David Noriega / BuzzFeed News
Early in May 2010, immigrant rights activist Oswaldo Cabrera announced that he was going on hunger strike.
Arizona had just passed its infamous bill targeting undocumented immigrants. Tens of thousands of people had recently gathered in Washington, D.C., to demand comprehensive immigration reform. Democrats, who controlled Congress at the time, were vowing to pass a reform bill, and activists around the country were convinced they could push them to do so.
Cabrera, a fixture in the Spanish-language press in Los Angeles, had recently moved to New York City. He had built a reputation as a tireless defender of the rights of the U.S.-citizen children of undocumented immigrants.
"I'm determined to arrive at the final consequences — death, if necessary," Cabrera told a camera crew from CNN En Español outside a church in East Harlem, demanding the repeal of the Arizona law and citizenship for America’s undocumented. “The system has to change.”
Cabrera would go on to say that the hunger strike lasted two months. "I nearly lost my kidney and my liver," Cabrera recently told BuzzFeed News. "And I did it with pleasure."
A few days after Cabrera announced the hunger strike, Luis Enrique Flores ran into him in Queens. The two men came from the same small province in Ecuador, and Flores had hired Cabrera to help him with his immigration case. Cabrera denies what happened next, but according to Flores, they dined together that night at an Ecuadorian restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue.
"We ate well," Flores said.
From the top floor of an office building in central Los Angeles, Cabrera runs the Coalición Latinoamericana Internacional, an organization that offers nearly every conceivable immigration-related service. On TV, on the radio, and in full-page ads in Spanish-language broadsheets, Cabrera says he will help make you and your family legal. Some of these ads claim he and the Coalición have won more than 250,000 immigration cases.
But Cabrera is not a lawyer. Instead, he styles himself an activist — a community leader and defender of immigrants’ rights. For more than a decade, Cabrera has reached an audience of millions, making frequent and steady appearances in every major Spanish-language television network and newspaper. At times he has managed to cross into English-language media, landing in the pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
All the while, Cabrera has used his reputation as an immigrants’ rights advocate to steer clients to his business, allegedly illegally charging them thousands of dollars to file paperwork with federal immigration authorities. On both coasts, he has left a trail of people who accuse him of misrepresenting his ability to take on their cases, swindling them out of what little savings they had, and failing to file any meaningful paperwork or do any real work on their behalf — leaving them in exactly the same legal situation as when they first walked through his door.
Now Cabrera stands accused of fraud in two lawsuits in California, and the lawyers who filed them say there are at least three others coming. The lawsuits accuse Cabrera of posing as a lawyer and charging people thousands in appointment after appointment.
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer Affairs, which regularly collaborates with law enforcement, declined to release records about Cabrera, citing a pending investigation.
Cabrera’s operation is unusual in its flair, but he is hardly alone. Ever since President Barack Obama announced last November that he would protect millions of immigrants from deportation, advocates around the country have been sounding the alarms about scams by so-called notarios, a catch-all term for people who practice immigration law without a license, some of whom use their status in the community to ruthlessly exploit those seeking to navigate the U.S. immigration system.
Under U.S. law, only immigration attorneys and a small number of accredited non-lawyers are allowed to help immigrants seeking status with even the simplest of transactions, such as filling out and filing forms with the government. The American immigration system is extraordinarily complex, and every step of the way, the stakes are high — immigrants who submit false information to the government, knowingly or otherwise, can wind up deported.
Yet, all over the country, there is a critical shortage of legal services for immigrants. The result is a vast underworld of informal and usually illegal consultants — notarios.
In the U.S., a notary public does unglamorous legal drudge work. But in many Latin American countries, a notario is an ill-defined but powerful figure with broad legal authority, often someone with the connections needed to navigate bureaucracies that, while arcane, are also flexible. Unscrupulous notarios in the U.S. exploit these facts to con immigrants into believing that all it takes to finally get legal is the right person to file the paperwork.
Both shady notarios and their victims are usually immigrants. In going about these transactions, immigrants are much more likely to trust their own people. They speak the language, they have connections in the home country, and they understand the endless daily anxieties of undocumented life.
Most notarios operate under the radar, but others, like Cabrera, do the opposite: They build trusted public reputations as community leaders and advocates.
In lengthy interviews with BuzzFeed News, conducted in Spanish, Cabrera denied breaking any laws. He insisted, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary, that he never charges for his services, and that every cent he ever received was a voluntary donation. And he defended his track record as an activist, saying that he contributed to every major immigrant rights victory in recent memory, from driver's licenses for the undocumented in California to Obama's deferred action programs.
"My conscience," Cabrera said, "is clear."
