March 21, 2008
From the NY Times
An Agent, a Green Card, and a Demand for Sex
By NINA BERNSTEIN
No problems so far, the immigration agent told the
American citizen and his 22-year-old Colombian wife at
her green card interview in December. After he stapled
one of their wedding photos to her application for
legal permanent residency, he had just one more
question: What was her cellphone number?
The calls from the agent started three days later. He
hinted, she said, at his power to derail her life and
deport her relatives, alluding to a brush she had with
the law before her marriage. He summoned her to a
private meeting. And at noon on Dec. 21, in a parked
car on Queens Boulevard, he named his price — not
realizing that she was recording everything on the
cellphone in her purse.
“I want sex,” he said on the recording. “One or two
times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t
have to see me anymore.”
She reluctantly agreed to a future meeting. But when
she tried to leave his car, he demanded oral sex
“now,” to “know that you’re serious.” And despite her
protests, she said, he got his way.
The 16-minute recording, which the woman first took to
The New York Times and then to the Queens district
attorney, suggests the vast power of low-level
immigration law enforcers, and a growing desperation
on the part of immigrants seeking legal status. The
aftermath, which included the arrest of an immigration
agent last week, underscores the difficulty and danger
of making a complaint, even in the rare case when
abuse of power may have been caught on tape.
No one knows how widespread sexual blackmail is, but
the case echoes other instances of sexual coercion
that have surfaced in recent years, including agents
criminally charged in Atlanta, Miami and Santa Ana,
Calif. And it raises broader questions about the
system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when
millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal
no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the
law’s protection.
The agent arrested last week, Isaac R. Baichu, 46,
himself an immigrant from Guyana, handled some 8,000
green card applications during his three years as an
adjudicator in the Garden City, N.Y., office of United
States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of
the federal Department of Homeland Security. He
pleaded not guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges
of coercing the young woman to perform oral sex, and
of promising to help her secure immigration papers in
exchange for further sexual favors. If convicted, he
will face up to seven years in prison.
His agency has suspended him with pay, and the
inspector general of Homeland Security is reviewing
his other cases, a spokesman said Wednesday.
Prosecutors, who say they recorded a meeting between
Mr. Baichu and the woman on March 11 at which he made
similar demands for sex, urge any other victims to
come forward.
Money, not sex, is the more common currency of
corruption in immigration, but according to
Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell,
former director of the agency’s internal
investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints
of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for
lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal
allegations.
The agency says it has tripled its investigative staff
since then, and counts only 165 serious complaints
pending. But it stopped posting an e-mail address and
phone number for such complaints last year, said Jan
Lane, chief of security and integrity, because it
lacks the staff to cull the thousands of mostly
irrelevant messages that resulted. Immigrants, she
advised, should report wrongdoing to any law
enforcement agency they trust.
The young woman in Queens, whose name is being
withheld because the authorities consider her the
victim of a sex crime, did not even tell her husband
what had happened. Two weeks after the meeting in the
car, finding no way to make a confidential complaint
to the immigration agency and afraid to go to the
police, she and two older female relatives took the
recording to The Times.
Reasons to Worry
A slim, shy woman who looks like a teenager, she said
she had spent recent months baby-sitting for relatives
in Queens, crying over the deaths of her two brothers
back in Cali, Colombia, and longing for the right
stamp in her passport — one that would let her return
to the United States if she visited her family.
She came to the United States on a tourist visa in
2004 and overstayed. When she married an American
citizen a year ago, the law allowed her to apply to
“adjust” her illegal status. But unless her green card
application was approved, she could not visit her
parents or her brothers’ graves and then legally
re-enter the United States. And if her application was
denied, she would face deportation.
She had another reason to be fearful, and not only for
herself. About 15 months ago, she said, an
acquaintance hired her and two female relatives in New
York to carry $12,000 in cash to the bank. The three
women, all living in the country illegally, were
arrested on the street by customs officers apparently
acting on a tip in a money-laundering investigation.
After determining that the women had no useful
information, the officers released them.
But the closed investigation file had showed up in the
computer when she applied for a green card, Mr. Baichu
told her in December; until he obtained the file and
dealt with it, her application would not be approved.
If she defied him, she feared, he could summon
immigration enforcement agents to take her relatives
to detention.
So instead of calling the police, she turned on the
video recorder in her cellphone, put the phone in her
purse and walked to meet the agent. Two family members
said they watched anxiously from their parked car as
she disappeared behind the tinted windows of his red
Lexus.
“We were worried that the guy would take off, take her
away and do something to her,” the woman’s widowed
sister-in-law said in Spanish.
