SACRAMENTO, Calif. September 25, 2010 — United States Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner announced today that three attorneys and their contract interpreter were sentenced to prison terms yesterday by United States District Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr., following their conviction for orchestrating a scheme to defraud the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in connection with the filing of hundreds of false asylum claims.
Jagprit Singh Sekhon, 39, of Westminster, formerly of Sacramento, was sentenced to 108 months in prison. Jagprit Sekhon’s brother and former partner in the Sekhon & Sekhon law firm, Jagdip Singh Sekhon, 42, of Salida, formerly of Oakland, was sentenced to 60 months in prison. Former law firm associate, Manjit Kaur Rai, 33, of Discovery Bay, formerly of Antioch, was sentenced to 30 months in prison. The sentencing hearing for interpreter Iosif Caza, 43, of Sacramento has not yet concluded. Interpreter Luciana Harmath, 29, of Glendale, Ariz., formerly of Sacramento, was sentenced to four months in prison on June 29, 2010. All five defendants were convicted on June 25, 2009 following a three-and-a-half month jury trial.
Judge Damrell ordered Jagdip Sekhon and Jagprit Sekhon immediately remanded into custody to begin serving their sentences. Rai was given three weeks to surrender to the designated prison.
Each of the defendants was convicted of charges related to a long-running scheme to defraud the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and its successor agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), by filing hundreds of false asylum claims from early 2000 through late 2004. All five defendants were convicted of conspiracy to defraud the INS and CIS by filing fraudulent asylum claims. Jagprit Sekhon, Rai, Caza, and Harmath were also convicted of a separate conspiracy to submit a false asylum claim and of several false statement and asylum fraud counts relating to specific asylum claims. The jury convicted defendant Jagprit Sekhon on nine additional counts, convicted Rai on three additional counts, convicted Caza on six additional counts, and convicted Harmath on two additional counts.
This case was the product of an extensive investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Homeland Security Investigations led by Special Agent Carol Webster. United States Attorney Wagner and Assistant United States Attorneys Camil A. Skipper and Kyle Reardon represented the government at trial. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Reardon and Saralyn Ang-Olson represented the United States in post-trial forfeiture proceedings.
In sentencing Jagdip Sekhon, Judge Damrell said that although these were flaws in the asylum system, that “doesn’t give license to lawyers to take advantage of it.” One of the primary purposes of the sentence, the judge said was “to deter future criminal conduct by lawyers who take advantage of this flawed system.”
United States Attorney Wagner said: “Through the granting of asylum, this nation offers its protection to victims of ethnic, religious, and political persecution from across the world. These defendants made a living out of cynically abusing and subverting the asylum process. That three of these defendants were licensed attorneys, officers of the court who are supposed to uphold the integrity of the process, is particularly offensive. The Department of Justice is committed to the fair administration of the immigration laws, and the sentences imposed today should remind those who participate in the adjudication of immigration cases that those who choose to cheat the system risk their own liberty by doing so.”
“As these sentences make clear, immigration benefit fraud is a serious crime,” said Daniel Lane, assistant special agent in charge for the ICE Office of Homeland Security Investigations in Sacramento. “Benefit fraud schemes like this not only undermine our nation’s legal immigration system, they also pose a potential security threat. Homeland Security Investigations will move aggressively to identify and investigate individuals who exploit and corrupt our immigration system solely to enrich themselves.”
In addition to the prison sentences imposed, several defendants have been ordered to pay financial penalties. Jagprit Sekhon entered into a stipulated money forfeiture judgments of $170,000. Following an extensive forfeiture trial, Judge Damrell ordered Jagdip Sekhon to forfeit $690,590 in ill-gotten gains. Each defendant was also sentenced to three years of supervised release following their release from prison. Parole has been abolished in the federal system, and the defendants will be required to serve at least 85 percent of the prison time imposed today. Rai and Harmath are not U.S. citizens and face deportation proceedings following the service of their sentences.
According to California’s State Bar’s Web site, the State Bar entered interim suspensions against Jagprit Sekhon, Jagdip Sekhon, and Rai on August 31, 2009. On June 17, 2010, Jagdip Sekhon resolved his State Bar charges and agreed to a two-year suspension, which was stayed with an actual nine-month suspension from the practice of law. As part of his actual suspension, he will be required to meet certain conditions before he may resume the practice of law. The Board of Immigration Appeals has barred the defendants from practicing immigration law before the Board.
