Since 2022, the number of newly arrived asylum seekers and immigrants in New York has neared 200,000, and Catholic Charities, in addition to helping migrants seek resources, shelter, and find legal assistance in filing their asylum claims, has now also been helping newcomers navigate the rise in immigration fraud.
“In three months, we have seen as many fraud complaints that people are willing to submit that we had in the entire year prior,” Elizabeta Markuci, Esq., the director of Hotline Services, Training and Policy Development for the immigrant and refugee services division of Catholic Charities Community Services, told Documented.
In the past two decades, Catholic Charities has been managing two hotline services for free, safe, and secure legal services for New York immigrants — one for the Department of State’s Office of New Americans and the other for the City of New York’s ActionNYC hotline.
“There’s a lot of misinformation, and there’s a lot of instability in the population, and that is when people are more likely to become victims of fraud,” Markuci said.
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Given the high demand in the need for immigration services, it has been the perfect storm for other people to offer services seeking to defraud, cheat, or take advantage of immigrants and asylum seekers. Markuci explained that she noticed an increase earlier this year in January. “I had expected it would happen just based on the pattern,” she said. “We do get calls throughout the year and so you start to hear examples.”
The immigrant and refugee services division of Catholic Charities Community Services decided then to do a community outreach on Wednesday, July 17, together with the New York State Office of New Americans, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.
At 6 o’clock, the phone started ringing on the 13th floor at 80 Maiden Lane in Manhattan, the office of Catholic Charities in New York. Thirty people — attorneys and trained volunteers and staff of Catholic Charities — were answering calls, helping people learn how to identify and avoid immigration service scams targeting immigrant communities in New York. By 8 o’clock, they had answered the questions of 113 callers in several languages: Spanish, French, Ukrainian, Korean, Chinese, and Haitian Creole.
Markuci explained that recent calls have ranged from people calling to report instances of someone offering to get them to the front of the line to get into court if they pay them $40, to someone approaching them in the shelter to get help for $400 and shortly after they call the hotline services to say the person disappeared. People are also spoofing government agency numbers and sending messages through WhatsApp. “We started to hear these stories, and we were like, Oh, this is going to become worse. And we worked with a lot of our partners,” Markuci said.
Families are often defrauded of amounts as little as $40 to as high as $15,000. According to Catholic Charities, throughout the year, the staff will answer over 100,000 phone calls with the capacity to answer those calls in about 200 different languages. They aim to help immigrants and asylum seekers regarding fraud but also help provide timely information about free, safe, and secure legal services.
Hon. Manuel Castro, the New York City commissioner of Immigrant Affairs, who was present at the phone bank event, said the reality is that when people arrive in New York, they rarely know how complicated immigration law is, and they often trust people that perhaps should not be trusted, because often they speak their language and are from the same nationalities.
Also Read: Scams Pretending To Be Immigration Agencies: How To Protect Yourself
“What we’re seeing is, unfortunately, an increase in this type of fraud, especially on behalf of people who are not allowed to practice law in the United States or in the States, charging money, taking advantage of people’s vulnerable situation,” Castro said.
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Also present at the event were: David Satnarine, the special counsel for Immigrant Affairs at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office; Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, executive director, Catholic Charities of New York; Margaret Martin, co-director, Immigrant and Refugee Services Division, Bill Tipacti, Senior Director of Community Empowerment, Televisa Univision, amongst others.
Over the course of the year, the hotlines to submit fraud complaints will remain open for people to call.
NYS Office of New Americans Immigration Hotline, Monday – Friday from 9-8pm 1 (800)-566-7636 and 212-419-3737.
NYC residents who are seeking immigration services and also have questions about fraud and other matters can call the MOIA Immigration Legal Support Hotline at 1-800-354-0365 between 9AM-6PM, Monday – Friday.
