A suburban Chicago man drew two years in federal prison for organizing hundreds of staged armed robberies that helped thousands pose as crime victims and chase U visas for cash, prosecutors said.
Parth Nayi of Illinois was sentenced Thursday for his role at the center of a conspiracy that turned small businesses and eateries into props for immigration fraud. Prosecutors said he coached supposed victims, collected large cash payments, and helped push paperwork meant for real crime victims who assist law enforcement.
Fox News reported that Nayi participated in hundreds of staged armed robberies in and around Chicago and helped others apply for U visas in exchange for money. The scam reached far beyond one city. A 2024 indictment identified more than a dozen locations, including a Subway in Louisiana and a truck stop in Middle Tennessee.
Federal prosecutors said thousands of people paid Nayi to take part. Some payments ran as high as $30,000. Several other suspects were charged in Illinois in connection with the plot to defraud the federal immigration system, and five others besides Nayi have been convicted.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Saqib Mohammad Hussain laid out Nayi’s role in a sentencing memo that left little room for spin.
"[Nayi] was the main organizer and at the center of almost every single one of the hundreds of staged robberies that were perpetrated. [The] defendant significantly corrupted the federal U-Visa program, designed to provide a benefit to a particularly vulnerable group, foreign nationals who are victims of serious crimes while visiting the United States,"
That is the government’s account of how a protection created for genuine victims became a product for sale.
U visas date to a 2000 law meant to protect trafficking victims and battered immigrant women who cooperate with police. After the staged holdups, purported victims were coached to seek law-enforcement certification on I-918 supplements, then submit I-918 forms to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for protected legal status.
In plain terms, the paperwork treats the applicant as a crime victim helping investigators. In this case, prosecutors say the “crimes” were theater, the victims were customers of the scheme, and the benefit was a path to legal status bought with cash.
Nayi did not work alone. Alleged co-conspirators included Bhikhabhai Patel, Nilesh Patel, Ravinaben Patel, Rajnikumar Patel, and Kewon Young. Prosecutors said people reached out to Nayi so they could pose as robbery victims and then apply for U visas.
Bhikhabhai Patel allegedly posed as a victim at a Chicago Dunkin’ in 2023 before filing a fraudulent U visa application. Ravinaben Patel allegedly posed as a victim at a second Dunkin’ and filed a false police report about the incident.
With Kewon Young, Nayi recruited people to serve as armed “robbers.” At times those recruits struck the purported victims to make the staged robbery look real. They organized and took part in holdups of shops and bodegas across the area.
The violence was not always fake. In July 2023, during a staged “robbery” at a Chicago liquor store, an alleged assailant accidentally discharged a weapon and critically injured a store employee. The perpetrators fled in a stolen vehicle, according to local reporting cited in the coverage.
A program sold as compassion for the vulnerable ended with a worker shot and a getaway in a stolen car. That is the cost when immigration benefits become a business model.
Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., was a lead sponsor of the anti-trafficking legislation that created the U visa. He told Fox News Digital the fraud demands full prosecution, not shrugs.
"Anyone who engages in visa fraud or falsifies claims to obtain any government benefit should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and if guilty, jailed,"
Smith went further on what makes this abuse especially ugly.
"It is especially egregious to abuse a program designed to help victims of human trafficking, often women and children, who are cooperating with police and are working to recover from their extraordinary trauma. We must hold abusive criminals accountable."
When the author of the protection calls the scam an insult to trafficking victims, the policy failure is not abstract. It is a direct hit on the people the law was written to help.
Rep. Chip Roy has pointed to the same visa-fraud pattern involving Indian nationals while pushing his PAUSE Act to temporarily halt immigration and pressing the Senate over the stalled Save America Act. The sentencing lands in a country already carrying the highest number of foreign-born residents in its history, with enforcement fights raging in sanctuary strongholds.
The case unfolded in Illinois, under Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker. Fox News Digital sought comment from both men, and from USCIS, the Department of Homeland Security, and ICE. The public record in the reporting does not show substantive answers that grapple with how staged robberies scaled into a visa pipeline on their turf.
Johnson has repeatedly attacked federal immigration enforcement, including under President Trump, and has likened aggressive enforcement to an America that looks as if the “Confederacy won” the Civil War. That rhetoric treats interior enforcement as the scandal. The Nayi case points at a different scandal: organized fakery that used local businesses, false police reports, and federal benefits while a store worker was left critically hurt.
Taxpayers fund the courts, the prosecutors, the visa bureaucracy, and the hospital care when a prop gunfight goes wrong. Lawful immigrants and actual trafficking victims wait in line behind people who, prosecutors say, paid for a staged crime scene. Soft-on-enforcement politics that treat every removal case as cruelty have little to say when the “victim” bought the robbery.
The mechanics were straightforward. Stage an armed robbery at a small business. Coach the paid “victim.” Seek a law-enforcement signature on the certification piece of the U-visa packet. File with USCIS. Collect the immigration benefit reserved for people who actually suffered serious crimes and helped police.
Prosecutors say Nayi was the organizer tying those steps together across hundreds of jobs. The 2024 indictment stretched the map from Chicago shops to a Louisiana sandwich shop and a Middle Tennessee truck stop. A related caption in the coverage referenced Indian nationals charged in a visa-fraud scheme with fake robberies at Massachusetts stores, with federal authorities describing 11 defendants in that matter. Whether every thread is one conspiracy or a family of copycats, the method is the same: manufacture victims, then cash in on a humanitarian visa.
Five others besides Nayi have already been convicted in the Illinois-centered case, though the indictment materials described in the reporting do not list those names in the summary. Several additional suspects face charges for conspiracy to defraud the immigration system. Nayi’s two-year sentence is the concrete result so far for the man prosecutors called the main organizer.
Open questions remain. The coverage gives Thursday as the sentencing day without a full calendar date. The names of the five other convicted defendants are not spelled out in the indictment description provided. Exact statutes, docket numbers, and the full roster of charged defendants sit in court files beyond the summary. It is also unclear how the Illinois case lines up, person for person, with the Massachusetts store scheme referenced in caption material.
What is not unclear is the incentive structure. A visa category built for traumatized trafficking victims and battered women became, in prosecutors’ telling, a menu item. Armed men hit real stores. Fake victims filed real reports. Money changed hands in sums up to $30,000. USCIS received I-918 filings seeking protected status. And when a gun went off in a Chicago liquor store, the injury was not staged.
Smith’s standard is simple: fraud for government benefits should bring prosecution and jail. Hussain’s memo says Nayi corrupted a program aimed at the vulnerable. The sentence is two years. The unrebutted facts are hundreds of staged robberies, thousands of paid poseurs, and a bureaucracy that processes victim claims at scale.
If leaders in sanctuary cities want fewer federal officers on their streets, they can start by explaining how local police certifications and small-business crime scenes became raw material for an immigration hustle this wide, and why the workers cleaning up blood are never the ones collecting the visa fee.
A country that cannot tell a real trafficking survivor from a customer who rented a robbery will keep rewarding the wrong people, and lawful Americans will keep paying the bill.
