The police reports, signed by law enforcement officials in otherwise quiet and small Central Louisiana towns, described a rash of armed robberies. The crimes had targeted people with no ties to the region, all of them immigrants struggling to find a toehold in the country.
But according to federal investigators, the reports were full of lies. “In fact, the armed robberies never took place,” Alexander C. Van Hook, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, told reporters on Wednesday.
Mr. Van Hook and other federal officials said that they had exposed a scheme to exploit a program that offers undocumented immigrants who are victims of crime a path to temporary legal residency and citizenship.
A federal grand jury has indicted current and former police chiefs in three communities, another local law enforcement official and a Louisiana businessman whom prosecutors described as the architect of the scheme.
Prosecutors said that the chiefs would produce false reports documenting armed robberies. Listed as victims were undocumented immigrants, who the prosecutors said had paid a middle man.
They were trying to take advantage of the federal U-visa program, which was created in 2000 and is available to undocumented immigrants who are victims of certain violent crimes. To qualify, applicants have to cooperate with law enforcement officials by helping with investigations and serving as witnesses.
Obtaining such visas also requires documentation confirming that the applicant was a victim of a qualifying crime. That is what the Louisiana police officials were providing for a price, officials said.
“People paid thousands of dollars to manufacture that status to get a shortcut to the privilege of staying in our great nation,” Jonathan Tapp, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I. in New Orleans, said in the news conference on Wednesday. “We expect law enforcement officers to protect the public and to honor their trust, not to sell that trust and the honor of their badges for personal gain.”
The scheme began in 2015, prosecutors said, and involved Chad Doyle, the police chief in Oakdale, La.; Glynn Dixon, the police chief in Forest Hill, La.; Tebo Onishea, the former police chief in Glenmora, La.; and Michael Slaney, a marshal in Oakdale. The towns are all south of Alexandria, in the rural sprawl of Central Louisiana.
Prosecutors said that immigrants who wanted to participate paid Chandrakant Patel, the owner of convenience stores and a Subway franchise in Oakdale, who then paid the police officials to provide the false reports. Mr. Patel paid the officials as much as $5,000 for each person named in the report, according to the indictment.
It is unclear how many immigrants participated in the scheme over the past decade. A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the status of the immigrants who participated or whether they would face charges in the case.
Federal authorities were tipped off to the scheme a year ago, prompting an investigation that led them to find “an unusual concentration of armed robberies of people who were not from Louisiana,” Mr. Van Hook said.
Mr. Patel was charged with bribery, mail fraud and money laundering. The police chiefs and marshal were charged with visa fraud, as well as mail fraud and money laundering.