As the recorder captured the agent’s words and a
lilting Guyanese accent, he laid out his terms in an
easy, almost paternal style. He would not ask too
much, he said: sex “once or twice,” visits to his home
in the Bronx, perhaps a link to other Colombians who
needed his help with their immigration problems.
In shaky English, the woman expressed reluctance, and
questioned how she could be sure he would keep his
word.
“If I do it, it’s like very hard for me, because I
have my husband, and I really fall in love with him,”
she said.
The agent insisted that she had to trust him. “I
wouldn’t ask you to do something for me if I can’t do
something for you, right?” he said, and reasoned,
“Nobody going to help you for nothing,” noting that
she had no money.
He described himself as the single father of a
10-year-old daughter, telling her, “I need love, too,”
and predicting, “You will get to like me because I’m a
nice guy.”
Repeatedly, she responded “O.K.,” without conviction.
At one point he thanked her for showing up, saying, “I
know you feel very scared.”
Finally, she tried to leave. “Let me go because I tell
my husband I come home,” she said.
His reply, the recording shows, was a blunt demand for
oral sex.
“Right now? No!” she protested. “No, no, right now I
can’t.”
He insisted, cajoled, even empathized. “I came from a
different country, too,” he said. “I got my green card
just like you.”
Then, she said, he grabbed her. During the speechless
minute that follows on the recording, she said she
yielded to his demand out of fear that he would use
his authority against her.
How Much Corruption?
The charges against Mr. Baichu, who became a United
States citizen in 1991 and earns roughly $50,000 a
year, appear to be part of a larger pattern, according
to government records and interviews.
Mr. Maxwell, the immigration agency’s former chief
investigator, told Congress in 2006 that internal
corruption was “rampant,” and that employees faced
constant temptations to commit crime.
“It is only a small step from granting a discretionary
waiver of an eligibility rule to asking for a favor or
taking a bribe in exchange for granting that waiver,”
he contended. “Once an employee learns he can get away
with low-level corruption and still advance up the
ranks, he or she becomes more brazen.”
Mr. Maxwell’s own deputy, Lloyd W. Miner, 49, of
Hyattsville, Md., turned out to be an example. He was
sentenced March 7 to a year in prison for inducing a
21-year-old Mongolian woman to stay in the country
illegally, and harboring her in his house.
Other cases include that of a 60-year-old immigration
adjudicator in Santa Ana, Calif., who was charged with
demanding sexual favors from a 29-year-old Vietnamese
woman in exchange for approving her citizenship
application. The agent, Eddie Romualdo Miranda, was
acquitted of a felony sexual battery charge last
August, but pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery and
was sentenced to probation.
In Atlanta, another adjudicator, Kelvin R. Owens, was
convicted in 2005 of sexually assaulting a 45-year-old
woman during her citizenship interview in the federal
building, and sentenced to weekends in jail for six
months. And a Miami agent of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement responsible for transporting a Haitian
woman to detention is awaiting trial on charges that
he took her to his home and raped her.
“Despite our best efforts there are always people
ready to use their position for personal gain or
personal pleasure,” said Chris Bentley, a spokesman
for Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Our
responsibility is to ferret them out.”
When the Queens woman came to The Times with her
recording on Jan. 3, she was afraid of retaliation
from the agent, and uncertain about making a criminal
complaint, though she had an appointment the next day
at the Queens district attorney’s office.
She followed through, however, and Carmencita
Gutierrez, an assistant district attorney, began
monitoring phone calls between the agent and the young
woman, a spokesman said. When Mr. Baichu arranged to
meet the woman on March 11 at the Flagship Restaurant
on Queens Boulevard, investigators were ready.
In the conversation recorded there, according to the
criminal complaint, Mr. Baichu told her he expected
her to do “just like the last time,” and offered to
take her to a garage or the bathroom of a friend’s
real estate business so she would be “more comfortable
doing it” there.
Mr. Baichu was arrested as he emerged from the diner
and headed to his car, wearing much gold and diamond
jewelry, prosecutors said. Later released on $15,000
bail, Mr. Baichu referred calls for comment to his
lawyer, Sally Attia, who said he did not have
authority to grant or deny green card petitions
without his supervisor’s approval.
The young woman’s ordeal is not over. Her husband
overheard her speaking about it to a cousin about a
month ago, and she had to tell him the whole story,
she said.
“He was so mad at me, he left my house,” she said,
near tears. “I don’t know if he’s going to come back.”
The green card has not come through. “I’m still
hoping,” she said.
Angelica Medaglia contributed reporting.
