In the Economist today: “Scammers are preying on America’s illegal immigrants.”

Immigrants look for legal help, but their vulnerability (desperation, language barriers, inability to call on law enforcement) makes them easy prey. Scammers pose as lawyers and as services offering help, extract enormous sums, and then leave immigrants with nothing.

“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.

These scams are not new, but they’re exploding now, for at least two reasons. First, the Trump Administration’s brutal crackdown on immigrants is increasing the desperation families feel to get their status resolved. Second, in its signature cocktail of cruelty and ineptitude, the administration is not taking enforcement against scammers seriously:

ProPublica, an investigative news outlet, found that the number of immigration-fraud complaints filed to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) doubled since the president returned to office. FTC webpages on immigration scams, however, haven’t been updated since Joe Biden left.

Most of the time, we see the moral rot of the administration in its own actions: its corruption, its incompetence, its vindictiveness. But that rot spreads. It spreads when companies abandon ethical conduct in order to please the President and get favors. And it spreads when the administration’s persecution of illegal immigrants creates the ideal conditions for scammers to profit and prosper from fear and desperation.

American greatness was built on trust, not only in the integrity of our institutions, but in one another. The next president’s job will extend beyond policy and diplomacy. They will need to re-establish (or at least begin to do so) that, while we need to enforce our immigration laws, we also need to stamp out the predators who take advantage of immigrants.