Daddy Yankee on a brochure for Adopt an Immigrant
Coalición Latinoamericana Internacional
Cabrera’s offices are divided into three cramped rooms along the same dark hallway. The reception room is decorated with poster-size, framed collages of newspaper clippings. Sometimes two copies of the same article show up twice.
On the morning of his first interview with BuzzFeed News, Cabrera walked into the reception room and introduced himself. “Did you see the article in the New York Times?" he said. "I’ve had a very respectable trajectory.”
Wearing a gray suit with a shiny blue dress shirt, Cabrera sat down behind a cluttered desk, and, unprompted, unleashed a torrent of words. Cabrera speaks fast. He leaps wildly from subject to subject, often in the middle of a sentence. He asks himself questions, apropos of nothing, and answers them in the same breath. It’s enough to dizzy any listener.
“How could a barefoot indigenous boy achieve the highest dream of rescuing American democracy?” he asked. His upbringing, he said, had been the focus of a recent interview on the Spanish-language network Centroamérica TV. The answer begins with his birth “in a half-built adobe hut” in an indigenous village in Cañar, an Ecuadorian province nestled against the western edge of the Andes.
“When I was 5 years old, my mother sent me to school barefoot,” he said. “All the other children had shoes, and I didn’t. But I was too young to understand. Later, when I was 13, my mother told me, ‘The reason I sent you to school barefoot was so that one day, when you become an interesting man, a man who defends the civil and human rights of the people, you’ll remember the land where you come from, and that you come from humble origins.’”
In his quest to become such a man, Cabrera said, he obtained a doctorate in international law from the University of Guayaquil. (An official with the university was unable to locate a record of Cabrera’s degree.) Then he set off for the United States.
Cabrera entered the country, he said, “like any other indocumentado” — illegally, crossing the Mexican border into Arizona. He landed in Los Angeles, where he spent his first night sleeping in MacArthur Park. He moved to Lynwood, a majority-Mexican city in South L.A. County, where he had his first taste of activism gathering signatures to repeal a state law that barred undocumented immigrants from getting driver's licenses.
Cabrera made an impression in activist circles during those first years in L.A., said Elba Berruz, the longtime president of an organization of Ecuadorians in the United States. Berruz met him at a reception at the Ecuadorian consulate in Beverly Hills, where he introduced himself as a lawyer. "He was young and politically ambitious," she said. "Everyone would always ask, 'Have you met Oswaldo yet?'"
Above all, Cabrera had a way with reporters and camera crews. Berruz said he never got his hands dirty with community work (a characterization Cabrera disputes), but he would show up to meetings, where TV stations always wanted to interview him. “He was a smooth talker,” Berruz said. "Later I started to wonder whether he was paying them."
It was around this time, in 2004, that Cabrera took up the cause of Jonathan Martinez, an 8-year-old boy from El Salvador who was arrested by the Border Patrol as he tried to enter the country to reunite with his mother. Jonathan was released shortly after he was apprehended. This was routine: A settlement in a federal lawsuit from 1997 compelled immigration authorities to release unaccompanied minors in nearly all circumstances.
Still, Cabrera managed to spin Jonathan's release as an achievement of his group, the Coalición Latinoamericana Internacional. This turned into Cabrera's first highly successful media campaign, landing him an appearance with Jonathan on Sábado Gigante, a massively popular variety show on the Spanish-language network Univision. Sábado Gigante is the oldest and most beloved show on Univision, which has the largest primetime audience of any Spanish-language network, according to Nielsen. Cabrera was preaching his gospel to millions.
About two years later, an immigration judge allowed Jonathan to stay in the country. The boy had actual lawyers — pro bono attorneys from the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. But to this day, Cabrera takes credit for the victory, calling it "his first case."
This is the story Cabrera tells about Jonathan: After a short time in the United States, the boy learned to speak decent English. Sensing an opportunity to "humanize" the judge in his immigration case, Cabrera coached Jonathan to sing the American national anthem during his court hearing. The judge, impressed and properly humanized, allowed Jonathan to stay.
The earliest public accusations of fraud appeared in the newspaper El Diario de Hoy in 2006, the same year that Jonathan won his case. The paper reported that two Salvadoran families in L.A. claimed Cabrera had swindled them out of thousands of dollars by promising to get their kids out of immigration custody.
Today, Cabrera claims these families were manipulated into lying by the editor of the newspaper, who had a personal vendetta against him. Either way, the stories were buried in the avalanche of good publicity that followed Jonathan’s case.
