Jorge Antonio Veres Lopez, a 69-year-old Colombian native and former archbishop priest, was sentenced to a year in federal prison for passport fraud. Convicted child molestation, Veres Lopez, was naturalized by the court, lost his US citizenship and was transferred from the US to Colombia.
Veres Lopez entered the United States more than 20 years ago as a temporary religious worker. He applied for alien status as a permanent resident through the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in 2007 and was granted permanent resident in November 2007.
Jorge Antonio Veres – Lopez (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency)
As part of the process, Veres Lopez said he had never intentionally committed a moral tort crime under the perjury punishment.
Veres Lopez then applied to USCIS to become a USCIS citizen in 2013, saying under perjury penalties that he had never committed a crime he had not been arrested, that he had never given false or misleading information to US government officials while applying for immigration benefits, and that he had never lied to becoming or obtaining admission to US government officials.
According to court documents, Verez Lopez said he was interviewed in May 2013 by a Citizenship and Immigration Services officer as part of the naturalization process to become a US citizen. He provided the same answers to the same questions under punishment of oath and perjury.
Velez-Lopez submitted his passport application the same year. As part of the process, he declared that under the perjury penalty he did not include any false documents to support the application.
Veres Lopez was arrested in 2020 by law enforcement in Howard County, Maryland, and charged with five counts of third-degree sex offenses and one count of four-degree sex offenses. He pleaded guilty on May 14, 2021 to sexual abuse of a minor who was temporarily liable for supervision and sentenced to nine years in prison. Veres Lopez was also ordered to register as a sex offender of life.
Veres Lopez confessed that she had sexually abused the victim from June 2003 to June 2009 while serving as a child priest. Veres Lopez's entry during his criminal lawsuit led to federal accusations of subsequent passport fraud, civil degeneration and final removal orders.
The Veres Lopez case was investigated by ICE as part of an ongoing national initiative designed to identify and prosecute child abusers and other terrible felons who have fraudulently acquired US citizenship. The operation successfully raised criminal and civil lawsuits against defendants convicted of murder, serial rape, child abuse, incest, sodomy, child pornography, inducement, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, money laundering, tax fraud, pill factory prescription fraud, weakening, abused identity, and abused elder abuse.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Louisiana has indicted the case with support from the U.S. Department of Justice's Immigration Litigation Office and the ICE's main legal counsel office.
Randy Clark He is a 32-year veteran of the US Border Patrol. Before retiring, he served as Chief of Law Enforcement Business and oversaw the operations of nine Border Patrol Bureaus in Del Rio, Texas. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @randyclarkbbtx.
