An Indian national has been arrested by US immigration officials and is awaiting deportation after he was released from a prison on charges of participating in a widespread foreign student visa fraud.
Maulik Gajjar, 37 of Iselin, New Jersey was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after he was released from the custody of Middlesex County.
On May 22, the ICE had lodged an immigration detainer against Gajjar but the correctional facility had released him from custody without notification to the ICE. Gajjar is currently facing state criminal charges.
Federal immigration officers from Newark arrested Gajjar this month outside his residence in Iselin.
The ICE said in a statement that Gajjar does not have lawful status in the US and will remain in the ICE custody pending removal proceedings.
"As a nation, we must protect the integrity of our immigration system and the removal of illegal aliens, especially those with a criminal history, this is one of the ICE's top priorities," said John Tsoukaris, ERO Newark field office director.
Gajjar was among nine people charged and arrested in June 2012 for their alleged participation in a widespread foreign student visa fraud.
According to the complaint, another Indian-origin man Dhirenkumar Parikh was the president, owner, and registered agent of Vision Career Consultants USA (VCC), located in Iselin.
VCC operated as an intermediary between students and various academic institutions within the US, recruiting students for the institutions in exchange for a referral fee and assisting students with the application process.
It is alleged that Parikh and his co-conspirators defrauded the Student and Exchange Visitor Programme by providing foreign nationals, for a fee, the documents needed to obtain student visas, without verifying any of the foreign nationals' information.
Parikh and the others allegedly ran their criminal enterprise through VCC and American Health and Technology Institute (AHTI), a school that was certified by SEVP to enroll foreign students.
In addition to counterfeiting documents and falsely certifying that the foreign nationals had met AHTI's school admission requirements, the defendants falsely certified attendance records and actively assisted some students with hiding their prior violations of immigration law.
In fiscal year 2016, the ICE removed or returned 2,40,255 individuals. Of this total, 1,74,923 were apprehended while, or shortly after, attempting to illegally enter the United States.
The remaining 65,332 were apprehended in the interior of the United States, and the vast majority were convicted criminals.
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