that have helped thousands of immigrants in their communities get their paperwork in order.

“That’s why I looked into them a decade ago,” Sharp said. He hoped they could fill the very real void of reasonably priced immigration services in Los Angeles. “And the conclusion was ‘no way.’”

“Where the reality is that [immigration proceedings are] really hard to navigate and the consequences for screwing it up are really harsh, then you just cannot delegate it to anyone over 18 with a pulse—which is what we have in California,” Sharp said.

“Literally, you’re 18, you don’t have a criminal history, and you’re alive—you can go and register as an immigration consultant. You actually don’t need to know how to read and write and that’s where we’re at right now,” he said.

This is a criticism that Anderson can get behind and it’s what he sees as one of two omissions in the bill as written. There is no test or licensing process to become an immigration consultant. Anderson would like to see a test that clarifies the line between non-legal help and unlicensed practice of law to help prevent fraud.

The other omission that Anderson sees is the lack of a dedicated enforcement and investigative agency, which he argued would not be expensive, given the relatively small number of immigration consultants operating across the state.  

In California, there are about 1,000 bonded immigration consultants. Reyes estimated that there are around 2,500 unbonded consultants, though he can't be sure. Sharp guessed that there are around 1,000 bonded and unbonded immigration consultants in the county alone; and an analysis by Annenberg Media found just over 300 individuals who were named in complaints filed with the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs.

But as Anderson points out, there is no dedicated enforcement and investigative agency responsible for these individuals. That falls to the two dozen fraud investigators in Los Angeles County, most of which are in the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs. The rest are thinly spread between the city attorney’s office and the district attorney’s office. Only three are dedicated strictly to immigration fraud.

On a state level, the attorney general’s office has none of their own investigators. The California Department of Justice has one. Police departments are equipped to handle these cases, but as Reyes pointed out, they rarely rise to the occasion.

Most of the investigations are started by Reyes’ team in the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs. Their findings are handed off to city attorney Mike Feuer, or Leonard Torrealba, deputy district attorney who runs a specialized unit that targets notario fraud. In some instances, the cases may also be given to the attorney general’s office.

Reyes notes that it can be hard to get prosecutors to sign off on many of these cases, given the technical nature of the violations. Without victims, prosecutors are reluctant to act, he said. He recalled one case where his department found clear-cut evidence that a consultant was practicing law without a license, but the state’s attorney general office told Reyes that they would only press charges if victims came forward.

“You don’t need to have a victim to prove that you’re violating the law,” Reyes said. “Try to convince any prosecutorial agency,” to take that case, he said. They want to see victims and they want to see harm.

Combined with the resource-intensive nature of these investigations, Los Angeles County is left with a fractured system that allows bad actors to flourish undisturbed for years, even decades, if they are careful.

This is frustrating for Diamante who thinks that, at minimum, the city attorney’s office ought to be going after the unbonded consultants. They would be easy to take down, Diamante said, because they’re not in compliance with the law. It would be a simple check to see if they are legal on paper—no victims required. The city attorney has not responded to repeated requests for comment on this issue.

The law allows anyone harmed by an immigration consultant to sue in civil proceedings for $1,000 per every violation of the statute. Diamante said that the original thinking was that private attorneys would help police consultants, but it hasn’t played out that way.

“This is very unattractive for most civil attorneys because you can’t get much money of it,” Diamante said. He only pursues cases against them because he’s sick of seeing it. He doesn’t expect a reward. But a lack of reward means that he’s one of the few who actually pursue civil litigation against them.

“The problem is that most of these places hide their assets pretty well,” Reyes said. “The second [problem] is that most of these places are barely making it.”

Compounding the issue, Diamante said, is a common strategy of dragging cases out as long as they can. They’ll file as many requests and appeals as possible. “So you’ll put $50,000 into a case for $5,000,” he said. “And you don’t know if you can even collect on the judgement.”

Diamante wishes that government agencies would step up to the plate and do something about the issue.

For his part, Torrealba hopes that he can fill that void, but recognizes that it’s an uphill battle predominately caused by underreporting.

He recently suggested a restitution fund for victims of fraudulent immigration service providers. He hopes that by offering restitution, he will be able to build trust within the community and encourage more victims to come forward, which would create more opportunities for prosecution. This suggestion will be included in a report by the Immigration Protection and Advance taskforce, which is due out this summer. 

Given the county's dismal restitution repayment rate, Torrealba hopes that a fund dedicated to victims of notario fraud will encourage more victims to come forward.

But more prosecutions may not solve the problem. When Zadorian was first prosecuted, she was sentenced to ten years in prison and only served five. Oswaldo Cabrera, another high-volume operator who was recently prosecuted, was sentenced to five years in prison. Gregory Chavez, who was prosecuted by Torrealba in July, was given a 10-year jail sentence followed by five years of mandatory probation—the largest sentence ever for a notario, Torrealba said.  As nonviolent offenders like Zadorian, Chavez and Cabrera will likely serve half-time. And if Zadorian is any indication, there is a chance that they will simply go back to their old ways when they get released.

