ICE Attorneys: Foreign Students at Fake College "Victims of Fraud"

Rich Schapiro, NBC News, Mar. 27, 2022

"[T]he University of Northern New Jersey wasn’t a real school.  The university was an elaborate ruse set up by the Department of Homeland Security to lure brokers and recruiters suspected of engaging in student visa fraud. ... A group of students filed a federal lawsuit alleging that they were collateral damage in the sting, duped by both the brokers and the undercover agents who posed as university officials. As the case played out, government lawyers struggled to keep their stories about the students straight — saying in one hearing that they were, in fact, “victims of fraud,” then filing court papers that walked back the statement. The sting resulted in little in the way of punishment for the brokers, all of whom pleaded guilty. None received prison sentences; more than half were sentenced to a year of probation. The students, meanwhile, had their lives upended. Though none were criminally charged, they lost thousands of dollars in “tuition” or broker fees and suddenly faced the threat of deportation, according to court documents. ... Federal immigration authorities fought the lawsuit for years but ultimately agreed to settle in a deal granted by the court in January. ... Lawyers for UNNJ students filed the class-action lawsuit in March 2017. The suit was initially dismissed by a lower court, but it was revived by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In its 23-page ruling, the court noted that during oral arguments in September 2018, government lawyers said for the first time that their position was not that the students had committed fraud. “Rather, the government believed that the students were the victims of fraud,” the ruling said. “The government twice stated that the students ‘were caught up in it in the sense that they were victim by the academic recruiters’ and that ‘[t]here was no fraud here. These students, as far as we are concerned, were the victims of fraud.’”