The Justice Department on Wednesday charged 11 people in New York in what prosecutors called a decade-long marriage fraud scheme that allegedly used sham marriages to help Chinese nationals win green cards. A federal indictment unsealed in New York City says the network ran for years and involved more than 1,000 fake unions.
That scale is why the case is drawing attention now. Todd Blanche said the operation was not a short-lived racket but a years-long, multimillion-dollar cottage industry built to help people who otherwise would not, or legally could not, become citizens of the United States. Prosecutors said the scheme allegedly charged foreign nationals as much as $100,000 to enter sham marriages with U.S. citizens, while those citizens were paid up to $30,000, usually in installments tied to milestones in the green card process.
The indictment names Amy Cheng, Xiao Mei Chan, Christine Lu, Jing Yan Ye, Xiao Yan Chen, Gang Zheng, Anthony Cheng, Michelle Duenas, Angela Duenas, Sigrid Cetino and Erika Johnson. It charges them with conspiracy to commit marriage fraud and immigration document fraud, as well as conspiracy to encourage the unlawful residence of aliens in the United States. Some worked as facilitators, recruiters and officiants; others prepared immigration paperwork and coordinated green card applications.
Erika Johnson is one of the defendants named in the indictment, and her role appears in a sham marriage ceremony shown on or about Jan. 15, 2025, alongside Anthony Cheng and a foreign national. Another ceremony shown on Dec. 17, 2024, involved Sigrid Cetino, Anthony Cheng and a foreign national, giving prosecutors a visual trail inside a network they say operated from at least 2016 through July 2026.
The friction in the case is plain. The indictment describes one of the largest marriage fraud prosecutions in the United States, yet it charges only 11 named defendants in what prosecutors say was a much wider operation spanning more than 1,000 sham unions. What remains unanswered is how many marriages were proved fraudulent for each defendant, and how far the evidence stretches beyond the people named in the filing. For now, the case turns a sprawling allegation into a specific criminal charge sheet, and that is where the Justice Department has chosen to start.
