11 Charged in Decade-Long Sham Marriage Ring That Sold Green Cards for Up to $100,000

Federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment Wednesday charging 11 people with running one of the largest marriage fraud operations in U.S. history. According to the Justice Department, the scheme ran from 2016 through July 2026 and arranged more than 1,000 sham marriages, mostly between Chinese nationals and American citizens.

Ten of the 11 defendants were arrested Wednesday morning. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called it "one of the largest marriage fraud prosecutions in United States history" at a press conference announcing the charges.

How it worked

The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, names Amy Cheng, Xiao Mei Chan, and Gang Zheng as facilitators who ran the operation, according to CBS News. Prosecutors say foreign nationals paid facilitators as much as $100,000 for a sham marriage and help getting a green card. U.S. citizens who agreed to marry strangers got paid up to $30,000. Recruiters who found willing Americans collected commissions of roughly $5,000 per head, the Justice Department said.

Officials say the network pulled in tens of millions of dollars over the decade it operated, according to Newsday. Blanche told reporters it was "a yearslong, multimillion-dollar cottage industry to criminally assist people who would not, or legally could not, otherwise become citizens of the United States."

The operation stretched well beyond New York, where most of the recruiting happened, into Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and overseas to China and the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, according to the Daily Signal and the Department of Justice.

Staged weddings, staged lives

The indictment describes an operation built to survive scrutiny from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Couples held ceremonies at restaurants, changed into traditional Chinese wedding attire, and invited friends and family "to create the appearance of a legitimate wedding," according to the indictment as cited by CBS News.

Facilitators allegedly helped couples open joint bank accounts and staged family photos to submit with green card applications, the Daily Wire reported. Once the foreign national secured the green card, the group would allegedly help the couple divorce.

Prosecutors say the operation extended into prenuptial planning. In one case cited by Blanche, an agreement stipulated the couple would live separately "and must not interfere with each other" — a detail that undercuts any claim the marriages were anything but transactions on paper.

The charges

Each of the 11 defendants faces one count of conspiracy to commit marriage fraud and immigration fraud, carrying a maximum five-year sentence, and one count of conspiracy to encourage unlawful residence of aliens in the United States, carrying up to 10 years, according to the Daily Signal. U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald for the Southern District of New York is leading the prosecution.

"Today's arrests have dismantled a central component of one of the largest marriage fraud schemes charged in United States history," McDonald said, according to the Justice Department's press release.

USCIS Director Joseph Edlow added his own warning: "Anyone willing to lie, cheat or steal their way to legal immigration status is a direct threat to America's national security."

These are charges, not convictions. None of the 11 defendants has been convicted of anything yet, and it was not immediately clear Wednesday whether they had retained lawyers, according to the Associated Press. The allegations in the indictment are just that — allegations — until proven in court.

Numbers that don't quite match

Coverage on the dollar figures wasn't perfectly consistent. Blanche was quoted by Newsday, the AP, and the LA Times describing the operation as a "multibillion dollar cottage industry," while the Justice Department's own press release and other outlets, including the Daily Signal, described it as "multimillion-dollar." Given that the alleged revenue is described elsewhere as "tens of millions of dollars" over a decade, "multibillion" appears to be either a misstatement or a transcription error carried across multiple wire-fed stories rather than a documented total.

What comes next

This case lands amid a broader Trump administration push on immigration enforcement that goes beyond the border. The Justice Department has directed federal prosecutors to prioritize denaturalization cases against naturalized citizens who got their citizenship through fraud, and Blanche said more than 120 such complaints have been filed since President Trump returned to office, according to the Daily Wire.

The open question is how many of the roughly 1,000 marriages tied to this network will now be individually reviewed by USCIS for green card revocation, and how many of the foreign nationals involved could face deportation proceedings separate from the criminal case against the 11 defendants. Neither the Justice Department nor USCIS has said publicly how that review process will work or how long it will take.