impersonated. “In the past year it’s exploded,” explains Consuelo Kwee of the Diocese of Raleigh. “I receive five to ten calls a day from people who have been scammed.” One man recently asked her why, after paying the non-profit $50,000 and waiting a year, his family’s documents still hadn’t arrived in the mail. “When I told him he wasn’t one of our clients he started crying,” she says. A careful observer can often spot a dupe: fraudsters promise results, real lawyers are not so naive. But AI is doing away with the distinction. With as little as a minute of genuine footage, scammers are making deepfakes. Ángel Leal, an immigration lawyer in Miami, found videos falsely depicting him handing papers to a tearful family waving an American flag and advising a handcuffed man in detention. Since March he has taken down more than 6,400 fake profiles using his name, with the help of some anti-piracy gurus. Getting content deleted isn’t always easy. Jared Jaskot, a Baltimore lawyer who represents teens eligible for green cards because they have been abused, asked TikTok to remove viral clone accounts that are sharing his content to scoop up clients. The platform responded that it found “no violation” of its “community guidelines”. Big Tech could do more. Meta, which removed 159m scam ads of all sorts last year, has rolled out new AI-trained tools. On WhatsApp users now receive a warning if a request to link accounts “might be suspicious”; on Messenger chats that show “patterns of common scams” ask if users want to submit them for an automated review. The company says this gives people “the chance to pause and reconsider”. For those who have already committed to chasing the American dream at tremendous cost, that might not be enough. The arrests in Florida and New York may deter some entrepreneurial scammers from scaling up. But the federal government has never done much to combat “notario” scams. ProPublica, an investigative news outlet, found that the number of immigration-fraud complaints filed to the Federal Trade Commission has doubled since the president returned to office. Fraudsters seem to have found an ideal target: a group demonised by America’s leaders whose desire to remain under the radar means they seldom report getting swindled. For those trying to help, “it’s a tragic game of whack-a-
mole,” says Charity Anastasio of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group. “And it’s only going to get worse.” ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/16/scammers-are-preying-on- americas-illegal-immigrants
The left is coming for Democratic incumbents In primary challenges, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is trying to install allies in Congress June 18th 2026 Adriano Espaillat is the only formerly undocumented immigrant representing New York in Congress. He is so respected as a leader on matters concerning Hispanic Americans that he chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He called for dismantling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as far back as 2018. And yet, as New York’s Democratic primary nears on June 23rd, he is in a fight for political survival against a first-time candidate, a graduate student in sociology less than half his age who is attacking him for not standing up to ICE, among other matters. So it is going across New York City, in the most intense manifestation of what Democratic officeholders are experiencing across the country as
congressional primaries unleash the party’s id. Candidates in New York who are not quite far enough left, or who bear a whiff of the establishment by virtue of their experience in public office, are struggling against insurgent challengers. For them the lesson for the Democrats of past defeats is not to moderate, but to charge the barricades. In New York’s tenth congressional district, which jumps from lower Manhattan into Brooklyn, the incumbent congressman, Dan Goldman, is a former federal prosecutor who served as the lead counsel in the first impeachment of Donald Trump. His opponent, Brad Lander, is attacking him as a “corporate Democrat” who is helping enrich the president. When the candidates were asked in a recent debate if they would support a third impeachment of Mr Trump, Mr Lander’s hand shot up. After a moment Mr Goldman followed suit, but then exposed himself as a squish: “But after investigations,” he said. Polls have him trailing. In these primaries Israel—or, rather, sufficiently strident opposition to Israel —is a dominant concern. That is true in Mr Espaillat’s race, though his district, the 13th, which stretches through Harlem and into the western Bronx, might seem beset by more immediate challenges than Middle East strife. The Palestinians’ plight has been the animating political cause of his challenger, Darializa Avila Chevalier, since she was an undergraduate at Columbia University, where she co-founded the campaign to press