A top House lawmaker told Attorney General Loretta Lynch Thursday to start revoking bogus asylum cases after the Justice Department admitted it was aware of more than 3,700 applications that were granted despite being part of a massive New York City fraud ring.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, gave Ms. Lynch until the end of August to tell him whether she’ll reopen the cases — something he said should have been done years ago after the FBI busted the fraud ring in 2012.
“DOJ’s refusal to take action in these cases is simply outrageous,” he said, adding that letting asylum-seekers get away with clear fraud gives future applicants an incentive to lie.
The Justice Department has tried to blame bureaucratic red tape, saying it has to wait for Homeland Security officials to raise the fraud cases. Mr. Goodlatte said that was wrong, and the law gives Ms. Lynch and her officers independent authority to reopen the cases.
The Justice Department demurred when asked that question by The Washington Times this week, instead insisting it would wait for Homeland Security.
The New York City ring, which spanned a number of law offices, was so adept at concocting convincing but fake stories for Chinese immigrants that federal investigators dubbed their bust “Operation Fiction Writer.”
The fraudsters would forge documents and make up backstories for the applicants, and coach them on how to game the interviews with asylum officers. Investigators said applicants who claimed to have been forced to have an abortion under China’s one-child policy were even told to watch Chinese soap operas portraying women in that situation as a way of studying how someone in that situation would act.
Asylum applicants also paid for translators who not only helped coach them how to beat the system, but also accompanied them to the official interviews to provide translation — and would shape the applicants’ testimony by failing to translate any inconsistent details, according to federal prosecutors who pursued the criminal cases against the fraud ring.
The situation was so bad that one analyst told The New York Times at the time of the bust that most Chinese asylum cases in New York city were fraudulent.
Despite that mountain of evidence, though, none of the 3,709 asylum cases approved by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) have been reopened.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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