HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Marty Anthony Muller was arrested just after 3 a.m. Monday at Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport.
He had just flown in from the Marshall Islands, where he works as a contractor.
Officials from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security escorted him to a waiting vehicle and then took him to a federal detention center.
Mueller is a U.S. citizen who worked as a contractor in Afghanistan before moving to Hawaii in 2017.
He was the only person arrested in the province, but two men, both from Afghanistan, are listed as co-defendants.
Mushtaq Ahmad Habibi is a naturalized U.S. citizen living in Virginia.
Daud Kalantari is a green card holder living in California.
They were also arrested in their respective states on Monday.
The three are accused of receiving money to help hundreds of Afghans fraudulently obtain visas through the Afghanistan Special Immigrant Visa Program, known as SIV, and are charged with document forgery, wire fraud, visa fraud, and conspiracy. has been charged with a crime.
Former FBI agent Tom Simon said the SIV was designed to protect those who risked their lives to support the United States overseas. However, Simon said that “fraud in this program poses a serious threat to national security and cannot be ignored.”
Former federal public defender Alexander Silvert agreed. “We want to have people who actually provide good service in good faith,” he said, adding that loyalty needs to be checked.
According to the criminal complaint, Mueller wrote 368 letters of recommendation for Afghans applying for SIVs from 2018 to August of this year.
Employers must provide a letter certifying that the person was an essential part of the job.
But Mueller actually had no relationship with most of those people, according to court records.
He lied in at least 208 letters, and the government claims he received $500 for each.
Simon said this does not mean that the 208 people entered the United States illegally, but that not all were able to obtain visas because the SIV program has other requirements that involve multiple steps to complete. Ta.
The SIV program has recently come under scrutiny.
Earlier this month, an Afghan national who had been approved for a special visa was arrested in Oklahoma. Nasir Ahmad Tauhedi was charged with planning an election day attack on behalf of ISIS.
Mueller and his co-defendants are unrelated to the Oklahoma case. The only commonality is that the SIV process was used.
Mueller’s preliminary hearing is scheduled for November 12th.
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