On May 6, just hours before his final asylum hearing, Mario De La Rosa, a Mexican immigrant living in Waukegan, waited in the parking lot of a CVS pharmacy hoping the person representing him in his immigration case, Margaret Carrasco, would arrive. She never did.
Eventually, De La Rosa said, he drove to Carrasco’s home, where she handed him a messy stack of forms, all filled out in English and completely unintelligible to the Spanish-speaking De La Rosa. Carrasco apologized for being too sick to appear in court, De La Rosa recalled. De La Rosa believed her. He had no reason not to.
He felt lucky to work with Carrasco, a bi-lingual immigrant activist in Waukegan. De La Rosa is among clients who say they assumed she was a lawyer thanks to the title she sometimes used: “notario,” a designation that in Mexico conveys nearly the same legal authority as a licensed attorney. Carrasco even allowed clients to pay her $500 fee in installments.
Even if she was sick, Carrasco may have had another, more pressing reason to avoid representing De La Rosa in court: She does not have the proper legal accreditation to do so. On Friday, Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed suit against Carrasco under the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Practices Act, charging her with misrepresenting herself as a lawyer and charging clients “unconscionable fees” for services she did not render. Carrasco could face more than $100,000 in penalties.
Carrasco could not be reached for comment.
Immigration courts have long allowed non-lawyers to represent clients as long as they are registered with the Department of Justice. But state and federal records show Carrasco is neither an approved immigrant representative nor a licensed attorney.
Since 2002, the Attorney General’s Consumer Fraud Bureau has pursued only nine lawsuits against immigration service providers, three of which were filed this year. But Madigan said there has been a significant increase in recent months of consumer fraud complaints coming into her office.
“With the downturn in the economy, people will turn to illegal ways of making money,” Madigan said.
Immigrants always have been vulnerable to fraud, and immigration-rights proponents believe recent changes in federal policy have brought an onslaught of new incidents of people preying on immigrants confused about the new rules.
President Obama’s “prosecutorial discretion” initiative, announced in August, created a working group to review the nearly 300,000 deportation cases currently before immigration courts. The program calls on immigration authorities to suspend or halt proceedings for immigrants who have not been convicted of serious crimes.
Caroline Schoenberger, an immigration attorney at the Chicago Legal Clinic and a former city commissioner of consumer services, has spoken to many clients who are confused about the policy.
“People keep calling about the ‘new law’ and about applying work visas. They think that deportation has been halted completely,” said Schoenberger. Such people are vulnerable to unscrupulous predators who might offer help they cannot deliver, she added.
More than one million people have been deported since President Obama took office three years ago, compared to the 1.57 million people deported during President Bush’s eight years in office. New federal programs such as Secure Communities–which enables local law enforcement to check an individual’s immigration status– have left many people in need of legal assistance.
The notarios publicos scam seems custom-made for such times. In the U.S., a person can become a notary public by filling out simple paper work. To an immigrant, though, the designation may take on far more significance since professionals called “notarios” have considerably more legal agency in Latin America and Eastern Europe than they do in the U.S. When victims hire a “notario publico,” they often assume the person can represent them legally–which is not the case.
“Here, it’s just a person to check the ID of someone who is going to sign a document. People don’t know that,” said Trinidad Hernandez, an immigration counselor at World Relief Chicago, an advocacy group for refugees.
“There are more and more people in removal proceedings,” said Mony Ruiz-Velasco, an attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center who has recently taken on De La Rosa’s case. “People want to hear good news, and legitimate immigration lawyers can’t always give them good news.”
Such scams are not limited to the Hispanic community. Last month, Madigan filed suit against Vytautas Lekarauskas, who faces up to $100,000 in penalties for running an allegedly fraudulent website, usimmigrationsupport.com, that charged $149 for passport applications, $450 for green card applications, and $680 for citizenship applications. Lekarauskas claimed on his website to be a University of Chicago-trained attorney. In fact, he never attended the University of Chicago nor any other law school in the U.S. or abroad, according to the complaint.
The suit against Vytautas was prompted by 11 complaints submitted to the Attorney General, as well as 56 consumer complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau.
The nature of these small, easily mobile business, make them difficult to prosecute. “They set up shop some place and then they’ll disappear,”said Fred Tsao, policy director with the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
The scams often go undetected because the victims are reluctant to seek help from authorities. “They might know where to go but despite the best outreach and assurances by the authorities, simply might not trust them,” said Tsao.
In 2004, the city of Chicago collected $200,000 from a notorious local notary, Antonio Rodriguez Perez, and wrote letters to each of Perez’s victims, explaining how to receive recompense for damages. “Very few people took advantage of it. People were afraid,” said Schoenberger, who as the city’s commissioner of consumer services oversaw prosecution of the case.
In bringing the case against Carrasco, Madigan seems intent on raising public awareness of fraud perpetrated by notaries posing as lawyers. Carrasco is a familiar presence in Waukegan, having served on the Waukegan School Board and acted as a spokesperson for the Waukegan Hispanic Organization. According to her Facebook page, she appears regularly on the radio program, La Campeona, and organizes a local youth soccer league.
Carrasco received a master’s degree in jurisprudence from Loyola University in 2003, a degree that “is specifically not intended to prepare its graduates for the practice of law,” according to the university’s website. But her business card lists several apparently misleading affiliations, including the Chicago Bar Association and American Immigrant Lawyers.
Carrasco has been preying off of the immigrant clientele since 2006, according to the Madigan’s office and immigrant rights groups.
“We had definitely heard of Margaret before,” said Ruiz-Velasco with the National Immigrant Justice Center.
According to the complaint, one of Carrasco’s clients paid $500 up front for her services. But after he made the payment, Carrasco stopped responding to his phone calls and text messages. More than a dozen community members have expressed their concerns about Carrasco’s services at outreach events hosted by Madigan’s office.
De La Rosa first heard about Carrasco from a friend after he was pulled over by police for a traffic violation–then turned over to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities. According to De La Rosa, the friend who made the referral said she paid $5,000 for Carrasco to represent her husband in his deportation proceedings. The friend could not be reached for comment.
De La Rosa is the sole financial provider for his stepson Alejandro, who has cerebral palsy. He will have his case retried. “I’m grateful I have another chance,” he said.