NYC immigration lawyer helped clients get legal status with phony abuse claims: feds

A Bronx immigration lawyer gamed the system for years by having clients falsely claim they were abused by their own kids to fast-track their bids for legal status, federal prosecutors said Monday.

Kofi Amankwaa and his son charged immigrant clients $6,000 a head to exploit the federal Violence Against Women Act by claiming they were victims of domestic abuse, which would expedite the migrants’ bid for legal residency in the US, prosecutors said in a press release .

Amankwaa and his son, Kofi Amankwaa Jr., now face up to 15 years behind bars on conspiracy and immigration fraud charges after they are arraigned in federal court on Monday.

US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said the father and son team “sought to make a mockery of the US immigration system.”

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“Amankwaa and his son allegedly exploited the Violence Against Women Act — a law that allows noncitizen victims of domestic abuse a path to lawful permanent residence status — for their own financial gain,” Williams said in a statement.

“Thanks to the dedicated actions of our law enforcement partners and the career prosecutors of this office, the defendants must now answer for these crimes.”

According to the feds, Amankwaa and his son ran the scam from September 2016 until November, charging clients a hefty fee and instructing them to apply for residency to falsely claim they were abused by their own children under the violence against women law.

Immigrants who apply under the act are allowed freer overseas travel and can be granted expedited legal residency status.

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Federal prosecutors said that most of the doctored applications were eventually denied “on the basis of fraud, among other reasons.”

As complaints piled up against the pair Amankwaa’s license to practice law was suspended by New York State and federal prosecutors began putting together their criminal case.

But the feds aren’t the only ones going after the lawyer.

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Also on Monday New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the lawyer and his son — and others on the lawyer’s staff.

James said in a press release that Amankwaa and staffers Sylvester Boateng, Nana Adoma Kontoh and Betty Smith were facing civil penalties “for running an illegal scheme that scammed hundreds of vulnerable immigrants.”

The lawsuit calls for the legal firm to pay restitution and damages to the victims they duped.

“When these immigrants sought help from attorneys claiming to act in their interests, they were taken advantage of and harmed instead,” James said in a statement. “This cruel and illegal scheme led to them being separated from their families and deported.”

In one example, an immigrant named Ricardo Velazquez was duped into filing a claim that his own son abused him and was urged by Amankwaa to travel to his native Mexico to have his passport stamped on his return, Valezquez’s son claimed in a gofundme page posted online.

Instead, Velazquez was barred from returning to the US, despite having lived in New York for 28 years, according to the fundraising site.

It was not immediately known if Amankwaa and his son, who are both from South River, New Jersey, had retained an attorney to represent them.

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