Tag Archives: Immigration

News, Observation, Politics

These Afghans Won the Visa Lottery Two Years Ago — Now They’re Stuck in Kabul and Out of Luck

Above: Photo Credit / Amber Clay / Pixabay

President Donald Trump’s ban on the visa lottery was ruled to be illegal, but the government says it can’t help hundreds of Afghans who won it for at least another year.

Fakhruddin Akbari is allowing his full name to be published because he is certain he is going to die. Akbari, his wife and his 3-year-old daughter fled their home in Kabul, Afghanistan, two weeks ago. They’ve been hiding with friends in the city, living on bread and water.

He should be among the lucky ones.

Instead, Akbari fears the very thing he was hoping would be his salvation will now make him a target.

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Two years ago, Akbari won a rare spot in the United States’ “visa lottery.” He was chosen at random from a pool of 23 million to get the chance to apply for one of 55,000 visas to immigrate to the U.S. The U.S. was supposed to have finished his case by last fall. The instructions when he registered promised as much. Either he would be safely en route to the U.S., or he would lose his chance and move on.

But with the final U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan just days away — and as Thursday’s bombings have added even more chaos at Kabul’s airport — Akbari has almost certainly lost his chance to get out.

He has already burned the letters of commendation his relatives received for their work with American contractors or allied militaries. The Taliban already know, he says, that he’s part of a pro-American family. His neighbors have told him they’ve been visited by strangers asking about him.

A March 2020 ban signed by President Donald Trump, citing a need to protect the American economy, prevented Akbari and visa lottery winners from entering the U.S. In response to a lawsuit by immigration lawyers, a federal judge ruled earlier this month that the government has to move ahead on processing thousands of last year’s lottery winners. But the U.S. has told the judge it can’t even start until fall 2022 at the earliest.

Several hundred Afghans are in the group. They may be the unluckiest winners in the visa lottery’s 30-year history.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

The lottery isn’t open to everyone. Winners must come from a country that hasn’t had much recent immigration to the U.S. Applicants for the visas must also submit biometric information, pass an interview and medical screening, and complete several security checks.

Nouman, an Afghan lottery winner who asked that his full name not be used over fear of the Taliban, spent months tracking down police documents from the Chinese town where he’d worked for a few years, to prove he had a clean record.

Those requirements are still far less restrictive than other ways to legally immigrate to the U.S., which generally require being closely related to a citizen or green-card holder or having a job offer from an American company. In Afghanistan, interest in the lottery is so great that Nouman said it took him two days to successfully log onto the swamped website where lottery results were posted.

But unlike other visas, diversity visas — the type lottery winners become eligible to receive — are on a tight and unvarying schedule.

Lottery winners are notified in the early summer. After submitting their full application, they can only be interviewed at the nearest U.S. consulate once the federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1. Then the whole process has to be completed within a year. Eligibility for the visa doesn’t roll over.

Usually, most of the annual 55,000 visas have been handed out by that time. But last year, two things happened. First, in mid-March, consulates around the world shut down because of the pandemic. Two weeks later, Trump declared that letting in immigrants would hamper the recovery of the economy, and he signed the order barring most types of immigrants — including diversity visa holders.

When U.S. embassies and consulates began to reopen last summer, a State Department cable disclosed as part of the lawsuit shows they were instructed to handle diversity visas last, even if they met the narrow exemptions to the ban.

Giving someone a visa is legally distinct from letting them enter the U.S., and critics of Trump’s actions — including a group of lawyers who filed lawsuits over the bans — argued that even if the ban were legal, consulates could still prepare visas so that recipients could come after the ban was rescinded, which President Joe Biden did this February.

In early September last year, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the argument and ordered the government to make up for lost time, prioritizing diversity visa applicants ahead of everyone else for the last 26 days of the fiscal year.

The State Department’s bureaucracy took a few days to get into gear. Then it began a process that turned out to be far from efficient.

Officials compiled a spreadsheet of applicants who had joined the now-consolidated suit and were supposed to be prioritized, but it was riddled with misspelled names and incorrect case numbers. In a court declaration, a State Department official from a different office said the spreadsheet took “many queries” from his team to fix.