“With the current legal framework, it’s really hard to prosecute your way out of the problem,” Sharp said. He is behind AB-638, a bill that would require immigration consultants to be supervised by a lawyer or authorized by the federal government. The bill was authored by California State Assembly member, Anna Caballero, but its progress has stalled in the Senate’s appropriation committee after stiff opposition from Anderson and the consultant lobby.

Sharp thinks that politicians are reticent to vote on a bill that would close minority-owned businesses. But even if his bill did pass, Sharp would still have concerns about the industry’s health. And oddly enough, they’re the same concerns shared by Anderson.

“You can shut all these people down, but if [immigrants] don’t have a legitimate place to turn, people will always find someone to do this,” Sharp said.

Anderson made a similar statement and argued that fraud would spike if immigration consultants were shut down. But unlike Anderson, who believes that more oversight is the answer, Sharp believes that the state ought to step in and provide more funding for nonprofit law firms like CARECEN. They already receive the lion’s share of their funding from the government and it’s only increased over the past three years.

“That’s been a really important boost in capacity,” Sharp said, “but it’s still not adequate relative to the number of undocumented folks in the state.”

Months after he accused Zadorian of playing games, Suhail Haiyas received a letter in the mail from USCIS. The checks he had given Zadorian for his brothers’ applications bounced and one of the two applications she was supposed to handle was denied. (There is no evidence that Zadorian submitted any paperwork for the second brother.)

He followed up with the Continental Express Money Order Company which opened an investigation and found that the money orders never arrived at the immigration offices. Instead, they were fraudulently altered and sent to Zadorian’s landlord as well as her insurance provider. Haiyas was given his money back—the money he received as a loan from his boss—but he was still out $1,500 in cash, which was all the money in his bank account when he paid Zadorian.

Haiyas repeatedly called Zadorian but she did not answer the phone. He managed to reach her brother who said he would ask her about it, but she never returned his calls. The brother stopped answering his phone too.

Investigators believe that both Zadorian’s mother and brother (with whom she lived) were aware of, but not involved with her fraudulent business. They are not pursuing charges against them, citing a lack of evidence. This infuriates Alan Diamante who brought a civil suit against Zadorian months before the district attorney’s office brought a criminal case against her.

“I personally encountered a hundred people who had issues with her,” Diamante said. He firmly believes that it was a family operation, yet the district attorney only pursued charges against Zadorian. He finds it absurd that she was able to operate for years before getting caught the second time around.

But, Torrealba noted, that when Zadorian was arrested last October, he only had a handful of victims. After announcing her arrest, complaints started flooding in.

“It was that level of confidence that the government had done something about it,” Torrealba said. “So [victims] felt more comfortable reporting it at that point.”

Her preliminary trial started in January, but Torrealba requested multiple extensions to interview additional victims. Seven months after her arrest, Torrealba had more than 80 individuals who were willing to testify against Zadorian, he said.

In April, she was charged with 112 felony counts, including 91 counts of grand theft, Torrealba said. She was also charged with forgery, extortion, criminal threats, residential burglary, and dissuading a witness from reporting a crime. She plead not guilty to all counts. Her next trial date is in July.

According to court documents and police reports, Zadorian had a penchant for threatening her clients when they discovered her fraudulent behavior, claiming connections to the Armenian Mafia, and telling undocumented immigrants that she would get them deported. In one instance, a victim asked her for a refund and she told him to take it up with President Trump.

Zadorian operated with this brazen attitude for four years before she was caught, only made possible by the vulnerability of her victims.

It’s impossible to know if any of her victims were turned away from police stations; it’s impossible to know how many of her victims never came forward at all. And it’s ultimately impossible to know the full extent of the damage she caused, which can’t be measured in dollars.

“Most of the time, when one of these bad actors is shut down, the harm has been done,” Sharp said. The asylum application has already been filed, the deportation proceedings may have already started. “You can’t unring that bell,” he said.

Zadorian played these games with her victims. Sharp knows because one of her victims became his client, who was placed in deportation proceedings without knowing it.

Without a change, this cycle will repeat itself. Zadorian will be replaced by another notario who will play the same games, preying on the same vulnerable population. It’s a pattern that’s played out for more than two decades at this point.

There is a genuine need within the immigrant community for low-cost immigration help. This is a very real void that someone will fill, whether they’re legitimate or not.

With victims who are unwilling to report the crime and perpetrators who operate with a state-sponsored aura of legitimacy, it is simply too easy and too efficient of a scam to disappear without some kind of reform. Depending on who you ask, that could mean changing the immigration consultant act or increasing oversight and investigatory capacity. It could mean increasing funding to nonprofit law firms or engaging with the immigrant community more effectively. Filling the void in a sustainable way will likely mean some combination of the above.

Regardless of the solution, one thing is undeniable: That void is being filled, but a sizeable portion of it is occupied by charlatans who are incompetent at best and malicious at worst, making a living by trading the futures of the county’s most vulnerable citizens for a few thousand bucks.