'I wrote so many ridiculous cases' - Tales from the asylum mills
Thu, Oct 4th 2018 @ 2:02 pm EDT by Jeremy Beck
NPR's Ailsa Chang has a wild story about a man who found his American dream writing fictional stories for asylum applicants. Years after being caught, he is in hiding from the FBI but sharing some of his best work with NPR over Skype.
Chang's story acts as a sequel to "Asylum Fraud in Chinatown: An Industry of Lies" (New York Times, 2014). When Times reporters Kirk Semple, Joseph Goldstein and Jeffrey E. Singer left off, the Obama administration had just cracked down on multiple law firms in New York City that specialized in fraudulent asylum claims -- one of "the most common forms of immigration fraud" in the U.S. Several lawyers (along with others involved in the fraud) were prosecuted, but none of the asylum applicants who submitted the false claims. At the time, the number of fraudulent submissions was unknown (the Times put it in the "hundreds.").
https://www.numbersusa.com/blog/i-wrote-so-many-ridiculous-cases-tales-asylum-mills
