Oh, I had not heard about this at all. It happened a couple of days ago, and what a development.
This began as a COVID-era fraud case, but what it ended up as should strike fear in the heart of every Somali Learing Center hustler and every Armenian hospice provider.
That naturalized citizenship is not the shield of steel one might have thought it was, or that it used to be back when no one paid attention to such things.
For the year between April 2020 and the next May, 25-year-old Joff Stenn Wroy Philossaint of Fort Lauderdale, FL, had himself a schweet little scheme going with COVID loan applications and all the various businesses he had registered in his name.
He and his partners in crime came into some serious cha-ching, courtesy of those very forgiving loan programs.
…Between April 2020 and May 2021, Philossaint fraudulently obtained COVID-19 relief funds through companies he owned or controlled and by preparing loan applications for others in exchange for kickbacks. The applications contained materially false representations about the applicants’ revenues and payroll.
In total, Philossaint and his co-conspirators prepared and submitted 40 fraudulent loan applications, obtaining approximately $3.8 million in loan proceeds. Philossaint personally received approximately $549,000 through the scheme in the form of loan proceeds and kickbacks.
This is where it gets really interesting. Thanks to a quirk in immigration law, if you are in the middle of criminal activity when you apply for your citizenship, you can also be charged with submitting a fraudulent application.
ANYONE COME IMMEDIATELY TO MIND?
Haitian-born Philossaint was definitely up to no good in 2020 when he dropped his citizenship application papers, and, when the feds collared him in 2022 for the loans conspiracy charges, guess what else they hung on him?
Philossaint pled out on the conspiracy charges, and a federal jury nailed him on the fraudulent citizenship application.
But another charge — whether he had lied on a naturalization form about his criminal history while his citizenship was pending — went before a Fort Lauderdale federal court jury. According to trial evidence, Philossaint applied to become a U.S. citizen in April 2020. While that application was pending, prosecutors said Philossaint orchestrated his COVID-19 loan scheme in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.
On Dec. 15, 2020, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer interviewed Philossaint about his naturalization application. During the interview, Philossaint “falsely stated” that he had never committed a crime for which he had not been arrested and that he had never made misrepresentations to receive a public benefit such as the PPP loans in the United States, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
In 2023, a federal judge sentenced him to 50 months.
That would have been the end of the story in most administrations, but not in this one. In February of this year, the Justice Department petitioned the court for an order revoking Philossaint’s citizenship, and it was formally stripped yesterday.
A Haitian national has been stripped of his United States citizenship after bilking nearly $4 million from COVID-19 relief programs during his naturalization process, federal authorities said.
U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith ordered the citizenship of Joff Stenn Wroy Philossaint, 36, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to be revoked after ruling that he illegally procured residency by making false statements to immigration officials, Department of Justice officials announced Tuesday.
“United States citizenship is one of the greatest privileges our nation can offer, and it must be earned honestly,” U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones said in a statement. “This defendant built his path to citizenship on false statements while stealing millions from programs meant to keep small businesses alive during the pandemic. The court’s order revoking his citizenship restores accountability and reinforces a simple principle: If you lie to obtain immigration benefits and commit federal crimes, you will lose what you unlawfully gained.”
IF YOU LIE, YOU LOSE WHAT YOU UNLAWFULLY GAINED
There’s a concept, no?
This isn’t the only case they have simmering away, either. The former mayor of North Miami is on the DoJ hotseat, both for fraud he’s allegedly committed and for a fraudulent marriage and citizenship application.
They have filed to restore him to Citizen of Haiti status, too.
NEW: In a rare denaturalization case, DOJ has filed to strip U.S. citizenship away from the former mayor of North Miami, FL, who they allege is a Haitian fraudster who used two identities & committed marriage fraud to obtain American citizenship after illegally entering the U.S.… pic.twitter.com/8YzBbIxEFg
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 19, 2026
…DOJ says he used a fraudulent “photo switched” passport under the name Jean Philippe Janiver to enter the U.S. before being ordered deported under that identity in 2001. He appealed the deportation order, then withdrew the appeal, claiming he had moved back to Haiti, when in reality, he remained in the U.S. and took on a new name, Philippe Bien-Aime, and new date of birth, then married a U.S. citizen to obtain permanent resident status.
But DOJ says that marriage was fraudulent, because he was already married to a Haitian citizen.
DOJ says after making a serious of fraudulent statements to immigration authorities, he was eventually naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2006 under the new identity.
DOJ says federal investigators at DHS/USCIS discovered the fraud & confirmed it through a comparison of fingerprints that he provided under the two identities.
That review is part of an ongoing national initiative designed to find fraud in partnership between DOJ & USCIS.
Hiz Dishonor is taking his ‘partner/wife #3/what’ with him into the immigration fraud ether. It turns out she’s a serious visa overstayer as well. Her ‘final deportation order’ dates back 26 years.
YOICKS
Sarahjane Ternier, the long-time partner of former North Miami mayor Philippe Bien-Aime and mother of three of his children, has been detained by federal immigration officials amid an ongoing effort to strip the Haiti-born politician of his U.S. citizenship.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman confirmed Friday to the Miami Herald that Ternier was arrested by agents on Wednesday in Miami in relation to a final deportation order issued on July 31, 2000. According to the agency, Ternier entered the U.S. on June 12, 1994; her appeal of the deportation order was dismissed on Oct. 23, 2002, by the Board of Immigration Appeals. She will remain in ICE custody pending her removal from the United States. ICE’s detainee locator showed on Saturday morning that she was being held at the Broward Transitional Center.
Ternier and Bien-Aime have long been a couple, though details from Bien-Amie’s ongoing federal denaturalization case cast doubt upon whether the couple’s 1993 marriage in Haiti was legitimate. According to the case, he was simultaneously married to two other women during his relationship with Ternier, a registered nurse
There’s a whale of a mess to straighten out.
And Ms Ternier seems like a real peach herself.
…Ternier also wasn’t always saying who she was.
A criminal complaint filed in the U.S. Northern District of New York shows that on Feb. 14, 1997, she attempted to enter the U.S. using a fake Canadian identification card.
She was in a car with a man named William Jean Louis when they arrived at the Champlain Port of Entry at the Quebec-New York border. Broward County has records of a 2001 marriage between Ternier and a Haitian man with a similar name.
During the inspection in New York, the officer noted that Ternier did not match the identification on the citizenship card. “She was unable to match the card signature, or produce additional documentation to support her claim,” read the complaint.
Holy smokes. Sympathy meter is pegged.
We can’t be rid of both of them soon enough.
And I certainly hope there’s more of this kind of action in progress everywhere. What am I saying – betcha there’s a bunch in the works.
I hope everyone with those papers running a scam is poopin’ their drawers when they hear about this.
That citizenship is a precious gift, not a shield for grift.
What the government giveth, oh, it can surely take away. And away they go.
Alrighty.
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