Once consulates and embassies got the correct names, they rushed appointments, often giving applicants little notice. The Kabul embassy wasn’t participating at all, so any Afghan appointments were set up in different countries — or continents.

At least three Afghan immigrants, including Nouman, were scheduled for interviews in Cameroon. All three were given one day’s notice to get there. (Nouman, at least, was able to get a later appointment in Islamabad, Pakistan.)

Many more weren’t given interviews at all. According to court filings, some State Department employees told applicants who called the office handling the cases that if they hadn’t officially joined the lawsuit, “you lost your chance” — which wasn’t true. When a COVID-19 outbreak hit the office and workers went remote, the help line shut down entirely.

When the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, 2020, more than 40,000 of the 55,000 diversity visas were still unused — and several hundred Afghans were still waiting. Less than 20% of the Afghan lottery winners had gotten visas by the deadline.

That day, Mehta had ordered the State Department to reserve 9,505 slots, based on his estimate of how many diversity visas could have been processed if COVID-19 had existed but the ban didn’t. When the case finally concluded this month, he declared that the government would indeed have to process those visas.

That opinion came down on Aug. 17, two days after Kabul fell.

In a response filed to Mehta on Thursday, the government offered to start processing last year’s visas in October 2022. One reason given for the proposed delay was that processing older visas is “an unprecedented computing demand that will require the Department to implement wide-ranging hardware and software modifications.” Another was that processing diversity visas would take resources away from dealing with the crisis in Afghanistan.

It went unmentioned that some people are affected by both.

Lawyers for the affected immigrants made an emergency filing this week, with testimony from several Afghans worried that they would be targeted by the Taliban precisely because they had sought to immigrate to the U.S. They’re hoping the court will order expedited consideration for Afghan lottery winners.

The lawyers are moving to appeal for the court to order that Afghans get priority in the visa process. The plaintiffs’ lawyers had asked the government to consent to their filing the request. The government’s response — after several days of silence, delaying the filing — was to call it an “unnecessary distraction.”

In a meeting by phone on Monday, according to two people on the call, another government attorney complained that he’d been getting emails from applicants “all over the world” and blamed their lawyers for posting his address online. One of those emails was a desperate cry for help from Akbari. “We are totally hopeless and every knock of the door seems like a call to death for us,” Akbari wrote. “Please help us.”

In the time since sending that email, Akbari and his family have made two attempts to get to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. The first time, he says, they were beaten back by the Taliban. The second time he was stopped by the United States. The Marines guarding the airport said they couldn’t enter. The reason? They did not have visas.

Originally published on ProPublica by Dara Lind via Creative Commons

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Business, Finance, Observation

How a ProPublica Reporter Learned Scammers’ Secret Sauce

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Adobe Stock

When the federal government enacted the CARES Act in March 2020, it boosted jobless aid and expanded the benefits to include people who weren’t typically covered, like gig workers. The legislation was designed to cushion workers against the massive blow of a partial economic shutdown during the pandemic.

Originally published by ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

But if you haven’t already buried your memories of last year, you probably remember how difficult it was to get those unemployment benefits.

Horror stories circulated about people waiting on hold for weeks, trying to get the money they needed to stay afloat. Maybe you remember spending long hours on the phone or the computer yourself. Delays in unemployment benefits heightened feelings of uncertainty that characterized much of 2020, and made the experience of losing your job even more frightening.

But as Cezary Podkul reported for ProPublica this week, this expansion of benefits also attracted fraudsters from all over the world who sought to cash in on the CARES Act. In hindsight, the millions of phony unemployment insurance claims were a large part of what clogged states’ overtaxed computer systems, delaying payments to unemployed Americans filing legitimate claims.

We don’t have a full accounting yet of how much the fraud will end up costing taxpayers. The federal government says it will be at least tens of billions of dollars, but some experts fear it may end up in the hundreds of billions. And on the micro level, every stolen identity fraudsters use to cash in belongs to a real person. If that person tried to file for unemployment themselves, it could take months for them to convince state agencies they were a real person and receive necessary support.

We talked with Cezary about how he discovered the alternate universe of stolen identities and pseudonymous fraudsters selling how-to kits for scamming state unemployment agencies on the dark web. Here’s an inside look at a massive fraud wave.

