Oscar Abraham Jaeger

Attorney at Law

729 Kathleen Place

Brooklyn, N.Y. 11235

voice and fax: 718/615-0393

email:

August 6, 2003

Andrea J. Quarantillo

District Director

Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services

1886 Greentree Road

Cherry Hill, N.J. 08003

Re: Ledi ……….

A.. … ...

Dear Ms. Quarantillo,

Enclosed is an original completed G-28, showing that Ms...... (hereinafter Ledi) recently retained me to help her with her adjustment of status case.

I have interviewed Ledi fairly extensively and so I’m familiar with the facts in this case. With all due respect, I do not believe your office is. If you were, you would know that my client is guilty of nothing more than being too trusting, too naïve. By way of examining that non-criminal naiveté, I ask you to ponder the following assertions. These assertions are true, even though they might appear anomalous without the more detailed explanation that I can provide, through affidavits, should that prove necessary.

My client was arrested on, pled guilty to, and was convicted of, a very minor shoplifting charge – the intentional concealment of a $20.00 wallet, to be precise. At the very time of this supposed concealment, she and her friends were purchasing, and she had her hands filled with, $450.00 worth of highly visible merchandise that she duly paid for. As to the wallet, Ledi was completely innocent of any crime. She did not intentionally (or unintentionally, for that matter) seek to conceal that wallet, but deliberately and thoughtfully (albeit foolishly, given the risk of forgetting) dropped it in one of the shopping bags she was carrying from a previous round of purchases she had made from the same store, so as to be able to better hold onto the overload of clothing on hangers that she had been struggling to manage. Her intention at the time of dropping the wallet in the shopping bag was to retrieve it when she reached the checkout counter, only by the time she reached the counter she had completely forgotten about the wallet. Her affidavit will explain why she did not fight the criminal charge. I have contacted the Wayne Township Municipal Court, which all too easily convicted an unrepresented and ill self advised Ledi and, time and energy willing, I intend to reopen that conviction. In any event, this conviction constitutes Ledi’s entire criminal record in the course of a lifetime. Talk about careers in crime!

Ledi’s application for adjustment of status contains a misrepresentation with respect to that history, but she never made that misrepresentation: she signed a blank form that was later completed by two people she trusted, who betrayed that trust. I am speaking of two human cockroaches, who are part of a vast, highly visible yet tolerated, underground of “paralegals,” who are not stepped upon as they deserve to be but are instead the steppers; who prey upon the immigrant community, who engage in the unauthorized practice of law and, much worse, do a terrible job of it. I write this with full awareness that my profession has its share of cockroaches too.

The documents in support of the I-485 application prepared by these two “paralegals,” namely Andre ...... and his partner in crime Inga ...... (with an office at … Madison Avenue, Suite …., N.Y., N.Y. 10017, telephone 212/…-….) which were signed by my client, were completed in the same way as the I-485 itself, with Ledi signing a blank document that these criminals later filled in, based upon a superficial interview of her and a careless disregard for the facts. As a result, these documents contain various errors and omissions, which Ledi and her husband only discovered upon their recent obtaining of their file (see below).[1] Moreover, some of the documents prepared by these criminals and submitted by them to BCIS were never even signed by Ledi and her husband; their signatures were forged by the “paralegals.” One example of such forgeries is the set of letters supposedly signed by Ledi and her husband in response to DAO Wein’s 11-18-02 request for an I-601 Waiver: my clients would never have signed such puerile letters. My clients did not even know that these letters existed until recently, when Ledi finally woke up to what Andre and Inga had been doing to her, and, with my support and participation, picked up her file from Andre’s office, on July 5, 2003.[2]
I have already contacted the BCIS Investigations Unit at 26 Federal Plaza in N.Y. City with respect to these particular criminals; I intend to terminate their business and, hopefully, put them in jail. Incidentally, even though my practice is not huge, I have recently encountered another husband and wife whose case was prepared by Andre and Inga, and the husband is eager to be with Ledi and me when we present our fraud charges to the Investigations Unit. The husband has proof that Andre forged the husband’s name to a joint affidavit of support; the husband never even met the beneficiary and certainly never signed an affidavit of support on behalf of that beneficiary.

