Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who has railed against loose borders and lax immigration policies during his four years as the state’s top lawman, went into business in 2017 with a Houston labor broker named Marco Pesquera, who had become rich by helping his clients defraud the immigration system to import more than 1,000 Mexican laborers to the Gulf South.
They set out to make millions by winning federal approval to bring in hundreds of skilled Mexican construction workers to help build a massive liquefied natural gas terminal in Cameron Parish.
The effort involved three firms with ties to the attorney general: two firms owned by Jeff Landry, and one owned by his brother, Benjamin Landry, and a business associate, documents and emails show.
The companies won federal approval to bring in more than 300 welders and pipe fitters from Mexico, based on applications that included several dubious claims and documents that were misleading at best and flat-out bogus at worst, according to records provided by Pesquera.
Pesquera, 46, pleaded guilty last year to a conspiracy charge for years of visa fraud unrelated to his work with the Landry companies. There’s no evidence that either Landry brother or their associates knew that Pesquera was under criminal investigation when they contracted with him, and neither of the Landry brothers nor their associates have been charged in the case.
Before beginning a three-year federal prison sentence in December, Pesquera shared hundreds of pages of visa applications, internal email exchanges and other records with The Times-Picayune and The Advocate…
(Original article published on www.nola.com. Click HERE for the full story.)