the university to divest from Israel. As an alumna, she helped organise campus protests during the war in Gaza that followed the Hamas attacks of October 7th 2023. She has hammered Mr Espaillat for accepting money from donors to the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel group. Anger at Donald Trump and Israel, frustration with the status quo, impatience for generational change—these sentiments have been boiling over in Democratic primaries from Durham, North Carolina to Los Angeles, California. In New York they are given greater heat by the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, along with two left-wing groups, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Justice Democrats. As Mr Mamdani works to install loyalists in the congressional delegation, he has surprised the city’s politicos with his ruthlessness. “Regular Democrats are petrified because they know that the Justice Democrats and DSA are running modern, complex, very interesting and exciting campaigns,” says Juan Carlos
Polanco, a former president of the board of elections who is now a professor of law at the University of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx. “If they have enough members of Congress that are all in the Mamdani camp, they will be juggernauts.” Mr Mamdani broke a reported commitment to support Mr Espaillat and instead endorsed Ms Avila Chevalier. The mayor is also supporting Mr Lander against Mr Goldman. In the seventh district, known as the “Commie Corridor” for its density of Brooklyn and Queens hipsters, Mr Mamdani refused to endorse the anointed successor of the retiring congresswoman, Nydia Velázquez, an early supporter of his own run. “Your actions are raising serious concerns about taking you at your word—and that is very, very, very problematic in this business,” Ms Velázquez sniped about the mayor to Politico. She favours Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president. Mr Mamdani supports Claire Valdez, a first-term member of the state assembly who also came to politics via Columbia University, which, seemingly by accident, has done more than any other institution lately to radicalise New York’s politics. Ms Valdez became a union activist while working in Columbia’s visual-arts department. The template for these races, including Mr Mamdani’s, was set in 2018 by the congressional campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Justice Democrats, which recruited her to run, had discovered a clever hack: because few Democrats vote in city primaries, and because no Republican stands a chance in most general elections in the city, an insurgent could win office by energising a relatively small number of voters. In her first primary Ms Ocasio-Cortez won fewer than 17,000 votes; that was more than enough to dispatch a ten-term incumbent and rattle American politics. This was also Mr Mamdani’s path. Though much was made about his success in turning out voters, less than 30% of Democrats participated in the primary that, in effect, delivered him the office. In that primary Mr Mamdani carried Mr Espaillat’s district by 13 points, and the DSA is growing fastest in that area. Ms Avila Chevalier has their typical candidate profile. What she lacks in experience she makes up for with sunniness and self-certainty. She also has the usual barbaric history on social media. Just a few years back she called Joe Biden “a rapist”, wrote “fuck Kamala Harris”, described wiping her hand on the American flag, suggested
white people should not be in interracial relationships and declared “no more police at all ever”. She has waved away her tweets as “the politics of the past”. Mr Mamdani said her views “have evolved”. The Democrats may be in for some serious evolving, too. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/18/the-left-is-coming-for- democratic-incumbents
Travel Brazil’s mirror-state to see the country’s future The Colombian diaspora is overwhelmingly right-wing The Gen-Z streamer from Medellín influencing Colombia’s election
Travel Brazil’s mirror-state to see the country’s future No one has ever been elected president in Brazil without carrying Minas Gerais June 18th 2026 Minas Gerais, the second-most populous of Brazil’s 27 states, is often overlooked. It should not be. The geography and ethnic make-up of Minas, as the state is known, reflect Brazil’s. In the south, its forests spill into Rio de Janeiro; to the north, dry hinterlands run into the poor state of Bahia; north-west is Goiás, an agricultural powerhouse, in which sits the capital district of Brasília; the west borders wealthy São Paulo. More than half of the 21m mineiros say they are black or mixed-race—about the same as the nationwide share. The state is a crucial political battleground. Since 1989, when Brazil’s first democratic election was held after 21 years of military dictatorship, no one has won the presidency without carrying Minas.