'Fake Cubans' Visa Fraud Trend Growing, Says US Immigration And Customs

Pretending to be Cuban can put some immigrants on the fast track to green cards and citizenship. They've just got to have the documents to prove it. CNN reported late last week that an official with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations told them a growing trend in visa fraud begins with the purchase of a fake Cuban birth certificate. For $10,000-$20,000, "fake Cubans" hailing from countries all over the hemisphere can find themselves on the fast track to permanent residency and citizenship. All they've got to do is "act Cuban" when interviewed by immigration officials.

In 1966, U.S. Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, a piece of legislation allowing Cuban immigrants to seek permanent residency after being in the United States only a year. They're put on that path as soon as they set foot on U.S. soil, at which point they're automatically granted refugee status. The incentives for committing fraud are enticing -- huge demand and a relatively tiny, capped number of visas handed out by the US has created a backlog by which many immigrants languish for decades before seeing their permanent residency requests awarded.

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Cuba still uses paper birth certificates in its record-keeping, not computerized ones. Some cases of fraud have been carried out by taking bundles of actual, blank Cuban birth certificate forms, then simply filling them out by hand for clients in the US - just as it's done by official Cuban registries.

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Alysa Erichs, a special agent in charge of the USCIS office in Miami, told the network that those directing the scam often coach their clients on how to field questions from suspicious immigrations officials. In one case, she says, the person selling the fake documents instructed the buyer to "get really sunburned" before they would then drop him off in the sea. The plan was to have someone rescue them, at which point the fake Cuban would say they'd launched from Cuba on a raft which had sunk along the way.

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Fidel Morejon Vega, a longtime leader of a "fake Cuban" visa fraud ring who is currently serving 33 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit immigration fraud, was taped by an undercover officer giving instructions on what to tell immigration officials who asked why he had a Mexican accent. "Because I work with a lot of Mexicans," Morejon Vega advised the undercover agent to say, "and I caught it."

Operation Havana Gateway, an initiative launched by the USCIS in conjunction with several other agencies in August 2012, has netted 40 arrests. Agents are reviewing cases from as far back as five years. Whereas in the past, they were processed rapidly, Erichs told CNN, "now they are all scrutinized."