As if Ledi has not suffered enough at the hands of cruel people, your office now comes along to complete this three-ring circus: the request for an I-601 Waiver that your office made to Ledi is based upon a complete disregard of the applicable law. You know as well as I do that for a misrepresentation to render an applicant inadmissible it has to be both willful and material. How could you, in good faith, consider a misrepresentation with respect to such a petty offense as a first-time shoplifting charge to be material? Had your office known at the time of the adjustment interview that Ledi had been convicted of this petty offense, you would not have had the discretion to deny her adjustment application on that ground. Therefore, even if she had made the misrepresentation willfully – and she most definitely did not – there is no way to regard the misrepresentation as material. It seems to me that for your office to nevertheless demand that she and her husband complete a Waiver is an act of bad faith no less outrageous, in its own way, and no less in defiance of law, than any fraudulent behavior you erroneously believe she engaged in. In fact, my client was simply naïve. But you are charged with a sophisticated knowledge of the law. What excuse do you have for the fraud you are attempting to perpetrate?

This letter is very blunt, and may appear to be disrespectful. No disrespect is intended, just a challenge: please cite and explain the provisions of law that entitle you, under the circumstances of a criminal history so insignificant as to be legally irrelevant to these proceedings, to demand of my client that she file an I-601 Waiver. If you cannot – and this brings me to my second request – just withdraw your demand and give my client the permanent resident status to which she is legally entitled. I repeat that my wife and I will submit a joint affidavit of support on Ledi’s behalf, should you require one in lieu of the one that I’m telling you was forged by the “paralegals.”

I do not ordinarily provide affidavits of support for my clients. In sixteen years of practicing immigration law, I have only done so once. But just as I completely trusted that one client, even though I had only known her for a relatively short time, and things turned out well, so I trust Ledi and believe things will turn out well for her. She is one of the most honest, generous, and kind-hearted people I have ever met. She is also an extremely intelligent and capable person. Accordingly, she would make an excellent contribution to our society, if we were smart enough to welcome her. Instead, we are making her and her husband jump over roadblocks and through hoops, as if this could possibly be amusing. She was ill served, and justice was not accomplished, in the course of her prosecution and conviction for shoplifting, only for matters to deteriorate when she unknowingly employed a pair of real miscreants, namely the “paralegals,” to assist her with her adjustment of status case.

On the basis of the fact that Ledi has already been punished for crimes that she did not commit, namely shoplifting (where the punishment was the payment of a fine) and fraud/misrepresentation (where the punishment consists so far of having to respond to a false accusation), I ask that you stop making further contributions to this perverse state of affairs. I alert you to the fact that, if you do not accede to my request for a cancellation of your illegal waiver request, you will be guilty of further torturing an innocent person. Make that three innocent people: Ledi, her husband, and myself. I include myself because, unless the option of going into federal court to make you obey the law is feasible, you will force me to do a great deal of work on their behalf, which will cost them a substantial sum of money,[3] when all of this effort and expense could have been easily avoided had you simply complied with the applicable law, which in this instance is so clear and logical.

Of course, if you recognize the compelling logic of my argument concerning the materiality of the misrepresentation at issue, you can just approve Ledi’s application for adjustment of status and schedule an appointment for her to have her passport stamped.

Yours sincerely,

[1] I would like to emphasize, however, that all the errors and omissions made by these “paralegal” villains are manifestations of sloppy and sometimes even deceitful work, but have no actual impact upon the proper disposition of Ledi’s adjustment case: her case remains fully approvable, and can most easily and properly proceed to this deserved outcome by your withdrawal of an illegitimate demand for an I-601 Waiver.

[2] In addition, the joint affidavit of support that appears to have been filed in this case is a forgery manufactured by the “paralegals”: my clients do not know the affiant and he does not know them. If you require a true joint affidavit of support, my wife and I will provide one on behalf of Ledi.

[3] This is true, even at my extremely reasonable rates: when I call myself a poor lawyer, I am not putting down my legal abilities, but simply noticing that I am not rich and never will be, in accord with most of my clients. As for my legal ability, since 1988, the year I began working for myself in the field of immigration law after a one-year apprenticeship with another attorney, I have never lost a case, and I’m not about to lose this one.