Fugitive Chicago Attorney Faces Immigration Fraud Charges, Feds Say

CHICAGO — Federal authorities have issued an arrest warrant for a Chicago immigration attorney accused of immigration fraud.

Mohammad Reza Baniassadi was indicted in August on one count of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and five counts of falsifying applications for immigration benefits and is now considered a fugitive, according to prosecutors.

Baniassadi is accused of conspiring with two employees at his downtown Chicago firm, The Law Offices of Reza Baniassadi, to submit fraudulent immigration applications to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, for at least seven years ending in 2020.

According to the indictment, one of the two employees — who prosecutors have neither named nor charged with a crime — would act as an interpreter and deliberately mistranslate the clients' wrong answers to questions on civics tests to the correct answers.

In addition to arranging for sham marriages, Baniassadi and his employees would also fake witness affidavits to falsely claim their clients had been abused by their spouses or former spouses, prosecutors allege.

The fugitive attorney would also direct his clients to go see his chosen psychologist and coach them to recount the same fabricated accounts of abuse.

Prosecutors also allege Baniassadi instructed clients to get divorces and orders of protection, even when he "knew that the client and his or her spouse were happily married and did not otherwise desire to get divorces."

Officials say the indicted lawyer told his clients to get new home addresses and separate their bank accounts, even if they did not actually move apart, to make their sham divorces more convincing.

Baniassadi also falsified United States Citizenship and Immigration Services forms claiming that a sponsoring employer would hire his clients, even though he and his unindicted employees knew that neither the business nor his immigrant clients planned to work there.

After the attorney learned that employees at one of the South Carolina USCIS offices was not bothering to verify the authenticity of immigration forms, he would tell his clients in Illinois to establish a fake residence there.

The five counts of falsifying immigration applications include allegations involving seven of Baniassadi's clients from 2017 and 2018. According to the 18-page indictment, two claimed they had been abused by their husband, one who said he had been abused by his wife, one falsely claimed they were an experienced baker who had lined up a job and another falsely claimed they were married, had lived together in Poland and planned to live together in the United States.

According to the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago, each of the five counts of visa fraud is punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison, while a conviction on the conspiracy count can lead to a sentence of up to five years.