Dominican Baseball Players' Visas Rejected Due to Marriage Fraud
Omar Beltre and Alexi Ogando, both natives of the Dominican Republic, and both prospects for the Texas Rangers, have been denied work visas for the past four years due to their involvement in a marriage fraud scandal in 2004.
Approximately 30 Dominican minor leaguers were involved in the marriage fraud scandal. Most of the players involved have since been released by their major league teams.
The Rangers owners were led to believe Beltre and Ogando serve a year's penalty and then be free to come to the United States in 2005. Instead, the club might have no choice but to sell the players' contracts to teams in other countries.
In the winter of 2004, a man known as Wilfredo began showing up at their doors in the Dominican Republic with a simple business proposition: the players could earn about $3,000, by agreeing to appear to marry certain women who had no other means of entering the US. After the women's visas were secured, the players and the women could go their separate ways. Wilfredo was sometimes accompanied by a local baseball agent who knew the player, or even an employee of a major league team.
The money was a great incentive to the players, who are usually the sole wage earners for large families in the Dominican Republic. Beltre supports eight relatives in a three-room house. Ogando supports his parents and two small sisters with his minor league pay that averages less than $2,000 a month.
After agreeing to the fake marriages and completing the paperwork, Beltre and Ogando went to the US embassy in January 2005 to pick up their work visas. However, because consulate officials had become suspicious of the large number of young minor league ballplayers had been married in a short period of time to women who had previously been denied visas, they questioned the players.
Both players admitted the marriages were fake and they had made a mistake. Their visa applications and those of their "wives" were rejected. They never received the promised money and haven't seen or heard from Wilfredo since.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, it is the players who bear the responsibility for their actions, even if they were “put up to it” by others. Since it was the players who presented the marriage documents, asserted these were genuine marriages and signed the visa applications, they are the ones held accountable for attempting to smuggle women into the US, and are therefore ineligible for visas. The teams’ owner, Tom Hicks, wrote to political friends on the players' behalf. They have also applied for visa waivers. However, all of the efforts made on Beltre and Ogando’s behalf have not gotten them any closer to entering the US. The team’s last hope is to try to get the government to pursue the ringleaders of the marriage fraud scandal. They are offering Beltre’s and Ogando’s testimony if they can be paroled into the US on witness waivers.
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