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Instead of legitimately fast-tracking their clients’ bids for legal U.S. residency, attorney Kofi Amankwaa and his son, Kofi Jr., filed false petitions to the federal government claiming that the immigrants’ children had abused them, authorities said.
All this did, they said, was put the applicants on immigration officials’ radar, leading to green card denials in some cases and even deportations in others.
It cost the victims roughly $6,000 each, as well as an additional $1,225 in fees payable to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and another $325 for a required medical examination.
Sometimes it led to domestic abuse charges against some of the children, defense attorneys said.
The father and son team from the Middlesex County, NJ, town of South River "sought to make a mockery of the U.S. immigration system," U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said on Monday, Jan. 22.
Williams jointly announced the arrests with Acting Special Agent in Charge Michael Alfonso of the Newark Field Office of Homeland Security Investigations in New Jersey, on Monday, Jan. 22.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James followed that up by announcing that her office had sued the Amankwaas.
The scheme involved submitting bogus petitions under the federal Violence Against Women Act for people seeking legal status in the U.S., said Williams, the federal prosecutor.
The I-360 petition, as it’s officially known, allows an undocumented parent of an abusive U.S. citizen child to self-petition for a green card.
Many of the bogus petitions filed by the Amankwaas were denied, attorneys for the victims said. Even worse, many of those applicants said they found themselves under investigation instead.
The senior Amankwaa and his son – who worked as a legal assistant in his office near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx – had been at it for more than seven years, Williams and Alfonso said in a joint release.
The men used the filing of the I-360 form and other petitions “as a basis to request advance parole travel documents for their clients that enable individuals without legal status in the United States to travel abroad temporarily and return,” the release says.
“The defendants then directed their clients, upon obtaining the advance parole travel documents, to travel abroad and return to the United States,” it says.
It says they also “used the fraudulently procured advance parole as a basis for their clients to apply for lawful permanent resident status.”
“The defendants carried out this illegal scheme knowing that their clients had not, in fact, been abused by their children or without ever asking whether any such abuse occurred,” Williams and Alfonso said.
Officials sniffed out the fraud and denied most of the applications, they said.
Las November, Awankwaa’s license to practice law in New York was suspended amid a flood of complaints, authorities said.
Then came Monday’s announcements.
Both men are charged with conspiring to defraud the government and immigration fraud.
Williams praised the “outstanding investigative work” of the HSI agents in making the case. He also thanked the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Office of Fraud Detection and National Security for its support.
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