As she was closing up shop on a blustery December night, a man dressed in black burst into Brow Beauty Salon.

He waved a black-and-gold handgun at Rashmi Samani and demanded she give him all the money in the register. She obliged, but the robber still shoved her to the ground before fleeing the Omaha shop.

On paper, it was an alarming report of violence against an undocumented immigrant. There was just one problem: The robbery had been staged.

Ketankumar Chaudhari, an Indian hotelier, paid an associate $1,000 to stick up his wife that night in 2022 so she could secure a visa reserved for victims of serious crimes, according to court documents. Chaudhari was later convicted of fraud.

The plot was revealed as part of a sprawling four-year federal investigation, which culminated in FBI raids of hotels across the Omaha area on Aug. 12. Samani, Chaudhari and three other defendants stand accused of crimes ranging from sex and labor trafficking to money laundering.

The alleged visa fraud adds to growing scrutiny of a decades-old program created to encourage immigrant victims of crime, who may otherwise fear deportation, to cooperate with police.

Federal officials under the Trump administration have ramped up attacks on the program’s legitimacy, pointing to fraud cases like those in Louisiana, where multiple law enforcement officers allegedly produced false police reports so immigrants could apply for the special visas, known as U visas.

The program is meant to help genuine immigrant crime victims and to aid police investigations, but “the effectiveness is questionable given the gross mismanagement and corruption that’s allowed these programs to be hijacked by fraudsters and criminal aliens, their attorneys, and corrupt law enforcement,” said Matthew Tragesser, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Some local immigration lawyers, including one former ICE prosecutor, say high-profile fraud cases like the one in Omaha are very rare and only serve to undermine a critical protection for vulnerable victims.

“It’s crime at so many different levels,” said retired ICE attorney Paul Stultz. “It’s immigration fraud. It’s fraud on the police … And it demeans other victims, too. It makes it harder for legitimate victims to get visas.”

At the same time, advocates say heightened immigration enforcement has made real victims more fearful of law enforcement, complicating the program’s primary goal.

“The problem is, they’re going to feel like they’re going to get repercussions, immigration-wise, because they helped. … That is something I think that can be really damning for the justice system,” said Mary Choate, director of the Center for Legal Immigration Assistance in Lincoln.

‘Justice Delayed’

A quarter-century ago, Sonia Parras learned a group of undocumented women working at an Iowa egg farm had been repeatedly raped by their colleagues but were fearful that going to the police would mean deportation.

Parras knew just what to do. The Des Moines lawyer had successfully lobbied Congress to create legal protections for immigrant victims of crime exactly for this kind of situation.

Her clients, the Iowa farmworkers, became what she said were the first U visa applicants in the nation.

The 2000 federal law creating U visas outlined a series of crimes, such as rape, domestic violence and abduction that would qualify an immigrant victim for the visa. The key to eligibility: cooperating with law enforcement.

Demand quickly outpaced supply. By law, only 10,000 U visas are available each year — far fewer than the number of applicants. In 2009, one of the first years U visas were issued, about 7,000 immigrants applied for the program. Last year, there were six times as many visa seekers.

In March, the ever-swelling backlog numbered nearly 250,000 pending petitions, USCIS data shows.

Claims are taking roughly a decade to be approved or denied, leaving most applicants in long-term legal limbo, said Omaha immigration lawyer Brian Blackford.

Since President Donald Trump took office, the wait time just to get an official receipt for filing an application has gone from a few weeks to upward of four months, Blackford said. Not having a receipt could put immigrants in deportation proceedings at risk, but so far, he said, local judges have been understanding.

Lifting the cap on how many U visas can be granted would ease some of the delays, Blackford said.

The lengthy wait times are “another sign of the broken immigration system,” said Stultz, the former ICE prosecutor.

“The old phrase ‘Justice delayed is justice denied,’” Stultz said. “It’s not good for the government. It’s not good for law enforcement. It’s not good for the victims. It shouldn’t take that long.”

‘It’s Not Real’

Questions around the U visa program’s vulnerability to fraud surfaced in a 2022 report. A top Department of Homeland Security official wrote that the audit team had identified 10 USCIS-approved petitions with “forged, unauthorized, altered or suspicious law enforcement certifications” — documents that attest to a victim’s willingness to help local law enforcement.

In response to the audit, USCIS defended the program and said audit officials refused to provide supporting evidence of the fraud in question. They did, however, adopt several recommendations, including improved tracking of visa approvals and added protections for people on the waitlist.

Now, under new leadership, the agency has itself alleged mismanagement and corruption in the program.

“Local law enforcement agencies ‘rubber stamping’ visa certifications have given bad actors every incentive to fabricate victim stories,” Tragesser, the USCIS spokesperson, said in a statement. “There’s no end to the number of unscrupulous immigration attorneys willing to help aliens file meritless petitions to delay deportation and obtain employment authorization.”