I was really curious how you went about finding these online forums where scammers were swapping their trade secrets.

So I started off by reaching out to cybersecurity firms and asking them, “Hey, where are fraudsters trading tips and advice and talking about how to do this?” That pointed me to Telegram [an online messaging app]. I got the names of a few Telegram channels where this was happening, and I started looking at those. And then from there I did my own research and found lots and lots of additional ones; it certainly wasn’t hard, because there’s just so many of them.

Did you have a strategy worked out for how you would reach out to scammers?

To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect, because I have never been to any of these forums. I realized that they’re open, public forums. I’m sure there’s some that are private, or invitation-only. But the ones that we wrote about in our story, anyone who wants to view them or access them can enter them as if you were entering a public square in a city.

There was a big learning experience involved in this in the sense that there was a lot of unfamiliar language to me. It wasn’t as if you could just jump in and know exactly what’s being said. You had to see a lot of the traffic and read a lot of messages before you learned what certain acronyms were.

For example, what does it mean for a state to be “lit”? It’s paying out state claims.

At one point, I came across a message in one of the forums that actually had a dictionary, which was super helpful. That was kind of like the Rosetta Stone, and once I came across the dictionary I could translate a lot of this stuff into plain language.

You quote one scammer’s response in the article that’s just two eye roll emojis. I was so curious what question you asked that prompted that response.

Yeah, the eye roll emoji! So that was the user who we cite in the story named “VerifiedFraud.” He was the admin for one of these channels where there was something like 1,300 participants, and he posted what’s called a “sauce.” Sauce, in the language of these forums, is the secret sauce for filing fake unemployment insurance claims in a particular state. He gave away a free sauce to his channel participants. And I asked him about that: Hey, tell me about the sauce. I noticed that you put it on your forum for participants along with the “new month prayer” wishing them luck.

When I messaged him about that I got the eye roll.

And I guess you told him you were a journalist?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. With all the people that I was contacting, I made it abundantly clear: “Hey, I’m a reporter, I’m writing a story about this. I noticed you said this or that and I wanted to talk to you more about it.” You know, “Tell me more about your ‘Fraud Bible.’ Does it work?”

Did you ever try a sauce to see if it worked? Or send it to a state agency?

No. As a journalist, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing anything illegal.

I did send a bunch of these sauces — the ones that name specific states that were publicly available — to the states. I sent them to Pennsylvania, New York and California, and I asked them for comments. The states declined to comment on the specifics of whether they worked or anything like that. But they did say generally that they’re aware of them, that they’re monitoring these types of messages with their law enforcement partners.

You have this quote from a scammer in the article: “Virtually all these wealthy entrepreneurs you see around 90% of them started with something illegal to make enough money to run their business.” It seems like some of these people consider themselves businesspeople, and they put some work into this. How different is what they’re doing from working an actual job?

There’s probably some people for whom this has become a full-time endeavor, where this is the main way they’re trying to make money right now because of the opportunity that has been opened up.

But there’s certainly people for whom they might have a day job doing something else. For example, one case involved a Nigerian national who ran an online shoe store. He was also accused of participating in a scheme to defraud states of unemployment insurance funds. And I think the total in that case was something like $489,000 across 15 states. [He’s pleaded not guilty to charges in the case.]

So there’s certainly people who do other things, but there’s others who I’m sure have made this sort of their full-time path. I think it does kind of run the gamut.

Did you get a sense of what percentage of people were working from outside the United States?

There’s no way to tell what percentage. But in reading the messages in these Telegram channels, I definitely got the feel that this was a very international crowd, because you do see messages from people, for example, looking to meet up to do deals in Lagos, Nigeria.

The statistic that really put a period on this for me came from one of the cybersecurity firms that we talked with. They said that one state they work with saw unemployment insurance applications coming from nearly 170 countries around the world.

So these are supposedly state residents applying for unemployment insurance, but when you trace the internet traffic, you see this application is coming from … gosh, they had countries all over the world. It was like the United Nations.

