Four law enforcement officials in Louisiana and the businessman who paid them have pleaded guilty in federal court to manufacturing armed robberies that never happened so that foreign nationals could apply for U visas as crime victims. Roughly 300 of them got visas. Please use your position to bring this program to an end.

There is no version of the U visa that works. Its central safeguard is a certification signed by a police officer, and in Louisiana that signature carried a price of $5,000. Federal agents did not learn any of this from the certification process. They learned it when immigration officers noticed a rural parish generating armed robbery reports it had no business generating. A separate ring in Massachusetts staged store holdups for the same purpose, with the “victims” waiting five minutes before calling police so the “robber” could get away.

More than 416,000 petitions now sit in a queue built for 10,000 a year, and each one carries deportation protection while it waits. Prosecutors will keep reaching the people who get caught. That is not a substitute for closing the program, and closing it is the Senate’s work, not a prosecutor’s.

Please make ending the U visa a priority. Real crime victims deserve a system that is not being run as a business.

Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA

Sent to:
Alex Padilla, Adam Schiff