Accusations that a Miami attorney “scammed” Venezuelan asylum seekers speak volumes about the cruelty of the U.S. immigration system.
By Reason – Jim Epstein
Dec 2, 2021
When Aleidy Andara was 16 weeks pregnant with twin boys, she discovered during a routine ultrasound that she had a rare disorder causing an imbalance in the distribution of nutrients and oxygen between the fetuses. If she were to give birth in a Mexican hospital, the babies’ chances of survival were low.
Andara and her husband, Javier Bracho, had fled Venezuela in 2019, after being detained, beaten, and tortured for participating in protests against the Maduro regime, and they had been living in Mexico for almost a year. They were seeking political asylum from the U.S., but as part of the “Remain in Mexico” program created by the Trump administration, they were required to wait outside the country while their cases were considered.
On August 11, 2020, desperate for Andara to be treated at a U.S. hospital, the couple hired a coyote to take them across the Rio Grande on an inflatable boat. They were picked up by border patrol, and Andara’s plea was granted. On September 10, she gave birth to Noah and Nathan at a hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. Noah required two heart surgeries and was in the hospital for four months. Bracho, who had been sent back to México, wasn’t able to be by his wife’s side and didn’t meet his sons until they were half a year old.
Andara and Bracho say that their entire ordeal could have been avoided if they hadn’t hired a Miami-based immigration attorney named Rolando Vázquez.
Vazquez refers to himself as the “Angel of the Border,” and boasts that he’s never lost an asylum case – even though asylum cases have become extremely difficult to win in recent years. His Instagram account, where Vázquez seems to find most of his business, features emotional videos of clients expressing their gratitude for all that he’s done for them. With his cherubic face and gentle manner, Vázquez often appears in the videos, looking on with earnest humility.
Vázquez, who is of Mexican descent, has alluded to the fact that one day he plans to run for political office. His wife, Sabina Conteras, came from Venezuela, and she has helped him find a niche working with immigrants who’ve been threatened, tortured, and imprisoned by the sham democracy led by Nicolás Maduro.
“He’s one of the best in South Florida,” Vazquez’s attorney, Robert Harris, told Reason. “And I believe he’s number one in the representation in immigration court of Venezuelans. Number one!”
Andara and Bracho are now part of a community of Vázquez’s ex-clients who are organizing to get him disbarred. They’ve come together in two WhatsApp groups, with about 60 total members, to commiserate about Vázquez’s alleged misdeeds and prepare formal complaints to submit to the Florida Bar. The two groups also have a handful of volunteers who are helping with Spanish to English translation.
Over the past few weeks, they’ve submitted 15 complaints, and they’re planning to introduce 10 more this week. The Florida Bar currently has six open cases against Vázquez, according to a spokesperson, all of which have advanced to the second stage in its review process. The complaints aren’t publicly available, but several former clients shared their submissions with Reason, which include copies of email and text correspondences. They allege that Vázquez and his staff “scammed” them by doing little or nothing to advance the cases he was paid to take on and that he didn’t answer or return their calls. Several ex-clients are also accusing Contreras, who serves as the firm’s office manager and senior paralegal, of verbally abusing them and demanding additional payment, even though the terms of their original contracts hadn’t been fulfilled.
“These are claims by customers who didn’t receive a good result” so they “attack a lawyer for his confidence or his professionalism because they wanted their case to go better,” attorney Brian Barakat, told Reason. Barakat, who is representing Vázquez in his dealings with the Florida Bar, says that he has reviewed two of the claims so far, both of which were rejected. “I fully expect all of the claims to be dismissed,” Barakat said.
In testimony that Andara submitted to the Bar, she described her experience working with Vázquez as “awful and traumatic” asking “kindly” for “justice to be made.”She alleges that Vázquez missed a crucial hearing that took place over the phone, which led to a two-month postponement. In the meantime, the immigration courts closed down because of COVID-19, putting Andara, Bracho, and tens of thousands of other asylum claimants in limbo. After Andara became pregnant and needed emergency medical attention, she says that Vázquez declined to help her gain permission to enter the United States.
According to emails that the couple shared with Reason, Andara and Bracho paid Vázquez $4,000 to represent them, but after the twins were born, Sabina Contreras demanded $750 more to continue representing Andara, and an additional $2,500 to continue representing Bracho, on the grounds that their decision to cross the border had changed the terms of their cases. According to Andara’s testimony submitted to the Florida Bar, Contreras was “verbally abusive…to the point that she even told me in that call that she wished [for] my babies’ death.”
“You act as if the additional work required by your illegal entry will be done for free,” Contreras wrote in an email Andara shared with Reason. “I’ll remind you again that the judge and lawyer for ICE are being informed of all your lies and malicious accusations,” she wrote. When she told Contreras she would find a different lawyer, Andara says that Contreras attempted to charge them thousands more to drop their case and to return their paperwork.
U.S. immigration law has long been rife with attorneys who take money from clients and then do little to advance their cases.
