WASHINGTON, DC, United States (CMC) — United States immigration officials yesterday announced they were teaming up with federal and state prosecutors, the government’s commerce watchdog, lawyers and campaigners in a new effort to combat an “epidemic” of bogus immigration lawyers.

The campaign is an effort by the Obama administration to step up one form of assistance to immigrant communities, which have intensified their criticism of the president in the wake of a record pace of deportations to the Caribbean and elsewhere in the last two years.

This is the first-ever coordinated crackdown on fake immigration lawyers by federal and state agencies working together with local immigrant aid organisations, officials said.

Courts officials in New York, California and other regions with major immigrant populations have reported a deluge of cases of immigrants seeking legal resident status through the courts, but ended up in labyrinths leading to deportation because of incompetent or fraudulent lawyers.

“Oftentimes, no documents have been filed for the immigrants, or they have been filed wrong and kicked back,” said Reid Trautz, director of the practice and professionalism centre of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“It is a very good thing that a coalition of agencies is coordinating to take this on,” he added.

The effort involves an advertising campaign to show immigrants how to distinguish bogus from legitimate lawyers and immigration consultants. Prosecutors are also to seek to bring criminal cases to serve as examples.

In addition, the lawyers association would hold clinics to assist immigrant victims of fraudulent lawyers, and would provide training in immigration law for legitimate lawyers in other fields, Trautz said.

The Federal Trade Commission, which oversees business and commerce transactions nationwide, is to gather victims’ complaints in a central database.

A programme by the immigration court system will expand the number of local non-profit organisations trained and certified to provide basic legal services to immigrants.

The federal agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, is leading the initiatives which began as a test programme in New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio and four other cities in January 2010.

Alejandro Mayorkas, a former federal prosecutor in California with a track record for bringing fake immigration lawyers to justice, said it was “heartbreaking” to learn that the problem had not abated when he came to Washington to head the agency.

In New York, Wilmer Rivera Melendez, a Puerto Rican with a criminal record including a conviction for bigamy, coaxed as much US$75,000 each from 14 immigrants from Guyana, claiming he was an immigration lawyer with two decades’ experience, Mayorkas said.

Most of the Guyanese were already in deportation proceedings by the time New York state prosecutors stopped Melendez, Mayorkas said. Rivera was sentenced in January to two years in prison.

Officials hope the campaign will ease the overload in the federal appeals courts, which hear appeals from immigration courts.

The federal court of appeal for the Ninth Circuit, which serves the western US, had seen a surge in immigration cases, with 37,990 cases in the last eight years, said Judge Harry Pregerson.

“So many of these people were represented so poorly by incompetent or disbarred lawyers, or they were snared in the clutches of notaries (consultants popular in Spanish-speaking countries),” he said.

“It’s a huge scam that has disrupted the lives of thousands of families,” he added.