About 275 Korean immigrants who say they were swindled into paying for fraudulent green cards currently face deportation. But if Congress passes a bill introduced Feb. 17 by California Rep. Michael Honda, many of them could find their immigration status restored and have the opportunity to gain resident alien status legally.

“This bill will bring justice to the innocent Koreans who unwittingly contracted with rogue immigration brokers and were caught in the investigatory net,” Honda said in a statement.

Starting in the late 1980s, former Immigration and Naturalization Service supervisor Leland Sustaire corroborated with two KA brokers, Daniel Lee and John Choe, and scammed more than $500,000 from hundreds of immigrants over 12 years. Lee and Choe collected as much as $30,000 in each case to “expedite” the processing of green card documentation. Both KAs served time in federal prison. Sustaire, however, paid a fine and was placed under house arrest in exchange for information leading to the arrests of Choe and Lee.

The victims of these crimes were unaware they had invalid green cards. The INS then placed the burden on the immigrants to prove their case that they were eligible to be resident aliens. However, the documentation that they had provided to the brokers was destroyed by Sustaire to cover up the fraud.

Rep. Mike Honda, a Democrat from San Jose, Calif., has introduced a bill in the House to bring relief to hundreds of Korean American immigrants with fraudulent green cards.

Honda said he is “not asking for blanket amnesty.” His bill requests that the immigration bureau consider each case on an individual basis.

Those considered eligible for relief had to be in a “valid non-immigrant status prior to seeking adjustment of status” — which means that those who rushed to Lee and Choe to get a green card after their legal status had expired would not be eligible.

After investigators deem an applicant to be qualified, “that person would be treated as though the fraud in procuring the green card had not taken place; so long as they were otherwise eligible, they would regain the immigration status they had as if the fraud had not taken place.”