Those who seek to break the immigration law are occasionally quite creative. Not admirable, but clever.
Today’s example is a doubly creative con man who not only fleeced 500 illegal aliens out of an estimated million dollars, but also encouraged the breaking of the immigration law in an imaginative manner described below.
Helaman Hansen was recently sentenced to 20 years in jail (a very long sentence in the immigration field) for his scheme. He has since argued that his conviction should be dropped because the federal prohibition of encouraging people to enter the nation illegally is a threat to freedom of speech. All of this is covered — if in a very bland manner — by a report from Law360.
Carried to the logical extreme, one could argue that urging Mr. A to murder Ms. B is simply an exercise of free speech and should not be punishable in a court of law. Hansen’s lawyers got the Ninth Circuit to rule favorably on the free speech matter; the Biden administration has asked the Supreme Court to review it; we probably will not know how this turns out for months.
Meanwhile, what was his (very original) con? He persuaded the 500 illegal aliens — apparently all adults — that he could get them legal status by causing them to secure adult adoptions from citizens. The only trouble is that this technique only works for those under the age of 16.
And, according to the Washington Free Beacon, Hansen is being helped in his appeal by the American Civil Liberties Union. The involvement of the ACLU and the prison sentence are omitted in the Law360 coverage, but not the Beacon’s.