Bad Samaritans | Part 4

Part 4. A CRISIS OF FRAUD AND PERJURY

One of the hardest truths to face about our ongoing border crisis is that it is very largely a crisis of fraud and perjury, being perpetrated by those who would not qualify for asylum under US law if they told the truth about their personal history and motives for migration. A large number of asylum claims – possibly the majority, at this point – are based on lies told under oath, an action forbidden in all circumstances by both Catholic doctrine and American law. 

Under US law, “asylum” is a specific legal category with criteria that would include some persons but exclude others. It is not a broad and indefinite invitation made to every victim of misfortune or injustice in the world – something no government could realistically sustain. 

Asylum is only legally available for those who fear persecution in their country of origin based on any of five criteria: race, religion, nationality, political beliefs, or membership in a particular social group. 

Interviews to establish these facts are conducted under oath, as a form of sworn testimony. To lie in one’s asylum interview, therefore, is perjury – a felony under federal law, and a grave sin in the eyes of God. 

The same legal and moral “penalty of perjury” also applies to the Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal.

We cannot know the precise extent of asylum fraud, but it is very common and may account for most of the claims that are currently overwhelming and crashing the US immigration system. Specific estimates of such fraud will be discussed later in this section, along with other evidence that has led experts to conclude that a large percentage of “asylum seekers” are not legally eligible for the protection they seek.  

This political problem has a definite – even primary – religious aspect.

In the teaching of the Catholic Church, perjury is principally a sin directly against God Himself, whose name is being falsely invoked in the service of a lie.

In the words of the Catechism: “Taking an oath or swearing is to take God as witness to what one affirms. It is to invoke the divine truthfulness as a pledge of one’s own truthfulness … A false oath calls on God to be witness to a lie.”

Without exception, the Church teaches that testifying falsely under oath is always a serious sin against both God and man. It is radically opposed to the state of grace in this world and eternal life in the next. It is never justified by any circumstance. 

On the human level, false asylum claims are especially immoral because they detract from legitimate claims, made by those who actually face persecution based on the legal criteria.

Fraudulent claims clog up an already overburdened adjudication system – while also turning the public against the very notion of asylum, by making it appear as a large-scale scam rather than a genuine legal and moral right. 

Today’s overwhelming abuse of the asylum system began with a 2010 decision by the Obama administration, to allow most illegal immigrants who passed an initial “credible fear” screening to receive parole and live freely in the US – rather than remaining in federal custody – while waiting for a hearing on their asylum claims. 

As the legal expert and former immigration judge Andrew Arthur has recounted, this change in policy initially met little resistance, especially since only about 5,000 illegal immigrants had claimed a fear of persecution in 2009 before the rule change. “Nobody challenged this at the time because nobody really thought that it was a big deal. Well, it turned out to be a big deal,” he said in a 2022 panel presentation. 

According to Arthur, this 2010 decision would eventually lead to the wholesale hijacking of the asylum system, by vastly larger numbers of people without valid claims.  

Crucially, it often does not matter whether these individuals are legally granted asylum in the end. The process of adjudicating their claims can take several years to reach a final resolution in the overburdened immigration courts, but in the meantime they can apply for permission to legally work in the US after only 180 days. 

After exploiting this option, they may stop showing up for court dates and find employment by illegal means, on the safe assumption that their arrest and removal will not be a “priority” for the Biden-Harris administration. 

So while some asylum fraudsters are determined to sell a judge on their false story and obtain full legal status, others will simply initiate the asylum process as a means to be released into the US, before disappearing into the country’s vast illegal immigrant population. 

What percentage of asylum claims are false? One internal study by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) – which was discussed in a 2014 congressional hearing, and later cited by the Supreme Court – found either definite fraud or evidence of fraud in a combined 70% of cases. 

This often-cited figure seems to be the only publicly available official estimate of asylum fraud, a problem the US government has acknowledged it cannot reliably detect. 

In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated that “the vast majority of the current asylum claims are not valid. For the last five years, only 20 percent of claims have been found to be meritorious after a hearing before an immigration judge. In addition, roughly fifteen percent are found invalid by USCIS as a part of their initial credible fear screening.” 

Chad Wolf, who served as acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, gave a higher estimate in a 2021 podcast.

Based on his experience at DHS, Wolf believes only 10% of asylum claims are legitimate. 

Even under the Biden-Harris administration, it has been acknowledged – though far more quietly – that false asylum claims are a system-wide problem. In a 2023 court filing, attorneys for the federal government stated that “immigration fraud, including asylum fraud, is endemic.” 

This Biden-era filing cited “the overwhelming load of fraudulent applications” for asylum, which creates “a backlog and delays for those vulnerable applicants who truly deserve the relief asylum provides, and unfortunately causes [Citizenship and Immigration Services] to view each asylum application – including for those who legitimately deserve such relief – with a more skeptical eye.”

The problem of asylum fraud has been acknowledged even by liberal media outlets. The New York Times reported on the problem in 2011 (“Immigrants May Be Fed False Stories to Bolster Asylum Pleas”) and 2014 (“Asylum Fraud in Chinatown: An Industry of Lies”). The 2011 piece quoted an immigration judge who stated that “fraud in immigration asylum is a huge issue and a major problem.” 

Further, a Manhattan immigration lawyer told the Times: “When there’s a problem anywhere, a horrible slaughter in Somalia, wherever, the first couple of years of those cases are very real … Then the next four or five years, they just mimic those stories.” In an informal and anecdotal way, this supports the conclusion that false claims now significantly outnumber truthful ones. 