Normal people trying to get unemployment checks in the middle of the pandemic were really struggling, waiting on the line for days at a time and getting disconnected when they were trying to get their unemployment checks. Did you get any sense of if and how fraudsters were better at getting unemployment checks than real humans?

One of the things that I think maybe hasn’t been talked about as much is the interplay between this huge wave of fraudulent claims that we saw and legitimate claimants. Because the information technology on which states are running their unemployment insurance systems is, in many cases, very dated.

Like with North Dakota, they had to actually bring in computer programmers from Latvia ​​to help them run their unemployment insurance computer system last year, because it’s so hard to find anyone who can service the technology. It’s been around for decades.

When you’re dealing with very dated technology, it doesn’t scale well. It can’t handle such huge volumes that we were seeing there during the pandemic. So when you had this huge influx of fraudulent claims, I think it did a few things.

One is it definitely slowed down processing of legitimate claims, because you just end up with backlogs of applications that the states are still struggling to get through because there’s so many people who have applied. There are legitimate claimants mixed in with fraudulent claimants and you have to kind of triage those, and figure out which ones are high-risk, which ones look like they’re very likely to be fraudulent, versus which ones are medium-risk and which ones are low-risk — and you put those through.

The other thing that it spikes is the call volumes. When I asked [Texas officials], why was it so hard for an individual that we profiled in the story to get through to Texas, it was just because they had such a massive call volume. There’s so many people calling the fraud line reporting fraud, there’s so many people calling for help, so many people seeking states’ attention, they just become overwhelmed. That has an impact on legitimate claims.

And then finally, you have legitimate claimants who are collecting unemployment insurance payments, and those payments either stop or are frozen because of suspected fraud. So someone else just stole your identity and used it to file a claim in another state, and all of a sudden you might see your benefits stop, which is what happened to Philip Payton, the individual we profiled in our story.

By flooding the system with so many fake claims, not only did fraudsters, in some cases, get away with pocketing those fraudulent payments, it really caused a lot of hardship for legitimate claimants.

The fraudsters are also probably working with the advantage of being able to send out 40 applications to 40 different states, and if they only get paid by 18 and get stuck in backlogs in the others, it doesn’t cost them very much.

Exactly. It basically comes down to a game of numbers.

Let’s say you go onto a dark web forum and you purchase some stolen identities. You pay $50, $70 for a stolen profile of someone. If you’ve got it, then it makes sense for you to file in all the different states where you think it might pay off, to all the different programs, to all the different government benefits you think that individual might be entitled to. If you don’t, you might be leaving money on the table.

One of the most shocking statistics that I came across, just on a micro level, was in one of the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General reports. They mentioned that one person used a single Social Security number to file fake unemployment insurance claims in 40 states, and 29 states paid up. They got something like $222,000.

I think we’re now at that point where we’re starting to realize that this has been a huge problem. And to be fair, it wasn’t just unemployment insurance. You’ve seen our coverage of people creating fake farms in places that wouldn’t even have a farm, like farms on beaches or people claiming they had an orange farm in Minnesota, to apply for PPP loans.

I’ll be curious to see if cybersecurity surrounding these leaks that led to IDs and social security numbers getting out are wrapped up in reform bills too.

If I can put in a plug: If anyone knows where all of the leaked data came from, I would love to talk with anyone who’s got information on that.

One of the terms that you see being used on these telegram chat rooms is the word “fullz.” Fullz is slang for the full suite of personally identifiable information like someone’s name, address, Social Security, driver’s license, the whole thing.

If you’re going to be filling out an unemployment insurance claim form in someone’s name, if you just know their name and their address — okay, that’s one thing. But if you have a full suite of information on a person it just makes it so much easier for you to file a claim that has a significantly higher chance of getting through the system.

So one of the questions that I was asking is: Where did all the fullz come from? This is a question that I became obsessed with in the reporting of this project, and I just couldn’t get a good answer to it. So if anyone reading this has a good answer for that, or a good theory, reach out to me and I’ll be more than happy to talk to you.

by Brooke Stephenson  for ProPublica and published via Creative Commons License

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Observation, Politics

As Trump’s reign of Clown-terror Fades: A look back at the Greatest Ads that helped Biden Win

Video

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

Wisconsin & Arizona Certified results while Georgia Republican Governor says he won’t break the law for his “hero”. The cards are stacking up against the criminal grifter in the WH and not in any way that was “rigged” by anyone but him. 

