A man living in Chicago who was convicted of running an immigration fraud ring has been handed a two-year prison sentence for arranging hundreds of fake armed robberies so migrants can use the police reports to gain legal visas.
Parth Nayi, 29, was charged with organizing the fake robberies from 2022 to 2024 at small restaurants, convenience stores, and gas stations across Chicago and the suburbs, prosecutors said, according to CWBChicago.
The scam featured migrants claiming to be victims of armed robberies so they can then apply for a U-visa by agreeing to work with the police to catch the supposed robber. The U-visa program was created by an act of Congress in the year 2000 and was intended to help police solve crimes in those migrant communities that often refused to get involved with police investigations for fear of being deported.
Nayi, though, recruited illegal migrants, “with most being of Latin and South American origin,” to pretend to be robbery victims so they could file for the visa protection, according to the report. The migrants would pay Nayi upwards to $10,000 to be part of the scheme.
The scheme was usually carefully orchestrated with the assistance of store employees and the fake robbery was staged so that no one was ever really injured. But one such fake robbery in 2023 resulted in one of the fake robbers accidentally firing his pistol and the bullet struck a store employee in the stomach. The employee survived the gunshot.
Nayi was arrested with prosecutors citing 17 specific fake robberies they said he organized.
The suspect later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit visa fraud and last week U.S. District Judge Mary M. Rowland sentenced him to two years in federal prison and fined him $50,000. Five others were also convicted over the fake robbery visa fraud scheme.
Federal officials have launched similar investigations in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri.
Several of the migrants are part of the extended network of Patel families living in the United States, many illegally, who have been linked to a series of crimes.
In one case, for instance, investigators said in March that Rambhai Patel set up the fake robberies at various establishments in Massachusetts in which the clerk of a business would participate in a fake armed robbery. The clerks would hand the store’s money over to the sham robber, then wait a few minutes before calling the police to give the accomplice time to get away clean. The clerks then falsely told police they were victims of a violent crime and offered to become a witness to help solve the crime.
A recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found that upwards of 416,000 petitions have been filed by migrants and most are simply granted the generous benefits in the program outright whether they actually helped police or not, despite that the program is supposed to only allow 10,000 applications annually.
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