Illegal Aliens Faking Crimes to Stay in USA

WSOCTV — Six years ago, Cristian Fernandez’s world changed when he was shot in the back outside a club on Albemarle Road. After months in the hospital, doctors told Fernandez he would be paralyzed from the chest down for the rest of his life, and he has spent most of the last six years on a bed in his family’s small living room in east Charlotte. Because he came to the United States illegally as a child, his mother could not get the help he would need to pay the mounting medical bills, so in 2013 he applied for a special visa that would give him a start on legal residency and eventually U.S. citizenship. It’s called a U-Visa, and the government hands out 10,000 of them a year to victims of certain — mostly violent — crimes and their family members. Fernandez and his mother received theirs’ in July and it immediately began opening doors. A U-Visa is good for four years and just filling out an application can delay or stop deportation proceedings altogether. Not surprisingly, that’s led to a flood of applications at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, where they have had more than 700 thus far in 2014. But it’s also opened the door to fraud. [Read More]