BATON ROUGE, La.—Federal authorities have charged three small-town Louisiana police chiefs with taking hundreds of $5,000 bribes over nearly a decade in exchange for filing false police reports that would allow noncitizens to apply for visas that let certain crime victims stay in the United States.
The false police reports would indicate that the immigrant was a victim of a crime that would qualify them to apply for a so-called U visa, U.S. Attorney Alexander C. Van Hook said Wednesday at a news conference in Lafayette. He said the police officials were paid $5,000 for each name they provided falsified reports for, and that there were hundreds of names over the years.