“It’s very easy to make a lot of money losing asylum cases for $10,000 each and never really face any consequences,” says immigration attorney Brian Hoffman, who’s the executive director of the nonprofit Ohio Center for Strategic Immigration Litigation & Outreach. “This problem has been extremely severe and endemic for as long as I can remember.”
Quality legal representation is expensive because litigating an immigration case requires navigating a mountain of red tape and the rules are constantly changing, so immigrants like Andara become easy targets for discount practitioners who promise big but never deliver.
Vázquez and Contreras declined our interview request, but they did connect us with Harris, another one of their attorneys, who maintained that the charges against his clients are fabricated. “To the extent that people are saying that Mr. Vásquez and people associated with this firm are, quote, ‘abandoning them or scamming them,’ I think is beyond the pale,” Harris said.
“Sometimes these people are very belligerent and they just don’t understand,” said Harris, “particularly when they come from countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, and the like. And many times they don’t understand the processes here in the United States, and when they don’t get the results that they were looking for, they demand that the money be paid back.”
Several of Vázquez’s accusers say they were too frightened to speak out until the investigative journalist Patricia Poleo, a winner of the prestigious King of Spain Journalism Award, and a Venezuelan political asylee herself, set out to expose him. Over the past month, she has been sharing video testimony from Vazquez’s former clients on her nightly show, Agárrate.
On November 10, Vázquez sued Poleo in Miami Civil Court, along with four of his former clients who appeared on her show. The lawsuit denies all of the allegations, and asserts that by attacking Vázquez, Poleo engaged in “unfair business practices” by trying to destroy his law practice to benefit other immigration lawyers who advertise on her show. “Poleo kept secret from the consumers her financial interest to destroy Plaintiffs,” the complaint states, “so that she can get clients and divert them to her business partners.”
Harris told Reason that his client is planning to amend the complaint to also charge Poleo with defamation. “I’m a First Amendment guy, I get it,” Harris told Reason. “But she’s going beyond.”
In a since-deleted Instagram video (which Poleo captured and has been running on her nightly political show), Vázquez and Contreras hurled insults at Poleo. “You’re not a person of God – you’re a bitch,” Contreras shouted.
Vázquez claims to be a prominent opponent of the Venezuelan government. “The Chavistas hate me because I won’t help them,” he said. “Patricia is a closeted Chavista,” shouted Contreras, “and it pains her that Rolando is helping the detained by rescuing them from the claws of the Maduro regime.” The lawsuit also asserts that Poleo’s animus towards Vazquez is driven by her “hatred” of his political views.
It’s a surprising claim to make about Patricia Poleo, who was exposing Hugo Chávez’s efforts to undermine Venezuela’s constitutional democracy back when he was still a darling of the left. In 2004, as editorial director of the newspaper El Nuevo País, Poleo was accused of “instigating rebellion” for sharing a video that demonstrated that Cubans had infiltrated the Venezuelan National Guard, which is one of several instances in which her reporting embarrassed the socialist government. The same year, her investigation of the suspicious killing of a Venezuelan prosecutor led the secret police to search her residence and call her before a military court. In 2005, when the government issued a warrant for her arrest in that case, Poleo escaped to the U.S. while hidden away on a boat and was granted asylum. The Venezuelan government responded by putting out a notice for her to be detained and extradited through INTERPOL, and Poleo was arrested in 2010 at an airport in Peru and held for several hours. The matter was dropped when the agency accepted that the attempt to prosecute Poleo was politically motivated.
The Chávez and Maduro regimes for years have used bogus defamation lawsuits, among other tactics, to silence journalists and shutter newspapers critical of the government. In 2004, Poleo herself was sued for defamation by Jesse Chacón, Minister of Interior and Justice under Chávez, for embarrassing him in the pages of El Nuevo País. She was stripped of her political rights, including her right to vote, and was sentenced to a six-month term in prison, though she didn’t end up serving any time.
After relocating to Miami, Poleo continued her hard-nosed reporting on the Venezuelan government and its network of corruption. In 2015, she published a story in the Doral News alleging that the Miami businessman Gianfranco Rondón served as the “bag man” for Diosdado Cabello, the second most powerful political figure in Venezuela, who is wanted by the U.S. Department of State on allegations of “corrupt and violent narco-terrorism.” After the story appeared, Rondon sued Poleo and her boss at the paper, Gianfranco Napolitano, for defamation and racketeering, accusing Napolitano of trying to extort him for $5 million in exchange for dropping the story. The charges were dismissed.
In a recent Instagram live video, Poleo mocked Vazquez’s lawsuit and warmly greeted her fans, while taking enthusiastic bites of a ham and cheese sandwich. She assured her audience that if she was willing to risk her freedom by speaking truth to the Chávez regime, she wasn’t about to be silenced by a Miami immigration attorney. “There isn’t a judge in the U.S. who will demand that I stay silent because the First Amendment is freedom of speech,” she said while smiling and waving the legal complaint in her hand.
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Read More: Reason – Venezuelan immigrants and the lawyer who let them down
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