A year after Fabiola crossed the border into the United States, the 33-year-old asylum seeker sent a message to the man she had hired to represent her in immigration court, inquiring about the status of her case.
In response, she received an angry voice message.
“You know very well that I assisted you in your asylum case,” the man snapped in Spanish during the March 2025 recording. “You are a person who is, let me just say, very ungrateful.”
Fabiola, a southern Sarasota County resident who requested Suncoast Searchlight withhold her last name for fear of being targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), listened in disbelief. What kind of legal professional would berate his own client?
As it turned out, “Benjamin Gonzales,” who claimed to specialize in immigration law and boasted of high-level contacts in the U.S. federal government, may not have been a lawyer at all.
In an interview in Spanish, Fabiola later told Suncoast Searchlight that Gonzales never provided the legal services he had promised. Fabiola had no idea who “Gonzales” could even be: Was he based in the United States? In South America? A single person? Or a composite of many false identities and fraudsters? She had no way to find out.
When Suncoast Searchlight called a number associated with Gonzales, a man answered and said he was Gonzales but hung up when a reporter started asking questions about his practice. Questions sent to an email address associated with Gonzales also went unanswered.
Amid President Donald Trump’s broad crackdown on immigration, attorneys warn that scams targeting vulnerable immigrants with promises of quick access to a secure future in the country are on the rise. Some fraudsters advertise their services on social media, while others reach out to potential targets directly, promising unusually fast access to work permits, permanent residence and even citizenship.
Scammers may drain immigrants’ savings, and can even jeopardize their immigration cases by submitting bogus forms or never rendering services at all. Developments in technology, like artificial intelligence “deepfakes,” have made online immigration scams all the more convincing.
According to fraud investigators, such con artists are often elusive.
“It’s a real challenge,” said Chelsea Binns, a fraud expert and associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Because of the nature of the crime, you have really no idea where these people are.”
A single mother, Fabiola left Puebla, Mexico, for the United States in 2024, fleeing her husband who she said physically abused her now 7-year-old daughter. She described her ex as politically connected and said she did not believe the authorities would keep her or her daughter safe from him.
She knew that obtaining legal counsel would be crucial to make a case for asylum; fewer than half of asylum claims are approved, and even fewer succeed without legal representation. Unlike in the criminal courts, the government is not required to provide representation to people arguing their case before an immigration judge. She said she was dismayed when one immigration lawyer quoted her $5,000 to represent her at an initial court appearance.
Having depleted her savings to uproot herself and her daughter, Fabiola, who now works in the construction industry, was already scrambling to cover basic expenses.
“I said, ‘No, I can’t do that,’” Fabiola said about her ability to afford the legal fees. With her boss and a friend from work, she scoured the internet for a lower cost alternative. Then, hope appeared: A Facebook advertisement for an immigration law firm called Migración Latina that was actively taking on new clients, including asylum-seekers like herself.
“We saw that [advertisement], and I sent a request to get some more information,” Fabiola said. “The first thing he said was that he was a ‘prepaid’ lawyer and at a lower cost.”
Unlike at other firms she’d contacted, someone who identified himself as an attorney — “Benjamin Gonzales” — got back to her almost immediately, rapidly explaining the process whereby his firm would seek to expedite her asylum case through relationships he claimed to have with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Fabiola said she found the man, whom she described as having projected intense enthusiasm, “a little strange,” but she proceeded. She forwarded him documents related to her case, including sensitive information about her daughter, and wired him an initial payment of $420. Next, he told her, he would help her get a work permit for an upfront cost of $350.
But Fabiola said she felt something was off. She had still not met Gonzales in person, and he could be overly communicative, sending her text after text on the messaging app WhatsApp. She did not wire him the money.
“‘I can tell you’re dubious about me,’” Fabiola remembered the man telling her during one exchange. As an alleged show of good faith, he offered to take her payment only after helping her with the work permit and said he would try his best to move the process along.
Soon, an official-looking email purportedly from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employee landed in Fabiola’s email inbox. It requested an initial remote interview on March 26 to assess her eligibility for asylum. Fabiola quickly confirmed. On the date of the interview, she kept her daughter home from school to join her for the call.
“I got dressed, cleaned the house — everything,” Fabiola said. “I told myself, ‘I don’t want anything to go wrong.’”
During the interview, she spoke with a person claiming to be a judge who asked questions about her family, her reason for leaving Mexico, and in an odd moment, requested she and her daughter each raise their hand for the camera to capture their fingerprints. Despite some of her hesitations about Gonzales, this seemed real.
“Everything was so perfect,” said Fabiola. “I saw he had the U.S. flag, I saw the courthouse — I didn’t have even the slightest doubt.”
Afterwards, Gonzales told Fabiola the full cost would be $1,500 — more than four times the cost he had initially quoted. If she did not pay within 24 hours, he told her, her asylum case would be terminated, and she could be deported.
