There have been new developments in two migration-related stories we reported in the past. One deals with a student-visa mill in California and the other with H-2B workers who drive trucks to a sugar beet mill in Minnesota. The stories are not finished in either case, but in both the cause is moving ahead, if slowly.
The visa mill is Herguan University in Sunnyvale, Calif., site of an earlier ICE raid and an "educational institution" that, according to court records, seemed at least at one time to be more interested in generating F-1 visas for its students than in educating them.
The latest development, as reported in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, is that the founder, former president, former CEO, and former owner of the for-profit entity, Jerry Wang, 34, has pled guilty to a visa fraud scam, faces three months to two years in federal prison, and has agreed to forfeit $700,000. (It is not clear who owns Herguan right now, perhaps his parents.)
I have been following the case in the federal courts for years (as noted here and here) and was not surprised by the plea. The feds really had the goods on him and his defense was weak. In his plea, he said that he had submitted some 100 false documents to immigration authorities.
What I was surprised by was the decision by the Student and Exchange Visitors Program (SEVP), a sleepy unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to threaten, once again, to deny Herguan the privilege of issuing the document that leads to the F-1 Visa as recorded in this document. The last time SEVP did so in this case, it reversed itself the next day.
Herguan was given until April 17 to respond to SEVP's Withdrawal on Notice document. There is, as yet, no indication of the final decision. Wang's own sentencing will not come until this fall. Wang has been out on bail since he was indicted.
As the Santa Cruz Sentinel noted, this visa mill case has been around for a long time; the paper first reported the problem nearly four years ago.
In its latest story, the paper said that the university has master's degree programs with classes only on weekends, allowing its students to work, legally, during the week while making use of the OPT program. For more on the latter, see here.
Wang apparently is a man of a certain kind of talent and drive. He managed to secure a PhD in China and to launch a multi-million dollar (albeit criminal) enterprise in the United States all before the age of 30 despite his apparently minimal English. (There are two court documents indicating he might need a translator at the trial, which did not take place.) It will be interesting to see what career path he takes after he leaves prison.
Meanwhile, off in the central-western part of Minnesota, there's a sugar beet mill that retains a trucking firm to bring farmers' beets to the mill. That firm, Transystems LLC, in turn, hired both H-2B truck drivers from Mexico and U.S. citizens, one of whom was Todd Harper, as we reported last year. Harper complained to Transystem's management that it was not really trying to hire citizens, as it should under the H-2B program regulations, and that it was causing some of its drivers to overload its vehicles in violation of the state law. (But only at night when the highway patrol was fast asleep.)
He also charged that the Mexican workers did not have an adequate level of English to be safe drivers of these large trucks.
Harper was on the night shift, but lost his job because of his complaints. He subsequently got another job, this time hauling something other than the beets. He also started looking for a lawyer to file a civil suit against Transystems LLC.
That suit was filed in the federal courts in late March, with Harper's lawyers (Halunen Law, in Minneapolis) saying that Transystems LLC owed damages to Harper. They said that the trucking firm had violated the Minnesota Whistleblower Act, by firing Harper over the overloading issue and his complaints to Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) about the H-2B violations. As I read the court file, Transystems' abuse of the H-2B program would be enjoined were Harper to win the case and the firm would be obliged to pay damages to its former employee. Neither DHS nor DoL seems to be involved in the case.
Readers using PACER, the federal courts' electronic documentation system, can find the California case at 5:12-cr-00581-EJD, and the Minnesota one at 0:15-cv-01596-JNE-TNL.