A Worcester man has been slapped with a 13-month prison sentence for sneaking back into the United States and engaging in passport fraud after he was originally deported, federal authorities have disclosed. Rohan Andrew Brown, age 56, found himself in the grasp of the U.S. justice system again after U.S. District Court Judge Margaret R. Guzman handed down his sentence on Friday, July 19, following his guilty plea in April to charges of unlawful reentry and passport fraud, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Brown, originally from Jamaica, was ousted from the U.S. in August 2002 following a conviction in Connecticut for unlawful restraint. However, he found his way back into the country later and, in 2012, managed to obtain a passport by assuming the identity of a U.S. citizen—a ruse he continued for years by also securing driver's licenses in both California and Ohio. These details were provided by Acting United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service Matthew O'Brien, and Field Office Director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Enforcement and Removal Operations in Boston Todd M. Lyons.
Sentencing for Brown did not simply stop at time behind bars; upon release, he will be placed under supervised release for three years, during which his compliance with legal and immigration obligations will be closely monitored. His run-ins with the law also included attempts to renew the ill-gained passport twice, once in March 2022 and again in May 2023, attempts that ultimately played a role in his recent sentencing.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristen M. Noto of the Worcester Branch Office prosecuted Brown's case, highlighting the collaborative efforts of different government agencies to uphold immigration and identity fraud laws. Cases such as these shed light on the continued struggle of the American legal system to deal with not only the complexities of immigration law but also the persistent issue of identity theft, which can unravel the lives of unsuspecting citizens and compromise the integrity of the nation's document issuance systems. Brown's case is another tile in the mosaic of immigration-related offenses that the Department of Justice grapples with annually.
