Lawyer Manjit Kaur Rai was born into the Sikh culture in the Punjab region of India, grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was subjected to blatant prejudice.

The environment in which she was raised was one where women are subservient to men in the Sikh culture, a court has been told.

And that is the reason why she processed dozens of fake applications from refugee claimants who had entered the United States from India and Europe, claims her lawyer who is defending Rai in a massive immigration fraud trial that opened this month in California.

At the heart of the case are five employees of the Sacramento-based law firm Sekhon & Sekhon, including Rai.

It centres around allegations of a massive fraud scheme for profit that led to hundreds of people being granted asylum in the United States after falsely claiming primarily religious persecution.

Some of them crossed into the United State via the Canadian border.

Charged are lawyer Jagprit Singh Sekhon, 39 ; his brother and also a lawyer, Jagdip Singh Sekhon, 42; Rai, 33; and Romanian interpreters Iosif Caza, 43, and Luciana Harmath, 29.

They face maximum prison sentences of between five and 10 years if found guilty.

The defendants are accused of supplying false information for applications and supporting narratives and coaching applicants on bogus stories. The indictment alleges a conspiracy for profit to dupe the U.S. government in hundreds of asylum cases by falsely claiming persecution in Romania or India.

Between 500 and 600 refugees remain in the country unlawfully as a result of the law firm’s alleged dirty work, the prosecution alleges.

Rai’s lawyer, Clyde Blackmon, in his opening statement said his client processed the applications because she believed the stories by the refugee applicants.

Blackmon told the jury his client was not in meetings with applicants when their written narratives were drafted. Rai later used those narratives to prepare and guide the clients through asylum hearings.

"By the time it got to her, the clients had signed off on the applications under penalty of perjury," said Blackmon.

Blackmon told the jury that Rai recognized similarities in the narratives and asked Jagprit Sekhon about it. He told her persecuted refugees were part of a relatively small group in their native countries, and their experiences are inevitably similar.

"This was all consistent with her background and experience," he said of Rai, who studied at Simon Fraser University.

"There was no reason for her to believe that any of these applications were false," Blackmon said.

Another defense attorney, Michael Stepanian, at the trial said that the refugees are the true culprits in the scheme to gain unlawful asylum status, not the attorneys and interpreters who are on trial.

"They got here through guile and trickery," he said in his opening statement. "Some had student visas and were never enrolled in school. Some were here on cultural programs but never showed up for them. Some had fake passports. Some snuck across the border," he said, according to the Sacramento Bee newspaper.

"We’ve got a big case in front of us," Assistant U.S. Attorney Camil Skipper told the jury in her opening statement. "But don’t be fooled; it’s quite simple really. It’s about lies, lies and more lies."

Referring to Sacramento-based Sekhon & Sekhon as "a well-oiled machine," Skipper said it was "pumping out fraudulent asylum applications." She assured the jury that conversations surreptitiously recorded by an undercover agent posing as an asylum applicant "will put you on the fraud assembly line."

But Stepanian said, "Romania and India are tough places. They have histories of persecution, arrests and torture. These people knew about asylum, knew how to talk, knew what to say. The applications were put together with their input.

The applicants "lied on their visas, lied to Jagprit, lied to asylum officers, lied to immigration judges," he told the jury. "And nobody is telling them what to do."

Some of them have negotiated a deal with prosecutors to trade testimony for an ability to stay in the country, he said. "Their only out is to blame the lawyer."

Until 2000, the bulk of asylum clients at the law firm the Sekhon brothers founded in 1995 were from India.

"Their motive was purely one of profit," Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner wrote in a trial brief. The firm’s ill-gotten gains are estimated by prosecutors to have been more than $2.5 million.

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