When Chicago’s violent crime surged in the post-COVID years, many liberals had a ready scapegoat: “lax” gun laws next door in Indiana. They refused to listen to, much less consider, alternative explanations. (At times, quite literally — Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) twice cut off one of the authors mid-sentence during a December 2021 Senate Judiciary Committee field hearing on Chicago crime.)

It was crystal clear at the time that Chicago’s gun violence wasn’t Indiana’s fault. Many of the city’s problems traced back to the refusal of its Soros-supported, progressive district attorney, the infamous Kim Foxx, to prosecute criminals. Now it turns out many of the city’s violent crimes weren’t even real. They were staged and paid for by illegal aliens as part of a rampant immigration fraud scheme made easier by Illinois’ sanctuary policies, which were designed to protect illegal immigrants and obstruct federal law enforcement.

In a stunning story that has apparently flown under the national radar, a federal judge just sentenced an Indian national to two years in prison for orchestrating hundreds of staged armed robberies at coffee shops, restaurants, liquor stores, and gas stations between 2022 and 2024. Many of these fake crimes occurred in Chicago and its suburbs. They were a fraudulent magic trick to transform illegal aliens into lawful residents with the wave of a wand (well, a gun, really). Thousands of illegal aliens paid $5,000 to $30,000 apiece to be “robbed” and transformed into “victims,” making them eligible to apply for U visas, an immigration benefit reserved for crime victims who assist law enforcement.

So how much of Chicago’s violent crime was performative immigration fraud paperwork? Nobody can say. That’s part of the problem.

Congress created the U visa in 2000 with a laudable goal. Illegal aliens who are victims of serious crimes, including human trafficking, may be reluctant to cooperate with investigators for fear of being deported, to the detriment of public safety. The U visa offers temporary legal status, work authorization, and deferred deportation for up to four years in exchange for helping identify and prosecute violent criminals. It also provides a rare pathway to citizenship by allowing aliens to apply for a “Green Card” after three years. Federal law caps direct U visas at 10,000 a year, but there’s no limit on derivative visas for family members.

To qualify, a local police department or prosecutor has to certify that the applicant was a crime victim and has been (or is likely to be) helpful in apprehending and prosecuting the perpetrator. Unfortunately, many of these local gatekeepers of U visa certification show little interest in crowd control at the entrance. Some sanctuary states have intentionally removed any capacity for local officials to filter applicants at all.

Illinois is particularly aggressive. The state requires police officers to automatically provide certifications for all apparent “victims” regardless of whether they cooperate in prosecutions.

Sadly, the Chicago scheme is no outlier. Consider other similar plots uncovered in recent years:

Investigators in Kansas City tied 11 armed robberies over 26 months to a U visa fraud scheme run by Mexican nationals. At least 18 of the 33 identified “victims” filed U visa applications, though a source said the scheme involved “well over 100” purported victims.

A federal grand jury indicted three current and former Louisiana police chiefs for taking bribes to fabricate police reports in a decade-long scheme involving at least 800 fake “victims” seeking U visas. Louisiana’s crime data between 2015 and 2025 is almost certainly skewed by hundreds of phantom violent robberies.

Federal prosecutors in Massachusetts charged 11 Indian nationals (all illegal aliens) in a U visa fraud conspiracy. The indictment alleges they staged at least 18 armed robberies across four states in less than a year — including six fake robberies at Massachusetts convenience stores in a single month.

These robberies and their victims may be fake, but their consequences are sometimes very real.

In January 2024, an armed bystander fatally shot a gun-wielding man during what he reasonably believed was a genuine armed robbery at a Houston gas station. It wasn’t. It was one of at least three staged robberies police now know the dead man took part in. Four of the five fake “victims” in those cases obtained U visas. The only real victim was the armed bystander, whom prosecutors — adding insult to traumatic injury — referred to a grand jury on weapons charges.

More shocking than the scale of U visa abuse is how much the federal government doesn’t know about it. U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) doesn’t even track what happens to its own fraud referrals (and rejected the DHS inspector general’s 2022 recommendation that it do so). In 2016, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) tried to get answers from USCIS, to little avail. In 2018, the agency’s own fraud officers reported “grave concerns” about the reliability of police certifications.

Some percentage of U visa applicants are, undoubtedly, true crime victims. But the visa program, with a processing backlog of more than 200,000 applications, is bloated with fraud and abused for corrupt purposes. It’s time for serious reform.

First, USCIS should publish data on U visa revocations for fraud by year, state, and the law enforcement agency that certified the “victim.” Congress should demand that data — or demand answers if USCIS can’t produce it.

Second, U visa fraudsters need to face certain, swift, and severe sanctions that meaningfully deter others. Every fraudulent “victim” must have their U visa status immediately revoked, along with family members’ derivative visas, then be swiftly deported, and permanently barred from re-entry. Those who stage the crimes should face not just the full weight of criminal law, but also charges for participating in criminal enterprises in violation of federal civil racketeering laws. Moreover, in our view, the fact that a judge gave the Indian national who organized hundreds of these fake robberies in Chicago only two years in prison is not “the full weight of the criminal law.”

Finally, Congress should strip certification authority from local officials who refuse to guard the gate. It should either limit certifications to federal officials or require local law enforcement to send certifications directly to USCIS instead of handing them to applicants, as the IG recommended in 2022.

The U visa program is supposed to help police catch violent criminals. Instead, it has led to massive visa fraud that undermines public safety, creating countless fake crimes for local police to solve and ghost perpetrators for them to waste their time chasing. Something must be done to address this.

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Amy Swearer and Hans von Spakovsky are Senior Legal Fellows in the Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom.

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The New Fraud Turning Staged Crimes Into Paths To Citizenship