Separately, the solidly leftist New Yorker magazine acknowledged “the prevalence of [asylum] fraud” in a 2011 profile of an African woman who was in the process of committing it:

“Now she was working on a story – a four-page document, in French, that she would give to a lawyer she had hired, and to immigration officials – saying that she was beaten and raped more than once by government soldiers in her country. ‘I have never been raped,’ she admitted [to the New Yorker].”

The subject of this magazine profile “knew people who really had been raped; she had heard their stories. But she believed that she was far from being the only asylum seeker at the torture survivors’ center who was lying or exaggerating. ‘Everybody’s story is a mixture of what is true and what is not,’ she said.” The article ends with the woman’s false asylum claim being granted. 

Likewise, journalist Todd Bensman has recounted his experiences with countless “asylum seekers” who would not be sharing their real stories and motives with American officials under oath. 

“In recent years, I’ve interviewed probably hundreds of Haitians en route to the American border to claim asylum on grounds that they can’t return to Haiti’s government and criminal gang persecution. But I’ve never met a Haitian actually coming from Haiti,” he wrote in an article summarizing his findings. “All of them had been living comfortably and securely in Chile and Brazil for four, five, and six years.”

“They discard their Chilean and Brazilian identification documents all over the riverbanks of the Rio Grande, where I find them. They toss these because they are evidence of asylum ineligibility, proving they were living safely for years in those two prosperous South American nations.”

“I find such discarded passports from countries all over the world, foretelling that their bearers planned to cover their ineligibility tracks and provide fake or altered names to American interviewers. Fraud.”

One of these Haitians was especially candid with Bensman:

“Asked how four years of life in [Chile’s capital] Santiago, where he’d worked as a baker and Uber Eats driver, compared to the Haiti they’d left years ago, the probable future U.S. asylum claimant promptly answered: ‘A thousand times better.’”

“Then why come to the United States border now, when his life in Chile was so peaceful and non-threatening? ‘Because,’ he said, chuckling, ‘life in the United States will be a million times better.’”

One may sympathize with such hopes – but the mere search for a “better life”  has absolutely nothing to do with the fear of persecution that is the basis for US asylum law. 

Bensman also spoke to residents of a Guatemalan village, who acknowledged that their family members were using the US asylum system for economic gain rather than to flee persecution.

The hard truth must be faced: we have a system-wide problem of illegal immigrants who are willing to swear falsely before God to obtain a legal benefit they do not deserve.

Their fraud is not only a grave offense against God, but may also cause legitimate claims to languish in the overburdened court system. The problem is serious in every way.

Does President Biden take this problem seriously? 

Does Vice President Harris?

In contrast with the Trump administration – which addressed the issue clearly and directly – our research found no instance of Biden or Harris mentioning asylum fraud in a speech, press conference, press release, or executive order. 

On the contrary, one of Biden’s most consequential moves was to end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, which had effectively discouraged many false asylum applications by requiring claimants to wait outside the US while their cases were pending. By ending this policy, Biden re-created the “catch-and-release” problem of false asylum seekers gaming the system to live and work in the US. 

Biden also ended several Trump-era “safe third country” agreements, which were meant to deter false asylum applications by requiring migrants to apply for the benefit in countries other than the highly-coveted US.

Our research indicates that Biden’s Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted individuals for asylum fraud in only two cases, for which a total of seven people were sentenced. Ironically, it was in one of these cases that federal attorneys made the filing that acknowledged “endemic” fraud – making this tiny number of prosecutions all the less impressive. 

Simultaneously, the Biden-Harris administration also moved to have asylum claims heard by a lower grade of federal officials, in a process critics said would remove safeguards against fraud. Todd Bensman described this move – transferring power from judges to “asylum officers” – as creating a “mass asylum fraud rubber stamp operation” by federal rulemaking. 

Perhaps the most charitable reading of these actions would be that Biden and Harris want to err on the side of letting every possible asylum claimant “access our legal system” – even if this means a vast number of false claims are pursued, making the system non-functional, while successful fraud generates a feedback loop with multiplying numbers of future false claimants. 

Such a policy would be extremely imprudent, especially since the US is hardly the only country in which legitimate asylum seekers can find refuge from persecution. Indeed, many of these honest claimants – as opposed to economically motivated fraudsters – might be better served by receiving asylum in a country that is culturally and geographically closer to their homeland, as long as they will not be persecuted there. 

Meanwhile, it is seriously questionable whether any amount of attention to supposed “root causes,” in the manner of Vice President Harris, will deter those willing to commit perjury and risk their souls for a life that is “a million times better” and not just “a thousand.”

Political correctness aside, a better deterrent for “endemic” false claims would be to punish them in accordance with their seriousness, and make this punishment internationally known. This has clearly not been the way under Biden and Harris, and the poor results of their “root causes strategy” are apparent. 

At any rate, governments can never afford to operate blindly on good intentions while ignoring the real-world impact of imprudent policies. A reckless humanitarianism is no real virtue – it is the way of the “Bad Samaritan,” eventually doing more harm than good.

However, we must also ask: what if misguided sympathy is not the fundamental reason for America’s border crisis? 

There is another interpretation of these events – which is not so charitable, but remains plausible and cannot be ruled out. 

This is the theory that America’s overrun border and swamped immigration system are a feature – not a bug – from the standpoint of Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party, for reasons of long-term electoral advantage.  

This report will not take a position on that question. Yet the growing suspicion is a problem in its own right – and for that reason, we will conclude by considering this growing question of possible corruption, through the lens of Catholic teaching.

Part 5: Coming August 30, 2024 

About the Author: Benjamin Mann is a Byzantine Catholic and has written for several publications including Catholic News Agency, Catholic Exchange, and Real Clear Religion.

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