Todd Bensman

This voice-cracking cry to save Venezuelans from earthquake chaos is gaining traction, though the administration has resisted demands to restore TPS. But the argument is an easily debunked false dilemma based on inaccurate premises. The truth is that most of the deportable Venezuelans need not be shipped anywhere near the smoking rubble of shaken Caracas.

The Trump administration must target and imprison average individual fraudsters. •

Praise is due to a recent Trump administration push to nail immigration lawyers for the broadly undeterred crime of running mass asylum fraud schemes, which have let huge volumes of ineligible illegal aliens into the country.The asylum system has long acted as a powerful magnet for aspiring illegal border crossers and visa overstayers, because, until President Donald Trump sharply curtailed its use, merely claiming asylum verbally allowed millions of ineligible foreigners into the country almost indefinitely.But targeting lawyers with fines is more of a beginning than a finish. To prevent the next mass migration crisis, we need the whole world to feel real asylum fraud deterrence. That means the Trump Department of Justice, headed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, must prosecute and imprison individual claimants, known in the business as “single scope” cases. These would be just the average foreign economic migrants who, perhaps coached online or by friends and relatives, lied under oath on U.S. government forms, to federal agents, and to immigration court judges, claiming that they suffered asylum-eligible government persecution back home.Claiming government persecution that never happened to gain asylum and its attendant public welfare and work authorization is a prosecutable felony crime.The problem is that appointed U.S. Attorneys in all 94 offices have never wanted, and won’t take, such cases unless told to. The time for that is now.Acting A.G. Blanche should appoint a “Special Attorney” (under 28 USC 543) to elevate asylum fraud prosecutions against individual aliens to a high-tier priority nationwide and within Department of Homeland Security component agencies. They won’t want to do it because presidentially appointed U.S. Attorneys don’t regard busting individual aliens for criminal asylum-lying as worth the squeeze, so they decline most criminal referrals that come their way. That roadblock in turn disincentivizes investigations by the responsible agencies: ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS). After all, why would any HSI or FDNS agent bother investigating crimes they know prosecutors will ignore?This (somewhat dated) December 2015 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report details how the processing blockage serves non-lawyer individuals who commit asylum fraud.According to the report, U.S. Attorneys had long preferred to see individual suspects of asylum fraud “not generally criminally prosecuted.” In turn, the agents of HSI “felt constrained because…prosecuting asylum fraud is a low priority for the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”Until very recently, FDNS could not directly refer their own fraud cases to U.S. Attorneys; the old policy required them to ask HSI agents to do it for them. HSI would reject FDNS cases, which, in turn, dampened FDNS interest in originating investigations. It’s a vicious, feckless circle.FDNS officers in six of eight asylum offices, the GAO report stated, reported that HSI declined their case referrals and, for those the agency did accept, would close them without further investigation. As a result, half of the eight FDNS offices referred either zero or only one fraud case to HSI from 2010 to 2014.One HSI office had not accepted an FDNS referral in two years because the area’s U.S. Attorney’s Office would only accept asylum fraud referrals involving at least 100 asylum applications, a circumstance that provides for sentencing enhancements, the report stated, which prosecutors love. Another asylum office reported that its U.S. Attorney had accepted no asylum fraud referrals in five years.“Because HSI does not prioritize investigations of single instances of asylum fraud, FDNS immigration officers we interviewed in seven of the eight asylum offices stated they generally do not submit single-scope cases…” the report stated.Skill atrophy was another cost. A 2008 GAO survey of all the nation’s then-256 asylum officers and 56 supervisors in the nation’s eight USCIS division field offices found the majority felt themselves ill-trained to detect fraud or assess the credibility of asylum seekers. Seventy percent confessed they found it moderately or very difficult to identify document fraud and could not assess credibility in more than half the cases they adjudicated.While these reports have aged, sources inside FDNS and USCIS told me recently that nothing has changed in the nearly 10 years since, despite the unprecedented mass border crossings of 10 million foreign nationals and a related surge in asylum claims from 172,000 in 2019 to 860,000 in 2024. A great many of those were no doubt filed by people encouraged by the knowledge that they would face no consequence for lying.This must be fixed.An appointed Special Attorney must require the 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices to understand that single-scope asylum fraud cases are far more valuable as crucial fraud deterrents than previously thought, and must accept some in every judicial district each year. Almost as important is that every one of these cases gets publicized and broadcast around the globe.That’s because the world of aspiring immigrant wrong-doers pays almost obsessive attention to all immigration-related enforcement in the United States and will alter its behavior if prison time for regular people becomes a possibility. It’s notable that last September, the Trump administration gave its FDNS agents guns and investigative referral authority that bypasses HSI. A whole new corps of officers is now geared up to refer individual asylum fraud cases to – hopefully willing – prosecutors. And they should get orders to be willing.At stake is no less than another mass-migration border crisis that voters have already said, loud and clear in the last national election, they don’t want.***Todd Bensman is a Senior Research Fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center. He recently joined Heritage following an appointment as Senior Adviser to DHS, ICE, and Border Czar Tom Homan.

The close timing of two high-casualty earthquakes in Venezuela on June 24 and a June 25 Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump Administration to deport some 605,000 US-based Venezuelans has given ris