7 News Belize

A Dozen Detained: Immigration Cracking Down On Ring of Fraudsters
posted (May 15, 2014)
Last night we told you about the Guatemalan couple 42 year-old Alfredo Orlando Gonzalez Marcos, and his common-law wife 46 year-old Marleny Elizabeth Castellanos who are currently remanded to prison after they confessed to mass immigration fraud. Well, credible reports tell us that the Immigration Department has closed in on an immigration scam of which Marleny Castellanos is supposedly the ring leader.

We're told that on Tuesday, Castellanos was detained at the Western Border as she was trying to flee the country, after being investigated for over a month by the Immigration Department. Information to our newsroom says that Castellanos is suspected of being a chief facilitator for persons trying to illegally obtain Belizean nationality certificates. Yesterday, Immigration Officers went on a mass-round up on both Caye Caulker and San Pedro where some 11 persons were detained for illegal nationality certificates - allegedly engineered by Castellanos.

We're told that these persons have since been transferred to Belmopan, where they will be assessed for immigration offences.

And how did she do it? Well, credible reports say much like she did her own. Cuellar, it is alleged would use connections in the registry and immigration departments to get birth certificates of long deceased persons and then push these through the Immigration Department for nationality documents. One of her clients may have been 24-year-old Rafael Alexander Vasquez Medina. He claimed that in September 2013, his mother was approached at her stall at the Michael Finnegan Market by a woman who said she could get her son's nationality document all worked out for just five hundred dollars.

She took only a week to get it done, and application and certificate were processed in just one day at the Immigration Office in Belmopan. Medina got his nationality by descent, but neither of his parents is Belizean. The nationality certificate shows that his mother is Roberta Medina, a woman who he said he doesn't know. Because of an irregularity with his social security card, He was charged for uttering upon a forged document and being in possession of a forged document.

Immigration minister Godwin Hulse told us that that Medina's nationality would be rescinded.

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