A high-ranking immigration investigator on Friday was sentenced to a year in prison for harboring his illegal-alien girlfriend.
The case against Lloyd Miner, the assistant chief of investigations for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, stemmed from the high-profile investigation into Robert Schofield, a former Homeland Security immigration official who convicted of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash bribes.
Miner, 49, a federal law enforcement officer for 20 years, helped his girlfriend obtain fake identification documents to hide her illegal-alien status, authorities said. He was convicted in December.
“Mr. Miner disregarded the very immigration laws hewas sworn to uphold, and will now spend time in federal prison because he broke that trust,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Chuck Rosenberg said in a statement.
Miner met his girlfriend, Tsomorlig Batjargal, 21, a native of Mongolia, in 2005. He provided her with a black convertible with a Fraternal Order of Police license plates, and let her live in his residence for more than a year, authorities said.
Batjargal, also known as Somoun, was sentenced to one month for conspiracy to commit fraud with identification documents.
Miner became a suspect after authorities obtained a photo that showed him and Schofield together at a party in the Philippines. Schofield was sentenced to 15 years and ordered to repay the $3.1 million earned through selling fake documents to Asian immigrants.
Schofield’s case was an embarrassment to the immigration service. Investigators discovered that Schofield had faced previous disciplinary problems. A decade earlier, he was demoted for having an affair with a prostitute that derailed a federal investigation of a Chinese gangster.
