For many immigrants, the language barrier makes it difficult to seek appropriate council. The only thing worse than not being able to comprehend your lawyer, is not actually hiring an immigration lawyer to defend your case.
Many immigrants have been hiring notaries who have advertised themselves as immigration lawyers. While this hasn’t been illegal in the past, a new bill here in Colorado is pushing to make it illegal for people to call themselves immigration lawyers when they aren’t.
This is coming years and years after hundreds (if not thousands) of immigrants were scammed by notaries, and other non-immigration lawyers.
The most common scam from notaries toward immigrants was charging fees to print out United States Citizenship and Immigration Services forms, which are free, and charging to book appointments for a USCIS office, which is also free. Notaries were taking advantage of immigrants who were desperate and trusting.
The immigration system is very complicated, much like any other form of law the paper work is extremely complicated and one simple mistake can determine whether someone is going to be getting deported or starting a new life. Notaries take advantage of people in search of the American dream by giving them false hope and pretending that they have connections that they don’t actually have. To make matters worse, once a case is closed it can’t be reopened, which leaves immigrants without any hope.
With the bill that is set to pass, notaries will be fined if they advertise themselves as immigration lawyers without the proper licensing. It’s about time a law like this was passed. Every year more and more students are applying for Differed Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which allows students to obtain a work visa as long as they are in school or have a stable job. These young students and their parents turn to notaries who advertise themselves as lawyers for help in filing paperwork. The fees for many applications (such as DACA) are in the hundreds, plus any fees to have help from a lawyer also run pretty high.
This bill will be enforced by law enforcement to make sure that notaries are not scamming the immigrant population here in Colorado. There’s no telling if other states will look to make a similar law in the coming months to also protect their immigrant population from scams. This isn’t a law that is by any means controversial since everyone should agree that no one should be scammed regardless of their citizenship.
It’s time for shady notaries to stop their abuse of immigrants. Their false advertising needs to be stopped and they need to be held accountable for their actions.
