Earlier this month, the US government filed an 18-count indictment against a New Jersey IT services firm for allegedly using fraudulent visas.  Computer World reports that the government is seeking $4.9 million against the NJ-based Vision Systems Group Inc., who is accused of paying its H-1B workers in multiple states based on low prevailing wages in Iowa through the creation of shell businesses in that state. 

Prosecutors for the case argue that Vision Systems told its H-1B hires that green cards could be obtained more quickly from ICE offices located outside New Jersey.  The indictment charges that the methods used by Vision Systems “have substantially deprived US citizens of employment.” 

Vision Systems and its executives are fighting the charges in US District Court in Iowa.  Mark Weinhardt, attorney representing the company, contends that “workers were paid at or above the prevailing wage rates of the places they were working.” 

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The full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will not review the asylum case of a woman whose father has said he will bring her back to Senegal, circumcise her and marry her off to a much older man, Baltimore’s The Daily Record reports.  Francoise A. Gomis, whose asylum petition was denied by three-judge panel in July, will not get a rehearing. 

Gomis, who came here on a work visa that expired in April 2003, filed an asylum petition in 2005. She testified that she did so after learning that her 15-year-old sister had been forcibly circumcised, suffering blood loss and infection, and that when their brother complained to the police, he was told to go home. 

Judge Paul V. Niemeyer, who penned the majority opinion in July, also wrote Monday's opinion. He called female circumcision “abhorrent” but said the court must defer to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which found that Gomis failed to prove it was “more likely than not” she would be circumcised. 

Judge Roger L. Gregory, the vehement but sole dissenter in July, requested the rehearing and objected to its denial as contrary to settled law.  “There is...one basis for asylum that is clearly established in both this Circuit and the other federal courts: protection from female genital mutilation,” Gregory wrote last week.  “Gomis's family made it clear that were she to return to Senegal, there is no chance that she could escape circumcision at their hands,” he added. “Neither invocation of sympathy nor innovation in the law of asylum was necessary to grant Ms. Gomis's petition; it merely required the application of our precedent - simple justice.” 

According to her 2005 asylum petition and testimony, she had fled Senegal because her family wanted her to undergo circumcision and get married to a man in his 60s. Gomis presented the Immigration Court with what Gregory called 'a mountain of evidence' that she would be circumcised if she returned to Senegal, including a letter from her father saying that she had embarrassed the family and that he would use 'all means' to get her back and circumcise her. 

Gomis' family has said she will be circumcised and, in her small ethnic group, almost all women are circumcised, many right before marriage, he noted.  “To deny her withholding of removal and send her back to Senegal, to virtually certain circumcision, would be a great miscarriage of justice,” Gregory wrote. “If we choose to ignore the blatant evidence before us of her specific situation by shielding our eyes with general statistics, then we will be sending her to a torturous future of which I shudder to imagine.”