to a felony charge of altering the immigration document of an Iranian student at the University of Tennessee.
Tori Ferrari, 32, of Knoxville, Tennessee, pleaded guilty June 9 in a US District Court. She now faces a maximum of 10 years in prison plus fines.
Ferrari was employed between 2002 and 2008 as an active law enforcement officer with US Customs and Border Protection. In 2008, Ferrari was placed on leave without pay due to a medical condition, and began receiving workers’ compensation. Because she was on leave, Ferrari was no longer an active officer.
Yet, according to the plea agreement, Ferrari on several occasions presented herself as an active officer to officials with the Center for International Education at the University of Tennessee (UT), including Joann Hartmann, the associate director of the university’s Center for International Education. Ferrari offered to help foreign students with immigration or customs-related issues at UT.
In January, Hartmann called Ferrari after an Iranian national legally in the US as a student discovered his dependent’s immigration papers incorrectly listed the dependent not as a dependent of the Iranian student but as a UT student.
Ferrari, the plea agreement stated, met with Hartmann and fraudulently altered the dependent’s status on the immigration forms from full-time student to dependent of a full-time student. Ferrari confessed to altering the immigration documents during the June 9 hearing.
William C. Killian, US attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, stated: “Actions such as these cannot be tolerated. It is especially disturbing that a former federal law enforcement officer would violate the very laws that they were sworn to uphold. Thanks to a citizen’s initial report, the authorities were able to stop this criminal activity.”
There was no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the Iranian student. There was also no suggestion that the original listing of the dependent as a student was anything more than an honest error. The issue involved was a formal law enforcement officer taking an action she knew she was not authorized to take.