Zed A. Shaw, Painter

1. They registered a real university with the state of michigan. 2. They got it accredited. 3. They took money from the students. 4. They *listed it on the ICE website saying it was real*. 5. They had classes listed, full website, and students even with through SEVIS and visas.

The building wasn't real, but how is a guy in India or even New York supposed to know that? They probably just want a low cost university, and this basically was a real university. ICE worked with ACCSC to get it fraudulently accredited, took money, and listed it...sooooooo.

The claim ICE is making is basically, "You should have known this university that was officially accredited, had a legit website, and which we SAID was legit, was not legit at all." I don't think even I could have figured that out if I saw all of that evidence.

Additionally, these people probably would have never committed this "crime" (applying to an accredited approved school is not a crime) without all this work enticing them from ICE, which makes it entrapment, but they can't use that defense because they're foreign.

Now, the real insane kicker of this story is, ICE was apparently taking $11k from these people and then....kept it all. Like, from reading this they arrested 130 people, but collected from 600, so ICE either stole 1.43 or 6.6 million dollars from poor framers in India.

But, that money was collected using fraud, which means that ICE isn't allowed to keep it and I'm pretty damn sure if you're breaking the law to catch someone then your case is fucked. At a minimum that's embezzling or fraud or something. ICE's defense might be "drug seizure".

ICE would say, "If we posed as a drug dealer and sold them $11k of cocaine, we'd get to throw them in jail and keep the $11k." The difference though is that, when you post as a drug dealer, you are posing as a criminal and everyone involved knows it's a crime. This is different

This is like ICE having a list of approved medical clinics, and getting the state medical board to approve the clinics, and getting AMA to certify the clinic, and then letting people fill out all the legal paperwork to get Oxy, then going "AHA! This is fake!"

A lot of string operations rely on the people knowing they're committing a crime with a criminal, and LEO can't be involved in vouching for the legitimacy of the criminal. They can't be like, "Oh it's fine to buy this cocaine from Pablo, we certify him and the AMA did too."

In fact, I'd say there's two angles to the defense: 1. Would a reasonable American know this university was fake and also apply? 2. If ICE hadn't vouched for this university and done all the proper registrations would they catch the same people? Here's how I'd test that.

Conduct a simple usability study that asks a bunch of random people to try to identify if a university is legit or not from the website. I'm pretty sure you'd find out that if it's accredited, registered, and recommended by ICE a massive majority would say it's legit.

Oh, I should add, ICE's original claim was they setup the university to catch people who commit visa fraud for people, like admissions officials and others. BUT, ICE still has a problem with this angle:

They definitely could arrest the people making fake passports and visas, BUT they didn't pose as someone who made fake visas. They posed as a university, enticed people to it, screwed with their paperwork, and then arrested them when they got desperate for their money back.

If I'm reading this right, ICE setup the university, took their money, put them through SEVIS and the F1 process, then just sat there. People requested their money back and to have their SEVIS moved to a new university and ICE ignored them. Eventually the students got desperate