Immigration scams in the United States target noncitizens. Noncitizens who have limited or no access to a clear path to adjust their legal status, coupled with a shortage of affordable legal services and an access to justice crisis ¹ Open footnote #1 1 Footnote #1 content: The access to justice crisis refers to gaps in the availability of legal aid services among disadvantaged segments of the general public. close have created the perfect terrain for profit-oriented fraudsters who thrive in moments of uncertainty. In those instances when vulnerable and marginalized noncitizens are taken advantage of and report consumer crimes, they attempt to turn rights in law into rights in practice. In this paper, we examine noncitizens’ descriptions of particular scams and suggest ways to apply this analysis of victims’ claims to a framework for social change. We rely on qualitative evidence from coding a sample of 1,040 consumer complaints submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) between 2011 and 2015. The narrative evidence includes both first-person accounts and descriptions of a scam from organizational intermediaries and witnesses. We examine efforts by noncitizens and their allies to seek access to justice, which allows us to answer the following questions: what do individuals choose to emphasize when reporting scams to consumer protection authorities? Relatedly, what can we learn about immigrant rights-claiming by focusing on the types of narratives people choose to relay as a means of seeking access to justice? We argue that scam reports offer important insights into possible solutions to enact social change and to ensure these preventable scams are addressed. Consumer protections for noncitizens targeted by immigration scams can function as a rallying point for immigrants’ rights more broadly. Addressing obstacles to accessing justice for noncitizens targeted by immigration scams requires us to acknowledge the unique risk immigrants face in exposing their legal status and the lack of guaranteed representation in immigration proceedings. We also discuss tangible solutions that echo immigrants’ own demands for consumer and civil rights, including examples from past cases and efforts to stop scams. The current study has broader implications given that reporting consumer fraud can be a flashpoint for noncitizens’ civic engagement and an insurgent citizenship (i.e., actions by immigrants and advocates that expand our notions of who participates in civic engagement) with the potential to reconceptualize rights traditionally associated with citizenship.

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