Fake heiress Anna Sorokin blasts US immigration system in jailhouse letter
Soho grifter Anna Sorokin blasted the “broken” US immigration system in a rambling letter sent from the New York jail where she is being held by ICE — complaining that “imprisonment simply makes no sense.”
In the lengthy letter published by the Daily Mail Friday, the convicted fraudster opined about a backlog in immigration cases, understaffing at her lockup and private companies profiting from the US prison system.
“Imprisonment simply makes no sense,” the 31-year-old wrote.
“But it does make billions of dollars,” she continued.
“With an annual budget of $2.8 billion from the federal government to house detainees, ICE pays private companies like GEO group and Core-Civic to lock thousands up in vast detention centers, while county or regional jails are paid to take smaller numbers. There’s no such thing in ICE as the United States Constitutional right to legal representation. No one will be appointed if you can’t afford a lawyer.”
Sorokin served four years in prison after her conviction on a number of state charges related to her years-long scamming spree, during which she bilked New York’s elite and skipped out on bills at luxury hotels and restaurants.
Weeks after her release from prison in 2021, she was rearrested by immigration authorities and has been detained in an Orange County facility ever since.
“The jail I’m housed at is famous for its understaffing issue. To help alleviate that issue, in the last few weeks alone, 61 immigrants were removed from this facility without notice and transferred to a facility in Mississippi, where ICE can detain them at a lesser cost,” she wrote in the letter.
“In the Orange County, N.Y. jail where I await my fate, female detainees are tossed in with the general criminal population, often without ever appearing before a judge,” she continued in the letter published by the Mail.
“We’re all the same,” she wrote.
“As of July, there were some 1.86 million pending immigration cases in the United States, with only 50 immigration courts to handle the backlog. A vast majority of these people — myself included — were picked up for overstaying visas, not illegally crossing any border.”
To end, Sorokin claimed she wants her life to have meaning and a “consequential impact” on a broken immigration system.
“If my life until now is to have the meaning I would like for it to have, the mistakes of the past and lessons learned will help guide me to being a better person and having a consequential impact.
“My experiences, along with my determination, can play a part in calling attention to and, perhaps, repairing a broken system that so many of our ‘leaders’ have simply failed to do.”
