Enforcement officers answer to layers of oversight. Immigration attorneys, however, can also wreck lives — and the public deserves to know how often misconduct is actually punished.
As a deportation officer who managed cases from beginning to end, I followed them through custody determinations, immigration court, appeals, travel-document requests, and ultimately the flight home. We worked those cases on the merits alone: not race, nationality, religion, or politics. What did the file say, and what did the law allow?
A rule that exists only on paper is not much of a safeguard.
Anyone who works in immigration enforcement answers for their actions because the system is watched constantly by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Professional Responsibility, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, detention inspections, congressional oversight, federal litigation, and a press corps that often publishes before cases are closed.
I have never objected to this scrutiny. Enforcement power is serious, and it should be examined rigorously — even under oath.
What I do not understand is why the examination so often seems to stop at the government’s side of the table.
On the other side sits a disciplinary regime that is hardly weak on paper. Federal regulations subject immigration practitioners to discipline for grossly excessive fees, solicitation through runners for financial gain, frivolous filings, false statements, and other misconduct. A lawyer’s signature on a filing certifies that he has read it, made a reasonable inquiry, and has a basis in fact and law.
In other words, the rules already recognize the problem.
And the misconduct is not hypothetical.
In Illinois, immigration attorney Robert DeKelaita was convicted by a federal jury of conspiracy to commit asylum fraud, making false statements in asylum applications, and procuring perjury during asylum interviews. Federal prosecutors said applications filed through his firm contained fabricated accounts of rape, murder, torture, kidnapping, and bombing. Some clients obtained asylum, lawful permanent residence, and eventually citizenship based on those lies.
In New York, a Queens immigration attorney received five years in federal prison after submitting more than 100 asylum applications containing false persecution narratives, criminal histories, and travel histories. Prosecutors said she invented stories, forged clients’ signatures, and falsely notarized affidavits.
In Georgia, an attorney went to federal prison after filing false documents in employment-based immigration matters, surrendering her law license, and forfeiting $100,000 in fees.
These are the spectacular cases. The quieter misconduct may be more common and, for individual families, just as destructive.
Illinois disciplinary records describe an attorney who allowed nonlawyer office managers to practice law out of his firm, failed to diligently represent immigration clients, withdrew from others without adequately protecting them, and failed to return tens of thousands of dollars in unearned fees.
That does not make national news. But for the client who handed over savings, it can be devastating.
An enforcement officer has two reasons to care.
First, every fabricated claim consumes real resources: an adjudicator, a docket slot, government-attorney preparation time, and often years of delay. Fraud also poisons the well for the applicant behind it who is telling the truth. When adjudicators repeatedly encounter manufactured versions of the same persecution story, the genuine claimant has a harder road.
Second, I have watched families pay lawyers for cases that were dead on arrival, then get billed again at every continuance while the years ran out. Immigration law is complicated enough without desperate clients being sold false hope.
The point is not that immigration lawyers are uniquely corrupt. Most are not. Nor is it that government officers deserve less oversight — they do not.
If ICE officers are properly subjected to inspectors general, professional-responsibility offices, civil-rights review, congressional oversight, litigation, and press scrutiny, then the lawyers whose conduct can determine whether a family loses its savings, whether a false asylum claim enters the system, or whether a genuine claimant waits longer should face meaningful accountability too.
There is a straightforward way to begin measuring that accountability.
How many practitioner complaints does the Executive Office for Immigration Review receive each year? How many are substantiated? How many end in discipline, suspension, or disbarment before immigration courts? How long does the process take?
Those are not classified questions — they are basic oversight questions.
If the numbers show a functioning disciplinary system, publish them and let the public see it. If they show a large gap between complaints and consequences, Congress should ask why.
A rule that exists only on paper is not much of a safeguard.
Immigration enforcement deserves scrutiny because government power can ruin lives when abused. Immigration representation deserves scrutiny for the same reason.
Scott Mechkowski is a visiting fellow at the Oversight Project and a former deputy director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security.
