A Yorba Linda family was scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Santa Ana Wednesday on charges of arranging sham marriages so more than 20 foreigners could stay in the country legally.
Ajit Bhargava, his 56-year-old wife Nisha Bhargava and their daughter Runjhun Bhargava, 30, are facing charges of conspiracy to commit visa
fraud, according to federal prosecutors who say most of the marriages involved people from India.
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The Bhargavas ran a Cerritos immigration services agency called MPEagle Consultants that charged up to $60,000 to arrange bogus
marriages for foreigners who came to the country on visas, the feds allege.
The same witnesses–and often the same U.S. citizen
spouse–appeared on multiple green card applications from couples who worked with MPEagle, according to government prosecutors who were forwarded 21 similar-looking cases from Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators.
As in the movie Green Card, many fake couples are said to have posed for
photographs in different locations wearing different outfits to make it
appear they had relationships.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.