Founder of Big Immigration Firm Gets 2 Years, Fined $750K in Visa Case
The former founder of one of the West Coast’s biggest immigration law firms was sentenced Friday to two years in prison for filing fraudulent visa applications.
In addition to the prison term, Daniel Korenberg, 58, was also sentenced to serve six months of home confinement, with electronic monitoring, after his release, and fined $750,000, reports the Associated Press. Steven Rodriguez, 41, a former senior associate who had been at the firm for 14 years and once ran its San Francisco office, was sentenced to three years of probation followed by six months of electronic monitoring for making false statements to federal agents. He also got 200 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.
Korenberg, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy and two counts of visa fraud, apologized and asked for leniency, saying that he had worked to help immigrants achieve “the American dream,” the news agency reports.
Previously known as Korenberg, Abramowitz & Feldun, the Sherman Oaks., Calif., firm is now named ASK Law Group.
Investigators said the law firm “may have distributed up to 1,000 fraudulent visas, primarily between 2000 and 2003,” according to a Copley News Service account of the indictment of the two lawyers last year.
It says a probe of Korenberg and Rodriguez began after authorities were tipped by a defendant in a different case, and involved an undercover federal investigator who posed as a firm client.
Another former partner, Philip Abramowitz, pleaded guilty last year to visa fraud and conspiracy, in what the Copley article describes as a related case, and a paralegal in a supervisory position pleaded guilty to conspiracy. The article doesn’t say what sentences they received.
