Immigration Officer Allegedly Bribed With Cash, Egg Rolls

47-year-old Mai Nhu Nguyen, a US Citizenship and Immigration Services officer in Santa Ana, California, has been indicted on charges that she took cash and egg rolls as bribes from immigrants who sought citizenship and green cards. Nguyen is being charged with three counts of solicitation of a bribe by a public official by federal prosecutors, who say she took 200 egg rolls from a citizenship applicant as well as bribes of $1,000 and $2,200 from two other immigrants over the past two years. Arrested on June 6 and released on a $20,000 bond, she is set to be arraigned July 1, according to the Associated Press.

Nguyen was an officer at the Santa Ana offices of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, where she would review applications from immigrants seeking benefits. The case is the latest to hit a US immigration service - a branch of the government long susceptible to bribery due to the high stakes involved for people seeking citizenship, permanent residence or other changes to their legal status.

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Earlier this month, former Border Patrol agents Raúl and Fidel Villarreal, who are brothers, were sentenced to 35 and 30 years in prison, respectively, for running a ring that smuggled hundreds of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Brazil into the United States. They were said to have charged the immigrants about $10,000 per group, and made more than $1 million from the scheme. Raúl had long served as the Spanish-language spokesman for the Border Patrol, appearing in public service announcements - one in which he played the role of a smuggler - on television. The judge called their operation "disgusting" and said he gave an especially severe sentence in part to deter other border agents.

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In May of this year, Maryland attorney Kiran Dewan, 59, and four of his clients were indicted in a conspiracy to bribe an immigration official to get permanent residence cards. They each face up to five years in prison for the conspiracy and as much as 15 years for counts of bribery. The four had unknowingly been paying an undercover agent a total of $117,000 for documents falsely claiming that two of the clients were married to US citizens and the two other clients were sponsored by their employers to obtain green cards.

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Also earlier that month, a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security and a former immigrations official were indicted for participating in a long-running immigration fraud scheme. The fraud was allegedly orchestrated by Kwang Man "John" Lee, a Los Angeles attorney, who paid them bribes which reached past $50,000 for admission stamps and permanent residence status for dozens of clients.