The Justice Department announced what it calls one of the largest marriage fraud prosecutions in American history, charging 11 people in a multimillion-dollar scheme that allegedly sold green cards to more than 1,000 Chinese nationals through bogus weddings across at least seven states and two foreign countries.

Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald unveiled the 21-page indictment at a Wednesday press conference, describing an operation that ran for roughly a decade and stretched from Connecticut to China. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York allege the defendants organized a sprawling network of facilitators, recruiters, and officiators who staged fake marriage ceremonies, paired Chinese nationals with American citizens willing to play spouse for a fee, and pocketed as much as $100,000 per transaction from the foreign clients.

U.S. citizens who agreed to enter the sham marriages received up to $30,000 each, AP News reported. McDonald told reporters the scheme generated "tens of millions of dollars" over its lifespan.

Four defendants, Amy Cheng, Xiao Mei Chan, Xiao Yan Chan, and Gang Zheng, are alleged to have run the operation. Seven additional defendants were charged but not publicly named in the initial announcement. All 11 were scheduled to appear in federal court in White Plains, New York, on Wednesday afternoon.

Blanche calls the scheme a 'cottage industry' built to cheat immigration law

Blanche did not hold back at the press conference. He framed the case as a direct challenge to the integrity of the country's legal immigration system, The Hill reported.

"This scheme was not a quick, fly-by-night operation but rather a yearslong, multimillion-dollar cottage industry to criminally assist people who would not, or legally could not, otherwise become citizens of the United States."

He added that the charges "show how far people will go to cheat our immigration system" and described American citizenship as "a sacred privilege."

Blanche also drew a broader line, telling reporters that such schemes carry real costs beyond individual fraud cases. The DOJ has stepped up its focus on immigration-related fraud under the current administration, including recent moves to prosecute birth tourism fraud as part of a wider crackdown on those who exploit legal loopholes to gain residency or citizenship.

"These schemes have real cost. They rob our country of its ability to know who should be and who should not be allowed in America."

That quote, reported by AP News, captures the enforcement posture the DOJ has adopted: immigration fraud is not a victimless paperwork offense but a national security problem.

Fake ceremonies spanned seven states, Vanuatu, and China

The indictment paints a picture of an operation with significant geographic reach. Prosecutors allege sham wedding ceremonies took place in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, as well as overseas in Vanuatu, a small Pacific island nation, and in China itself. The 21-page filing includes what prosecutors describe as photographs of several of the bogus ceremonies.

Many of the recruiters allegedly operated out of the White Plains area, where the defendants appeared in court. The recruiters' job, prosecutors say, was to find American citizens willing to pose as spouses. Officiators then presided over the staged ceremonies to create a paper trail that could support green card applications.

The scale is striking. More than 1,000 foreign nationals allegedly received permanent U.S. resident status through the scheme, the Washington Examiner reported. At up to $100,000 per client, the math supports McDonald's estimate that the operation brought in tens of millions of dollars. The scheme allegedly ran from 2016 through 2026, a full decade of fraudulent marriages processed through the legal immigration system without detection sufficient to shut it down.

That timeline raises an obvious question: how did more than 1,000 sham marriages clear federal immigration review over ten years? The indictment does not appear to address what, if any, failures in government vetting allowed the scheme to operate at that volume for that long.

Fraud prosecutions signal a DOJ willing to act on immigration enforcement

The case lands at a moment when the Justice Department has made immigration fraud a visible priority. Blanche, newly sworn in as attorney general, used his press conference to frame the prosecution not as routine casework but as a statement of principle about who gets to live in the United States and how.

That posture fits a broader pattern. The DOJ has also pursued fraud referrals involving public officials, including Vice President Vance's referral of Minnesota officials to the Justice Department for a criminal fraud investigation.

And the consequences for large-scale fraud have been severe in recent cases. A mastermind behind the Feeding Our Future scheme, one of the largest pandemic-era fraud operations, was sentenced to more than 41 years in prison, a reminder that federal judges are willing to impose serious time when the scope of the fraud warrants it.

Whether the 11 defendants in the marriage fraud case face comparable sentences remains to be seen. The indictment does not specify the maximum penalties for the charges filed, and the specific statutes cited were not disclosed in the initial announcement.

Several key details remain unclear. The identities of seven of the 11 defendants have not been made public. It is not known whether all defendants were in custody at the time of the announcement or whether any remain at large, a relevant concern given the international scope of the alleged operation and the history of fraud defendants fleeing the country to avoid prosecution.

The current immigration status of the more than 1,000 foreign nationals who allegedly received green cards through the scheme is also unknown. If those green cards were obtained through fraud, every one of them represents a residency slot taken from someone who followed the law, and a potential security gap that federal authorities failed to catch for a decade.

A system that lets more than 1,000 fraudulent marriages slip through without setting off alarms is a system that needs more than indictments, it needs an honest accounting of how the fraud went undetected for so long.