We are all still waiting for him to recede from the public discourse (haha not discourse in his case) but in the end it is ok to want to congratulate Biden and all of those that helped him win so we can all be rid of the terrorist clown club.

Read More: Trumps Legacy to the Press: a Rare Gift from an Evil Man

Though there are many who do not look fondly on “never-Trumpers” like The Lincoln Project and plain that they had a self-serving agenda, nonetheless, they were a powerful force in countering the Russian-bot army that would possibly otherwise have made 2020 more like 2016. 

And the MeidasTouch, RVAT and others all contributed to the fight with great ads that kept people informed of the dangers of a second term for the maniac, and at the same time used his own words, actions and inactions to prove that he had to go, one way or another. 

Read More: Trump Demands “Proof” of votes: Do 80 Million need to Visit Him at his Residence?

We’ve compiled some of the greatest hits here and think we should all give ourselves permission, one last time, to revel in the absurdity that this man was ever “leader of the free world” and how glad we are that ads like these will soon be in the history books (internet archives).

Trump will only accept victory otherwise election is rigged in Lincoln ad

Trump’s grand entrance emulates Putin during RNC 2020 and Twitter responses explode

Trump’s Cocaine Convention – Don Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle and more Screaming in Lincoln Project Ad

https://youtu.be/YUICRyTCI8M

Get off the Trump Train Wreck this November in MeidasTouch ad

Paranoid. Delusional. Unhinged. Dangerous: Presidential?

Trump says “I will never speak to you again” if loses in new Joe Biden ad

The Proud Boys Can’t Save You
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Politics

ICE Raids and a Xenophobe Named Trump: Sunday, July 14th in the USA

Trump’s Goons Set Loose on Cities Across the Nation: Some ICE raids Currently Underway

As promised, ICE raids are in progress across the country, as announced by the Trump administration and widely reported. 

There have been over 2000 immigrants targeted for arrest in a host of major cities: New York, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco and New Orleans. It appears, possibly as a tactic, that smaller rural communities are also seeing action.

Mayors in some cities have spoken out strongely against the actions, such as New York’s Mayor de Blasio as seen in the above tweet. The Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs added a video to remind those affected of their options under the law. 

The video reminds those targets and any other immigrants that they have the right to refuse to open their doors and do not have to respond, according to the law in New York City, for example. 

According to witnesses in areas already targeted in New York, people appear to be avoiding going out in public and streets are quieter than usual. 

In what was likely not a coincidence, on Saturday, Trump chose to hurl xenophobic insults at Democrat Congresswomen, implying that they are not American and should “go back and help fix” the “places from which they came” :

The tweets, clearly meant for the progressive wing of the Democratic Congress, were not only racist and xenophobic but also, as is sadly, no surprise, wrong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York City, Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit and Massachusetts Congresswoman, Ayanna S. Pressley was born in Cincinnati. Only Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, was born outside the country, in Somalia.

“You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us. You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.

You won’t accept a nation that sees healthcare as a right or education as a #1 priority, especially where we’re the ones fighting for it. Yet here we are.”

– Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in Tweet responding to trump’s tirade

The LA Times reported, in an interview with Melissa Taveras of the Florida Immigrant Commission, based in Miami, that the onset of possible raids was like waiting for a hurricane:

Read More:

“The overall environment is very much like a hurricane: When is it going to come, is it going to hit us, is it going to move north?”

Melissa Taveras , Quoted in the L.A. Times

“The overall environment is very much like a hurricane: When is it going to come, is it going to hit us, is it going to move north?” she said. “We have people in Homestead, Little Havana, Little Haiti — where we know there are concentrations of immigrants — distributing ‘know your rights’ pamphlets. That seems to be effective because we’re already hearing reports of people not opening their doors.”

Her organization was advising families to be sure to have a relative or attorney’s contact information memorized in order to contact them, if detained, and that they need to be sure to give them details of where they are taken, along with full name and birthday, in order to help try and get them released, if arrested. 

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