Asylum-fraud crackdown is another key step in fixing the US immigration system

In yet another crucial crackdown on fraud, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is at last going after lawyers who file blatantly bogus asylum claims — another too-long tolerated abuse of immigration laws.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week issued a notice to fine attorney Suraj Raj Singh, who runs a nationwide immigration practice representing mostly Indian asylum seekers.

Alleging that Singh filed 118 cut-and-paste documents across 54 immigration cases, the agency is seeking the maximum fine — nearly $500,000.

A month earlier, ICE similarly fined attorney Vinod Doddamani over $250,000, alleging he filed 64 fraudulent documents in 32 asylum cases.

The fines follow a May directive from DHS General Counsel James Percival ordering a crackdown on fraudulent asylum claims.

The larger claim is that lawyers routinely cut-and-paste the same story of persecution into one asylum application after another, figuring a tale that worked once will work again and trusting overburdened screeners to not notice (or, when Democrats are calling the shots, not care).

Back in March 2025, President Donald Trump issued a warning that some law firms coach migrants to hide facts or lie to game the asylum system; this fraud is only part of that outrage.

And it prospered as the Biden administration dismantled Trump’s first-term border-security policies, such as the “Remain in Mexico” protocol (requiring) asylum seekers to wait outside the country while their cases were pending) to Title 42 (tighter rules for entry during the pandemic, the only anti-COVID measure Dems despised).

Biden, like President Barack Obama before him, also yielded happily as the left sued to vastly expand the issues that could justify an asylum claim: Once, only actual, organized persecution counted; eventually, mere fear of crime and disorder back home became enough.

And so more than 5.8 million “asylum seekers” got waved into the United States, along with other migrants rushing in as border and immigration agents were buried in processing asylum paperwork. 

Team Trump has restored real border enforcement, and going after legal sharks who fraudulently exploit the loosened asylum laws is another good step — but the Justice Department has major work ahead to reverse all the countless court rulings that rewrote the laws to make the rules themselves a sick joke.