Law Firm Charged in Immigration Ring

A Harvard-educated lawyer, head of one of the nation’s largest immigration asylum firms, and seven others were charged Wednesday with helping smugglers sneak scores of Chinese into the country.

Porges, a Manhattan law firm, earned more than $13 million illicitly over the last seven years as it forged a relationship with Chinese smugglers, federal prosecutors alleged.

The fraud may have changed the outcome of as many as 7,000 asylum cases, forcing the government to review every one to determine whether each person should have been allowed to stay in the country.

“Manhattan attorneys in three-piece suits do not typically come to mind when the public pictures the criminals who traffic in human cargo and who profit in the desperation of migrants who are seeking a better life,” said Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Meissner joined U.S. Atty. Mary Jo White at a news conference to announce the charges in a case she said illustrates the kind of “well-organized, well-planned international enterprises that have become a multibillion-dollar problem.”

White said the government sought to send a stern message by using racketeering charges for the first time against a law firm specializing in immigration cases.

The law firm operated by Robert Porges, 61, and his wife, Sheery Lu Porges, 47, was at the heart of a sprawling criminal enterprise, White said. If convicted, Porges, a 1962 Harvard Law School graduate, could face up to 175 years in prison, while his wife could face life.

There was no answer Wednesday at the firm, and a message was not immediately returned. Others charged in the case included the firm’s office manager and four of its paralegals.

White said Porges had become one of the largest immigration asylum firms in the nation, representing immigrants throughout the country at nearly every major INS detention facility.

The firm allegedly teamed up with smugglers who charged desperate immigrants from $40,000 to $50,000 to sneak them into the country. When immigrants were captured by U.S. authorities, the law firm built a tower of lies for each one to qualify them for asylum, authorities said.

Porges’ techniques were so elaborate that a “mentality scale” was devised to grade the intelligence of each immigrant on a scale of one to five, and then an asylum story was made up that the client could remember, White said.

Once the firm managed to win freedom for the immigrants, it delivered them into the hands of smugglers who held them captive until the smuggling fee was paid, the prosecutor said.

“The cold, hard reality of alien smuggling is that the smugglers deceive clients who pay large sums of money,” Meissner said.