An immigration raid on what officials are calling a “sham university” in California is having reverberations in upper levels of the Indian and U.S. governments and will be a topic of discussion when the Indian foreign minister visits Washington this month.
In a federal forfeiture complaint, the United States attorney for Northern California accuses Tri-Valley University, outside San Francisco, of making “false statements and misrepresentations” to receive U.S. Department of Homeland Security authorization to issue visa-related documents, and of receiving millions of dollars to help “foreign nationals to illegally obtain student visas in return for tuition fees.”
The institution, says the complaint filed last month in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, operated a “profit-sharing system” that allowed students to receive a cut of the tuition revenues of other students they referred.
Tri-Valley officials did not immediately respond to phone or e-mail messages requesting comment.
Indian government officials have questioned why the university was permitted to operate and have condemned the use of radio-tracking devices used to monitor some of the 1,500 Indian students were enrolled at Tri-Valley and who were detained and released following the investigation. The controversy has also permeated the Indian parliamentary debate over whether to allow American and other foreign universities to open campuses in that country, with some lawmakers asking what protections there will be against fly-by-night institutions.
In a statement, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi said that ankle bracelets do not “necessarily imply guilt or suspicion of criminal activity” and argued that visa fraud hinders “genuine students” from studying in the United States and takes opportunities from legitimate applicants.
The Indian government has set up a dedicated e-mail address to respond to inquiries from affected students.
Ballooning Enrollment
It is unclear what first led homeland-security officials to investigate Tri-Valley, which received government approval to issue visa-related documents in February 2009. Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency could not comment on active cases.
But the complaint, a civil document that seeks forfeiture of properties owned by Tri-Valley’s chief operating officer, Susan Su, details explosive allegations. (No criminal charges have been filed, Ms. Kice said.)
The university, which says it offers degrees in business, engineering, medicine, and other fields, went from enrolling just two international students on visas in early 2009 to 1,555 in the fall of 2010 term. A homeland-security site visit in February 2009 as part of the approval process to grant visas, however, found that the university had capacity for just 30 students.
Visa-granting authority was given under false pretenses, the federal complaint asserts. As an unaccredited institution, Tri-Valley had to provide evidence from three accredited colleges that they would accept credits earned at the university. At least two of the articulation agreements supplied to homeland-security officials were false, the complaint says, and administrators at those institutions had not in the past and did not agree in the future to accept Tri-Valley credits.
Of the more than 1,500 international students enrolled at the university, 95 percent were Indian nationals. And more than half were reported in information submitted to the government by Tri-Valley administrators to be residing in a single apartment, according to the complaint. That was done, the federal government alleges, to conceal the fact that the students were not living in California.
The court documents do not specify exactly what the students were doing. Indian newspapers, however, have reported that some were illegally working in other parts of the country.
For students to maintain immigration status, they must show proof they are making reasonable process toward completing course work and must physically attend classes.
The government alleges that Tri-Valley, instead, approved visa-related documents for students who were not actively enrolled in classes.
Accusation of Running a ‘Pyramid Scheme’
According to the complaint, a witness wearing an audio device visited Tri-Valley in June 2010, carrying written information about two other foreign students, friends who he said had been “terminated” in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or Sevis, a federal database that monitors foreign students and scholars.
The witness said he saw Ms. Su sign paperwork, which bears the signatures of other Tri-Valley administrators, to apply for new visas.
A month later, the complaint alleges, the witness returned to the university to pay $2,000 to “activate” the status of the two students. Neither of the so-called students ever attended classes but remained on active status in the Sevis database as late as November 2010.
Based on a semester’s tuition fee of up to $2,700, the complaint estimates, Tri-Valley’s international-student revenue could have approached $4.2-million in the fall of 2010 alone.
Indian officials have suggested that the foreign students were victims of Tri-Valley’s fraud. But the court documents allege that some may have been in on what it describes as the university’s “pyramid scheme.”
Under what the government calls a referral and profit-sharing system, international students were able to collect up to 20 percent of the tuition of any new student they referred, the complaint alleges. They could also then collect up to 5 percent of the tuition of students their referred students refer.
“A large percentage of foreign nationals” at Tri-Valley, the government alleges, “participate in this referral/profit-sharing scheme.”
