In 2015, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency set up a sting operation at a fake university in Michigan. The plan was to catch foreigners trying to game the immigration system by falsely claiming they were attending school.
In reality, the “school” only existed on paper and students were well aware of that. This past week, ICE arrested 90 more students for immigration violations. That brings the total number of students arrested to 250.
Needless to say, some students were not pleased with being caught cheating.
The U.S. “trapped vulnerable people who just wanted to maintain (legal immigration) status,” Rahul Reddy, a Texas attorney who represented some of the students who were arrested, told the Detroit Free Press on Wednesday.
Many of the arrested students have been deported, but some are contesting their removals.
The students had reportedly arrived legally in the U.S. on student visas and later lost their immigration status after the school was shut down in January, according to the Free Press.
What a crock. These “vulnerable people” knew full well that the school was bogus. Why did they think it was anything else when there were no classes to attend?
Meanwhile, seven of the eight recruiters who were criminally charged with trying to recruit students have pleaded guilty and been sentenced in Detroit. The final defendant will be sentenced in January.
Attorneys for ICE and the Department of Justice said the students should have known it was not a legitimate university because it did not have classes in any sort of physical location, the Free Press reported.
I don’t think those “students” have much chance of resisting deportation, do you?
“Their true intent could not be clearer,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Helms wrote in a memo, per the publication. “While ‘enrolled’ at the university, [100] percent of the foreign citizen students never spent a single second in a classroom.”
“If it were truly about obtaining an education, the university would not have been able to attract anyone, because it had no teachers, classes or educational services,” he added.
Taking down the “recruiters” was a bonus. It’s people like these individuals who enable illegal immigrants. Along with shady businessmen who knowingly hire illegals, the “recruiters” assist those wanting to deliberately circumvent the law.
It’s always a gamble when law enforcement uses techniques like this because it’s relatively easy to be accused of entrapment. But this should be a slam dunk case as the students knowingly gamed the system by claiming to attend a university with no physical plant, no teachers, no classes, and no degrees.
Maybe Harvard should try that.
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