A Washington state man has finally been sentenced for a years-long scam that bilked Hispanic families in Yonkers out of tens of thousands of dollars when he made false promises to help ease their path to U.S. citizenship.
Juan Cedillo, 70, who twice pleaded guilty to scheme to defraud while sowing doubt that he actually accepted responsibility, was sentenced on Monday, July 7, to one to three years in state prison and ordered to pay $50,000 in restitution.
His prison stay will be short because he will get credit for the time he has spent in the county jail over the past year.
It was not the stiffer sentence that Westchester Judge Maurice Williams threatened two weeks ago when he postponed sentencing because Cedillo seemed to deny culpability again.
That was because the judge and Assistant District Attorney Emily Rowe-Smith agreed that Cedillo’s statements did not rise to the level of violating the conditions he agreed to when he pleaded guilty.
“You preyed on some of the most vulnerable among us,” Williams told Cedillo. “You took advantage of their strong desire to live the great American dream.”
Juan Cedillo’s Yonkers victims, police first outlined scam in 2019
The final disposition of the case was a far lower key affair than when Cedillo’s 2019 arrest was first publicized. City and police officials were joined then at a Yonkers church by several victims and community activists for a press conference outlining the scam.
Cedillo promised non-U.S. citizens with children born here U-Visas and eventually green cards. Families would pay $5,000 to join his U.S. Counter Insurgents Association of Justice and agreed to recruit other members. For an additional $3,000, he told them he would submit the applications for the visas.
None were ever granted as U-visas were reserved for immigrants who had been victims of crimes. None of the people Cedillo had scammed made such a claim.
Cedillo’s case then meandered for years. First during the Covid pandemic, he was back home in Olympia attending court hearings remotely. But when New York courts reopened and Cedillo was ordered to appear in person, he did not return. He ignored an arrest warrant but was finally picked up on it in July 2024 and brought back to Westchester.
Cedillo ignored order to return to Westchester
Had he gone to trial and been convicted, Cedillo could have faced decades in prison. The original sentence promise when he pleaded guilty in November 2024 to two counts of scheme to defraud was 2 to 6 years, or 1 to 3 for each count.
But when Cedillo made denials to a probation officer in a pre-sentence interview, state Supreme Court Justice James McCarty said he would not abide by the sentence promise and the guilty plea was withdrawn.
The specter of a tougher sentence evaporated when Cedillo pleaded guilty again on the eve of trial, this time to just one count and a promise of 1 to 3 years.
‘You pretended to be someone you’re not’
Before that sentencing imploded, Williams heard victim impact statements read by a Spanish interpreter.
One woman wrote of being “desperate and full of hope” from the promises Cedillo made but that her interactions with him turned into “one of the most painful and humiliating experiences of my life.”
Another woman told how Cedillo called himself a special agent of justice who claimed to have more power than attorneys and could “open the immigration door” for her. He also told her he was an angel who God sent to help her.
“I can’t wish you evil because I am not like you, a person who didn’t have a heart, to deceive me and confuse me in your lies and falsehoods of trying to want to help me obtain legal status in this country,” she wrote. “You Mr. Juan Cedillo abused me in my ignorance of legal matters and you pretended to be someone you’re not.”
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Immigration scammer who preyed on Yonkers Hispanics finally sentenced
Reporting by Jonathan Bandler, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
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