USCIS and ICE are reviewing hundreds of the asylum cases to determine if they will be reopened.
Prosecution Background
According to the prosecutors, Jagprit Sekhon, Jagdip Sekhon, and Rai are attorneys licensed to practice law in California. The Sekhon brothers were partners in the law firm of Sekhon & Sekhon, which had offices in Sacramento and San Francisco and specialized in immigration cases, particularly the representation of clients seeking asylum. Rai was a senior associate in the law firm. Caza and Harmath were contract interpreters who worked with the firm on asylum claims relating to Romanian clients. According to the evidence at trial, between the late 1990s and late 2004, the defendants filed hundreds of asylum applications with INS (later CIS), on behalf of clients who were primarily Indian and Romanian nationals. They also filed claims on behalf of Fijian and Nepali clients. In order to qualify for asylum status in the United States, an applicant must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in the applicant’s home country on account of the applicant’s race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. The application process includes a written application with supporting documents and an interview with a CIS Asylum Officer. If asylum is not granted by the Asylum Officer, the matter is referred to an administrative immigration court, called the Executive Office for Immigration Review, for a hearing.
The evidence introduced at trial showed that the defendants filed many asylum applications containing fictitious stories of persecution that the clients had supposedly suffered in their home countries on ethnic, religious, or political grounds. The applications were often supported by doctor’s letters, medical certificates, affidavits and other documents that were counterfeit or fraudulent. As a result, scores of Sekhon & Sekhon clients fraudulently obtained lawful status as asylees in the United States. The evidence established that Jagprit and Jagdip Sekhon drafted persecution narratives, which were filed with the asylum application forms that contained harrowing, but fictitious, stories of arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, and rape. Some persecution stories were reused in asylum claims for multiple clients. After filing the claims, the defendants conducted preparation sessions at which they coached their clients to memorize the false stories in preparation for interviews with Asylum Officers and hearings before the immigration court.
Many of the documents filed in support of the bogus asylum claims, including documents that purported to be notarized declarations or doctors’ certificates from Romania and India, were fraudulent, in that they were drafted based on the fictitious asylum story and not based on actual discussions with the purported declarants or doctors. Some documents that appeared to be Romanian declarations notarized in that country had in fact been created in Sacramento using a computer.
The trial evidence showed that many of the Romanian clients of Sekhon & Sekhon traveled to Sacramento from other states, such as Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Michigan, to use the firm’s services. Because these clients resided outside of the jurisdiction of the San Francisco Asylum Office, their applications included false information reflecting that they resided in northern California.
At trial, the prosecution called seven former Sekhon & Sekhon asylum clients – nationals of Romania, India, and Moldova – to testify. They told the jury that they had not suffered persecution in their home countries, and that Jagprit Sekhon had drafted the fictitious stories of persecution filed with CIS. Three of them also testified that they had purchased documents that appeared to be Romanian declarations from Caza.
During the investigation, a Romanian undercover informant, who posed as a prospective client seeking assistance with obtaining legal status in the United States, met with Jagprit Sekhon, Rai, Caza, and Harmath during late 2003 and early 2004. The informant told Jagprit Sekhon and Harmath that he had not suffered persecution in Romania, but Jagprit Sekhon nonetheless drafted and filed an asylum claim that stated that the informant had been repeatedly attacked, arrested, and beaten unconscious by police due to his Baptist religion. Audiotapes of the informant’s initial meeting with Jagprit Sekhon and Harmath, and of his subsequent preparation sessions with those two defendants and with Rai and Caza, were played at trial.
Documents presented to the jury included a large number of items recovered from the home of Caza, including Romanian notary tax stamps found under his mattress, and jpg images of seals for Romanian doctors, notaries, and churches found on floppy discs in his bedroom. Some of those seals were matched to seals on documents filed in connection with asylum claims for Sekhon & Sekhon clients. A forensic document expert testified that some documents submitted to immigration authorities that appeared to bear wet ink Romanian notary seals had in fact been produced using an inkjet printer. ICE Special Agent Carol Webster testified about her analysis of hundreds of Sekhon & Sekhon asylum claims, which established that certain phrases and scenarios were reused in multiple claims.
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