Luis Castro, a Bradenton immigration attorney whom Fabiola later contacted for help, told Searchlight that the maximum filing fee for a work permit should be $520.
Victims may be reluctant to report scams
In retrospect, Fabiola said she found the meeting mortifying. The “judge” who interviewed her had asked invasive questions. It was like they were mocking her, Fabiola said.
Binns, the fraud expert, told Suncoast Searchlight that it’s common for people who have been defrauded to experience a high degree of embarrassment, even though “they shouldn’t, you know they did the best [they] could do at the time,” said Binns. “It’s not the victim’s fault.”
Fabiola is far from alone: Unqualified people posing as immigration attorneys have long plagued the immigration court system. In some cases, U.S.-based notaries accept money to file paperwork in bad faith — for example, filing for asylum when a client has been in the country too long to qualify. Because in Latin America “notarios públicos” are professionals with deep legal training, some U.S. notaries — who are not trained as attorneys — have exploited the mistranslation to offer immigrants from those countries services they cannot provide.
In 2011, DHS launched an initiative targeting that kind of fraud. An archived government webpage described its efforts to “stop UPIL [unauthorized practice of immigration law] scams and prosecute those who are responsible; educate immigrants about these scams and how to avoid them; and inform immigrants about the legal immigration process and where to find legitimate legal advice and representation.”
In other cases, like Fabiola’s, scammers posing as immigration attorneys find victims on social media and solicit funds for services they never actually render.
“What we’ve seen more recently is really a shift in what the scams and the frauds look like,” said Adonia Simpson, deputy director of policy and pro bono at the American Bar Association Commission on Immigration. “They’re leveraging social media and technology…we’ve started seeing more instances of more sophisticated frauds, where people receive what seems to be legitimate interview and approval notices from the U.S. government.”
Some of the fraudsters simply disappear with the money, Simpson said. Others may tell the victim they have secured a green card or a work permit, leading immigrants to unwittingly abandon their own immigration cases and end up with deportation orders.
It’s a trap Fabiola said she easily could have been ensnared by. After her fake interview, she looked up an official U.S. Department of Homeland Security number and called, asking to confirm that her work permit had been processed and approved.
“They told me they didn’t even have a work permit application on file,” she said. Furthermore, if she had to pay for anything, she would not have been asked to wire the cash.
Castro, the Bradenton lawyer, said the paperwork these scammers send often uses federal agency logos and “looks legit if you don’t know what you’re looking for,” but on closer inspection has giveaways: misspellings, incorrect capitalization, or the use of Spanish when all U.S. government documents should be in English.
In his office, Castro showed a Searchlight reporter an example of a fake U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services letter that was purportedly signed by an officer named Carlos Enrique Garcia Leighton. The actual signature was a copy of the autograph of late Hollywood Western star John Wayne.
It’s difficult to obtain data on how widespread immigration services scams are or how much money victims have lost. Because undocumented immigrants may fear law enforcement — in Florida, for example, every sheriff’s office in the state is authorized to conduct immigration enforcement through partnerships with ICE — victims may be reluctant to report scams to the authorities.
Fraudsters “are looking for people who are not gonna report that stuff,” said Carlos Verdoni, a detective with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office. “Most immigrants today aren’t gonna call the cops and say, ‘Hey, I’m here illegally, and I’m gonna file a report. That’s just not happening.”
At the same time, Trump’s immigration crackdown and heightened fear among undocumented immigrants in the United States has helped bolster an environment in which immigration services fraud thrives.
The American Bar Association issued an alert in August warning that such scams were on the rise, attributing the trend to “rising enforcement actions” with “bad actors … seeking to take advantage of immigrant communities desperately seeking legal assistance.”
In November, North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson issued a similar notice and urged people to report scams to the state’s fraud hotline, adding that the state would not penalize them or put their immigration case in jeopardy for volunteering information.
“When families look for immigration help, they deserve real answers from real professionals,” Jackson said in a statement. “These scams do the opposite. They mislead people and take their money.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office did not return emails from Suncoast Searchlight requesting information about immigration services fraud in Florida.
Unlike many victims of fraud, Fabiola backed out before she was robbed of her livelihood — or her asylum case. She has a real court appearance in March, and this one she will attend with a legitimate attorney, if she can pull together the $7,000 fee.
“Honestly, I’m frustrated, disappointed, because this wasn’t what I hoped for. I thought this country was one of opportunity and growth and now I see it’s not necessarily like that,” Fabiola said. “At least I realized in time.”
This story was originally published by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom delivering investigative journalism to Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
Editor's note: Suncoast Searchlight says it does not use generative AI in its stories. If you have questions about their policies or content, contact Executive Editor-In-Chief Emily Le Coz at emily@suncoastsearchlight.org.