Experts interviewed by the Flatwater Free Press say U visa fraud isn’t just rare — it’s remarkably inefficient.

“When people start talking about (rampant U visa fraud), it always makes me chuckle a little bit, because I just want to say that these are not visas that are easy to obtain,” said Christon MacTaggart, director of the Nebraska Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence.

The coalition is among several organizations in the state that assist victims with U visa applications. It involves hundreds of pages of paperwork, interviews with police, background checks — and a willingness to wait decades.

“So the idea that people just kind of run out and get a U visa, it’s not real,” she said.

When USCIS questions the integrity of the U visa system, they’re casting doubt on local police, who are the first line of defense against fraud, said Astrid Munn, an attorney with Omaha’s Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement.

Samani and Chaudhari’s foiled scheme is evidence that police are good at upholding the system, and uncommon attempts at fraud don’t undermine the integrity of the process, Munn said.

‘A Big Fear’

Stephanie Gil is no stranger to the brutal realities that lie behind each U visa applicant.

There was the pregnant woman whose partner abused her so badly she ended up in the hospital. Another who couldn’t escape the oppressive presence of her unstable stalker. The high school mom whose child was held by her traffickers in order to incentivize paying off her debt.

As a bilingual client coordinator for Sheltering Hands in Lexington, Gil has seen only a few U visa cases in her seven years on the job. When a victim does walk through their doors, part of her role is reassuring them that it’s safe to cooperate with law enforcement.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a situation where they weren’t willing (to cooperate),” she said. “In the beginning, even calling the police, just that type of thing, is hard, but once they’ve reached (Sheltering Hands), I think they’ve kind of opened up a little bit.”

This year, though, Gil said Sheltering Hands has seen a decline in the number of people coming for assistance. Lexington has a large Hispanic population, including undocumented people, and increased immigration enforcement activity in the state has the community on edge.

“I’m not saying I know that’s why (the numbers are down),” she said. “But it has been a big fear around here. And we’ve heard it from other clients, too, that they’ve come and they said, ‘I didn’t reach out for help because he threatened me with immigration.’”

Since June 2021, USCIS has granted some U visa applicants on the waitlist protection from deportation and allowed them to work.

But the Trump administration has in recent months undercut those protections. In early August, NBC News reported that some immigrants waiting for U visas were now facing deportation.

Choate, the executive director of the Center for Legal Immigration Assistance, said they handle around 20-50 U visa cases annually. They haven’t had any clients get their protections revoked yet.

“Thankfully, deferred action is still deferred action,” she said. “It’s a waste of the court’s time to go after these cases, a court that’s already backlogged with cases. They’re just causing it to be more backlogged, if they’re doing that, to be frank.”

Blackford, the Omaha lawyer, said he hasn’t changed his advice to clients amid ramped-up enforcement: If you’re the victim of a crime, you should still report it and work with police.

U visas uphold a symbiotic relationship between immigrants who want to live in a safe community and police who want to solve crimes, he said. The Omaha Police Department really takes that to heart, he said.

OPD didn’t provide information on the number of U visa certifications it grants in time for publication.

Different State, Same Scheme

Though Samani and Chaudhari’s robbery plot in Omaha failed, federal law enforcement officers allege that several years later, the couple tried again — this time in Utah.

Samani filed another U visa application in May 2025 based on an assault she reported to police in a Salt Lake City suburb the year before, according to the criminal complaint filed by investigators. She told officers an unknown man had groped her breasts and then sliced her arm.

The West Valley City Police Department certified her U visa application, confirming that she was cooperating with their investigation, according to court documents. But that investigation ultimately fizzled out, and police reported that “all avenues have been exhausted and no suspect has been identified.”

Samani’s U visa application, like hundreds of thousands of others across the U.S., was still waiting for judgment when federal authorities arrested her.

Any system can be abused in isolated cases, but that’s not what MacTaggart sees in her network’s domestic violence programs, which serve 10,000 victims across the state.

“What we see are individuals who very much want to work and be a documented, contributing member of our communities,” MacTaggart said.

Trump will weaponize rare examples of fraud to justify his administration’s chipping away of protections for immigrants like the U visa, said Kevin Ruser, who runs the Nebraska College of Law’s Immigration Clinic. That, he said, will hurt immigrant survivors of crime who really need the program to work.

Munn, the Omaha attorney, isn’t worried about the program’s future. The U visa is etched in federal law, she said, and changing it would require a gridlocked Congress to make a move: “I don’t think the U visa is going anywhere.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/lawyers-advocates-fear-omaha-fraud-case-c...