Alexandra Lozano sold desperate immigrants into deportation. She promised miracles to tens of thousands of people trapped in the twilight status of an unworking legal system, and instead she handed them forged narratives of trauma, copied their signatures onto documents they never read, and drained their bank accounts. When the machine finally caught them, it was not with a humanitarian visa in hand, but with a notice of removal proceedings.
Gabriel Martinez Garcia, thirty years old, told the Associated Press that his family paid Lozano tens of thousands of dollars, only to watch his mother be placed in removal proceedings despite being married to a naturalized United States citizen. Tens of thousands of people walked into that office hoping to become safe, and walked out with their bank accounts emptied, their signatures on lies, and their names on removal dockets.
The predator here wore the clothing of advocacy. She told the people who came to her that she was the one who would stand between them and the machinery that takes people away. The clothing of the helper is the only clothing that lets a helper take the helpless for everything they have. Jesus said it as plainly as it has ever been said: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
The Hebrew prophets were not shy about what to call this. Isaiah, speaking for the Lord, named “woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” The fabricator who invents a story of domestic violence against a client who has never experienced it, in order to file a humanitarian visa, has called evil good. The client will eventually have to sit across from an asylum officer and be told: tell me what was done to you. She will have nothing to say, because nothing was done to her. She will be told that she made it up. The fraud travels with her.
The people who do this work well — who sit with the family, who explain the document in the language the client thinks in, who tell the client when the answer is no — are doing something close to what the Good Samaritan was doing when he stopped on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The people who copy a signature onto a story they wrote themselves are not doing that. They are passing by on the other side.
We cannot isolate this predation from the architecture that makes it profitable. The deportation machine does not merely target the vulnerable; it creates a market for their exploitation. By maintaining a vast underclass of people whose presence is legally possible but practically precarious, our laws have turned the migrant’s desperation into a commodity. When the only way to safety runs through a small number of practitioners with power of attorney over your life, the practitioner is the bottleneck and the bottleneck is the price. The bottleneck is staffed, according to the lawsuits, by workers who lacked proper legal credentials — people pressing signatures onto documents for clients they would never sit across from, in a language the worker may not have spoken.
Defenders of the status quo will tell you this is merely the story of a rogue operator, that the system works because the state rightfully hunts down those who broke its laws. They will say these immigrants had no legal right to be here, that the machinery of removal is just and necessary. But look at the flesh caught in those gears. Look at Gabriel Martinez Garcia’s mother, placed in removal proceedings despite being married to a naturalized United States citizen. This is not a healthy system protecting itself from a bad apple; a legal ethics investigation and multiple civil lawsuits now expose an assembly-line of state-sanctioned cruelty.
The Torah commands us not to oppress the stranger, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Our laws have created a twilight status that makes this ancient warning a daily reality, trapping families in a precarity where any charlatan with a law degree can become their executioner.
The red letters of Jesus make the identification absolute: whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me. Lozano took the sacred reality of their suffering and turned it into a counterfeit currency. She did not merely defraud her clients; she committed a wicked act against the human dignity of those who trusted her, weaponizing the very category of the victim against the victim.
Pope Francis named this posture the globalization of indifference, treating the migrant as a number to be processed rather than a face to be encountered. In Lozano’s assembly-line practice, the indifference of the state met the greed of the grifter. The clients were not human beings with stories of their own; they were raw material for a fabricated narrative, processed in bulk, and discarded when the fraud collapsed.
The state demands trauma as the price of survival, and when the state builds a labyrinth of impossible precarity, it breeds the minotaur. The same political class that builds the deportation machine and funds its expansion will wring their hands at the charlatans who feed on its victims. They design the trap and then condemn the rats.
The state bar that licenses her and the federal immigration courts that must now process the wreckage are not innocent bystanders. The Washington State Bar Association is moving through a legal ethics investigation — the profession finally being asked to do the policing it was built to do. We who do this work — who raise money in the parish for legal aid, who staff the Catholic Worker house, who sit on the board of the immigrant defense committee — have let our fundraising language outrun our internal discipline. We have built a culture in which the predator’s office and the honest attorney’s office look the same from the outside, and we have not built the regulatory or professional discipline to tell the difference. The fraud Lozano’s clients were signed up for may, when their cases reopen, be the same fraud the Justice Department has begun using to revoke citizenship — the victims of the fabrication charged with the very fraud the perpetrator authored.
Óscar Romero, the archbishop who was murdered at the altar in 1980 for naming the sins of the Salvadoran state, knew that a gospel which refuses to unsettle the sins of the state that manages the border is no gospel at all. “A church that does not provoke any crisis, a gospel that does not unsettle, a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — what gospel is that?” In the name of this suffering people, whose laments rise to heaven each day, the imperative is clear: cease the repression. Dismantle the machine.
The door of return is open for you, Alexandra Lozano. It is open for every attorney in every office that ever told a desperate family what they wanted to hear and filed what was not true. You can come back. The door is repentance, restitution, and the rest of a working life putting right what was taken. The Lord, in the parable, does not bar the door. But the door is a door. It is not a revolving gate. The wolf in sheep’s clothing is the easier wolf to identify. The harder wolf is the system that produces the bottleneck. The immigrants who came through that office did not need to be saved from evil. They needed a country that did not produce it, and a profession that did not sell it back to them as rescue. What remains is Gabriel Martinez Garcia’s mother, and the tens of thousands drained and discarded alongside her, standing in the wreckage of a system that tried to process them out of existence, waiting for someone to finally see them not as a case file, but as a face.