From that point on, Cabrera adopted defending the rights of immigrant kids as his cause. In 2007, he came up with his flagship campaign, "Adopt an Immigrant," in which U.S.-born children "symbolically adopt" their undocumented parents in order to keep them from getting deported. Cabrera claims that this strategy — by "humanizing" judges, as with Jonathan's case — has prevented thousands of families from being torn apart by deportations.
Because Cabrera has never represented anyone in court, it's impossible to know whether this tactic has actually worked in any specific immigration proceedings. But as a publicity stunt, Adopt an Immigrant was brilliant. Cabrera became a go-to source for stories about children left behind by deportations — or "orphaned by La Migra," as he would later put it in the title of a self-published book. For the first time, his appearances weren’t limited to the Spanish press. He was quoted twice in the Los Angeles Times, once on the front page, in stories about families split by deportations.
Adopt an Immigrant also led Cabrera to cross paths with politicians and pop stars, meetings that Cabrera brings up at every possible turn. In 2007, he flew to Miami for a taping of the Univision show Despierta América. Backstage, he posed for pictures with Daddy Yankee, the reggaeton superstar.
Cabrera recalls the meeting fondly. "I said to him, 'Daddy, I need a social change, but I can't do it by myself.'" Cabrera went on to use the singer's picture in promotional materials, and an article in New York's major Spanish daily, El Diario La Prensa, calls Daddy Yankee the "godfather" of Adopt an Immigrant. (Daddy Yankee's publicist acknowledged the meeting in an email to BuzzFeed News, but denied that he ever endorsed Cabrera's campaign.)
Then there was the meeting with Hillary Clinton, which took place, according to Cabrera, at a private fundraiser in Lynwood during the presidential primary campaign in 2007. The meeting was reported by the Spanish newswire EFE at the time, but it's not clear whether Cabrera was the sole source for the information. Clinton's office did not respond to a request for comment. But in Cabrera's telling, Clinton enthusiastically endorsed Adopt an Immigrant.
"It was very important for me," Cabrera said, "when Mrs. Hillary Clinton applauded, and said to me, 'You are very intelligent. Where are you from?' And I told her, 'I'm just an Indian from Ecuador.'"
Photograph by Wladimir Labeikovsky CC BY-SA / Via Flickr: nucho
In 2009, Berruz, the Ecuadorian community leader in L.A., stopped seeing Cabrera around. "He just sort of disappeared," she said. “People had started speaking poorly about him. ... It was already known that he was charging large sums of money to help people with immigration."
One day, Berruz saw Cabrera on television, this time on a show that taped in New York City. Cabrera had settled in Corona, Queens, an immigrant enclave with a large Ecuadorian population. Every block of the neighborhood's main drag, Roosevelt Avenue, is a dense mosaic of storefronts offering services to immigrants, among them countless lawyers and notarios.
Cabrera set up shop in a borrowed corner of a store on Roosevelt Avenue and went about gathering new clients for his business. One of them was Luis Enrique Flores — the immigrant from Cabrera’s same small province in Ecuador who says he dined with Cabrera shortly after he announced his hunger strike.
When Flores landed in immigration custody, friends of his hired Cabrera after seeing him on television. At the same time, Flores hired an attorney in Texas, where he was detained. With the lawyer's help, Flores was released and returned to New York.
Flores continued paying Cabrera to help ensure that his case would be permanently resolved. Over the course of several months, Flores said, he paid Cabrera more than $30,000. He trusted Cabrera for many reasons, among them the fact that they came from the same place and had become friends. "How was I going to think that he was running a scam?" Flores said to BuzzFeed News from Ecuador, where he returned a few years ago.
Flores said that he asked around in Queens about Cabrera, and found several other people who said they had given him money. "Just like he scammed me, he scammed many others," Flores said.
Cabrera denied that he took Flores’ money without helping in his immigration case. He said he accepted donations from Flores (though less than Flores says he paid), and that Flores’ release from detention and his ability to remain in the country were the result of his work.
Meanwhile, Cabrera ramped up his activist campaigns. He promoted his self-published book, whose title translates to American Children Orphaned by La Migra. He announced his hunger strike from the church in East Harlem.
But Cabrera also raised eyebrows in activist circles. Vicente Mayorga, an Ecuadorian community organizer with Make The Road New York, recalled going with Cabrera to a forum in Connecticut on immigration reform. After the meeting, Cabrera announced that anyone needing additional help should come see him in private.
Mayorga, who had heard about Cabrera’s side business, confronted him. "I told him that you don't charge people for this," Mayorga said. "You don't charge a cent."
Cabrera complained that Mayorga was interfering with his work. "What work?" Mayorga replied. "This isn't work. Pick up a shovel. That's work."
