Helaman Hansen, a Tongan man who authorities say preyed on the desires of immigrants to become United States citizens in an illegal scheme to get their money, was re-sentenced on Thursday.
Helaman Hansen, also known as Helamani, and his wife, Viola Hansen, also known as Sela Hansen, were the couple at the centre of the FBI investigation, which led to Helaman’s conviction.
Hansen ran the “Americans Helping America Chamber of Commerce” (AHA). The Sacramento organization first came on the radar of KCRA 3 Investigates before Christmas in 2015. In December 2015, a half-dozen migrants met with KCRA to discuss an adult adoption concept that had been spreading through word of mouth at churches and throughout the Latino and Hispanic communities in Northern California.
Those people said Hansen’s system was a scam.
Hansen told people that, under international law, he and his employees could adopt these migrants — as full-grown adults — and that would automatically make them U.S. citizens.
“They would tell my parents, ‘Hey, this is something you can do for your kids. They’ll have a better future,'” said one person in 2015.
Another said they were told, “There is one option you can be legal here.”
Yet an immigration attorney KCRA 3 Investigates spoke with at the time said, “It’s a total scam.”
Hansen spoke with KCRA 3 Investigates, claiming to be “the only agents in the United States of America that are doing something like this because everybody want to make money. We want to change lives.”
When asked point-blank if he was leading a scam, he denied it.
When asked how many people had become U.S. citizens through adult adoption, he said, “Thousands, as far as I’m concerned.”
Immigration experts said that adoption can help the pathway to citizenship for those 16 and younger, but that it’s far more complicated for anyone older than that. And it has absolutely no effect at all for immigration purposes.
Just before our story aired in 2015, the FBI raided Hansen’s offices, taking all his files and computers. At the time, he claimed the feds had no constitutional right to take their equipment.
Hansen asked for a jury trial and was found guilty in 2017 on 18 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy to entice illegal immigration for the purposes of enrichment. The judge then sentenced Hansen to 20 years in federal prison.
But the story did not end there.
Hansen appealed his conviction. His appeals documents were sometimes filled with the same claims of knowing United Nations and international law, claiming that his conviction was unconstitutional. Eventually, his attorneys argued that the two immigration enticement charges were problematic.
In 2020, Hansen claimed very poor health. Hansen was let out of prison on supervised release, pending the result of an appeal, amid fears he could die from the COVID-19 outbreak in the Lompoc prison facility in Santa Barbara County.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Hansen, in small part, saying the immigration charges should be modified. But the court upheld the other charges. The case even made its way up to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the Ninth Circuit’s opinion.
Ultimately, the U.S. attorney in Sacramento dropped the two immigration enrichment charges, noting that the sentencing for his original fraud charges was still 20 years in jail.
That led to Aug. 22, 2024, four years after Hansen’s release and seven years after his original conviction, where Hansen, again, faced Judge Morrison England, Jr., for sentencing.
The probation department had sent recommendations, and at the beginning of the hearing, the judge seemed to want to let Hansen out with the 36 months he served in Lompoc as his time served. The prosecution vehemently disagreed, saying that Hansen was running the same health-problem scheme he’d run in the original trial and that then, the jury didn’t buy it.
The debate came down to how much time Hansen should actually spend, then, on home supervision. Hansen’s lawyer said that he has type-2 diabetes, gout, arthritis, hypertension, has been through a heart surgery, has prostate cancer, and may have a form of dementia. That’s in addition to him saying during his trial that he had a mental condition.
Prosecutors pointed out that, although the enrichment charges were dropped, there were hundreds of people whose lives were ruined by Hansen and his scheme. He had also shown no remorse for the crimes and deserved the long sentence to be served out inside a prison. But if the judge wanted to put him in home confinement, he should do it for the same period of time. “Accountability with compassion,” the prosecutor said.
Ultimately, what changed the sentence from “time served” to more were Hansen’s actions. During what is called his “right of allocution,” Hansen began to quote the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. He then began saying he knew the international laws and was a registered justice of the peace. Then Hansen claimed his innocence.
That statement seemed to strike a chord with Judge England. After a long debate where Hansen kept saying, “if I violated the law,” England stated that the case “went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, who affirmed the decision” in all but two of the counts.
Hansen’s attorney intervened to try and deflect Hansen’s statement, pointing out he was a “dreamer” and that his health issues impaired him. More importantly, she claimed Hansen, even if he wanted to, could not perpetrate another scheme because he was too frail and his standing in the community had been ruined.
Hansen, ultimately, in a meandering statement, did admit he violated U.S. law. He still claimed he did nothing in county or city laws that was illegal.
The judge sentenced Hansen to six years in home confinement.
Hansen has 14 days to appeal the sentence. He has been ordered to pay back restitution to the hundreds of people whose money he took selling his adult adoption scheme.
