I was able to report on a briefing from American Community Media on a subject that overlaps multiple topics: fraud, immigration enforcement, and fear. The steep rise in scams targeting immigrants across the United States deals with all these topics, and the stakes are high.
Immigration detention has been expanding. Reuters has reported that the Trump administration’s detention crackdown has continued to widen, with courts repeatedly finding detentions unlawful even as the policy moves forward, and FTC consumer alerts have separately warned that immigration scams now often begin on social media through fake law firms and false promises of legal help.
Pilar Marrero, the social editor at American Community Media, opened the call by asking a hitting question. Why are immigrants especially vulnerable right now?
Her framing mattered because it mapped the problem. There is a political climate that has created desperation and then leaves people vulnerable.
Marrero introduced two speakers who know this landscape well. Monica Vaca spent 23 years at the Federal Trade Commission, where she worked on consumer fraud cases that returned hundreds of millions of dollars to the public.
Katie Daffin spent 15 years at the FTC as a litigator and manager, including work on deceptive business practices, AI-related fraud, and the payment systems that help scams move fast.
Both women are now in private practice in Washington, D.C., and both described what they are hearing from community partners in language that was notably restrained, which only made it more alarming.
Vaca said the reports they are hearing are “really disturbing and incredibly alarming,” and then she laid out the pattern with blunt clarity. Families are being targeted when a loved one is suddenly detained by ICE. They are approached in the middle of confusion, when communication is limited and information is scarce, and they are told someone can help. “When people are experiencing heightened emotional distress, we know that they are particularly susceptible to a scam,” she said.
Which of course, is what people are dealing with daily in this news cycle, a continued hightened state of fear. People are being scammed because distress changes decision-making.
Daffin, who handled litigation and enforcement work at the FTC before moving into private practice, described what these scams now look like on the ground. “These scammers are very sophisticated,” she said. “We’ve heard about people even having a fake immigration hearing.” She described Zoom calls staged to resemble court proceedings, fake bond orders, fake receipts, and fake bar cards tied to the names of real attorneys.
In one of the starkest lines of the call, she said scammers have “jumped in to offer supposed help” at the exact moment families are “absolutely beside themselves.”
This emotional manipulation is effective. Any old advice to just simply watch for obvious warning signs is no longer enough. The fraud is now polished, multilingual, and procedural.
That point lands hard in this moment because the wider system has become more unstable.
Reuters reported in February that judges around the country had already ruled more than 4,400 times that the administration was detaining immigrants unlawfully, while a separate Reuters report from April described a court fight over the administration’s policy of detaining some non-citizens without bond hearings.
In other words, the legal ground itself is shifting under families’ feet. That instability is what makes guarantees so powerful and so dangerous. When a scammer promises a bond, a release, or a fast result, they are selling the feeling of certainty in a system that currently offers very little of it.
Vaca urged families to think in advance about bank accounts, car titles, insurance documents, and limited powers of attorney so that detention does not instantly become financial collapse. She also stressed the need to build a list of real immigration lawyers before any emergency begins. “Assemble that list today,” she said.
Fraud works best when panic forces people to improvise. Planning cant totally erase that, but it can help to narrow it down.
The other major theme was the role of platforms. Daffin warned people not to use social media to find a lawyer, and she also cautioned that internet search results are now crowded with paid advertisements that look like real services or government pages.
That warning aligns with the FTC’s own guidance. In late 2024, the agency warned that scammers were impersonating attorneys and law firms on Facebook and other platforms, contacting users after they liked or commented on immigration-related posts, then promising green cards, work permits, or citizenship.
Reuters has also reported extensively on fraudulent advertising across Meta’s platforms, including internal findings that scam ads remain a major problem.
Asked whether the FTC currently has the political will to pursue these scams, Vaca did not dodge. She said the agency now sees itself as an arm of the Trump administration and added, “I would not anticipate that the FTC will be taking action against immigration scams.”
That was one of the most revealing moments in the briefing, because it really pointed to a fact that this really is a deep and dangerous pit.
She and Daffin still encouraged reports to the FTC database, especially through trusted advocates who can file on behalf of victims, but the message was unmistakable.
Families are being told to remain alert in an environment where enforcement against the fraud itself appears uncertain.
These scams thrive where public systems become more punitive. They thrive where people distrust government, and where there is a blur between trustworthy websites and scams.
When Marrero summed it up near the end: the more the government targets certain groups, the more vulnerable those groups become to exploitation.
They fall out of protection on all corners. There is now a secondary market built on state pressure. And in this moment, that is exactly the kind of story community journalism has to keep naming before more families lose money they do not have.
Please share this story with friends so we can help spread the word!
