Suit: Va. firm exploits desperate migrants

FALLS CHURCH, Va. – A Virginia company that touts its record of reuniting immigrant families is accused in a lawsuit of exploiting those same families by charging excessive fees to facilitate their release.

The lawsuit filed last week in Rockingham County and announced Thursday accuses Verona-based Libre by Nexus of fraud and violating Virginia’s consumer-protection laws. It says immigrants desperate to be released from detention paid Libre thousands of dollars and agreed to onerous GPS monitoring imposed by the company.

The lawsuit filed by the Falls Church-based Legal Aid Justice Center says Libre by Nexus’ business model seeks to evade regulations imposed on bail companies that would bar it from engaging in many of its practices.

“Libre attempts to camouflage its practices by casting itself as a champion of immigrants and a re-uniter of families, when in reality its scheme traps desperate immigrants into paying thousands of dollars,” the lawsuit alleges, accusing Libre of raking in more than $100 million from the immigrant community.

Libre President Mike Donovan defended his company Thursday at a news conference. He said tens of thousands of immigrants would otherwise be jailed without his company’s services.

Donovan said immigration detainees are almost never able to obtain the services of a bail bondsman on their own, and detainees must come up with the full cash amount of their bond – often $10,000 or more – to obtain bail.

Libre works with bondsmen and with immigrants so that the detainee pays a percentage of their bond to the company, and then agrees to monthly payments of several hundred dollars. Often, but not always, Donovan said, detainees are required by Libre to submit to GPS monitoring.

Donovan said the immigration system “is beyond broken. I think it’s disgusting. I think it’s abusive,” he said at a rally that attracted a few dozen supporters outside Legal Aid Justice Center’s offices in Falls Church. “I have created a company that takes that abusiveness and makes it possible for people to survive it, and to overcome it.”

BARAKAT MATTHEW/AP Libre by Nexus President Mike Donovan responds to allegations his company charges excessive fees to help detained immigrants during a rally in Falls Church, Va., on Thursday.