Park Ridge lawyer facing federal immigration fraud charges

A lawyer from Park Ridge and a skilled-nursing facility human resources coordinator from Buffalo Grove are facing federal immigration fraud charges.

The lawyer, Gerardo Dean, 58, is accused in court papers of conspiring with 76-year-old Felicitas Cordero to provide false and fraudulent information to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on behalf of individuals in the Philippines who were seeking U.S. visas.

According to the indictment, Cordero worked at an unnamed firm that operates skilled-nursing facilities in Illinois and doctored visa applications with Dean that claimed workers seeking visas “had managerial, supervisory, or higher-level jobs waiting for them at the company.”

Those types of jobs were not available, prosecutors said.

“Dean and Cordero collected money from foreign nationals whom they helped fraudulently obtain the visas to work at the company, and Dean also collected money from the company for his fraudulent conduct,” federal prosecutors stated in a press release.

Both are charged with one count of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and three individual counts of immigration fraud. They face up to five years in prison on each count if convicted.