Advocate: Stubbornly Non-Partisaned

In January 2018, Lopez’s privacy breach by the DHS crime-victim office was a lead story for both ​​USA Today & The Arizona Republic.  Other newspapers and media around the country quickly picked up the story. 

Elena's been a lead source for NBC News affiliates around the country and other media outlets investigating immigration fraud.

Time, NBC News, Gannett's nation-wide publications, The Week, Fox News (online and television), Medium, Israel's Haaretz , the Spanish-language El Sol  Latino newspaper and other media featured her story. ​ Since 2017, she's been interviewed by almost 60 national and local radio hosts about her story and the national-security implications of ignoring widespread immigration fraud. 

Realizing the extent of the immigration fraud problem coupled with the lack of information to help American victims, Elena set up the first website on the Internet around issues of immigration fraud: ImmigrationFraud.com. 

She provided a basic primer ("Marriage Fraud 101") to help victims come up to speed quickly on the immigration system and assess how they might've been defrauded. She also highlighted data, government investigations, congressional testimony and court cases highlighting the systemic problem of immigration fraud. 

Elena wrote a free legal guide to help Americans facing immigration fraud issues and posted it on the site, as well. She wanted to help people avoid her costly mistakes. 

• Family law attorneys knew little to nothing about immigration fraud negatively affecting their American clients
• Immigration lawyers knew everything but weren't willing to help protect Americans; Setting a precedent could hurt their future clients. 
• More and more Americans were being victimized regularly as foreigners sought to legalize their temporary or illegal status in the United States.

Elena tirelessly lobbies congress to change immigration laws victimizing Americans and the nation's security.  She fails to understand why politicians  put the needs of foreign nationals before those of their own U.S.  citizen constituents.  

She regularly calls out both Republicans  and Democrats by demanding protections for both natural-born and naturalized American citizens. 

Such political demands are not "anti-immigrant"  or racist: Many of the fraud victims she's worked with for the past 15  years are people of color, Latinos, multi-racial, LGBTQ,  first-generation Americans and naturalized U.S. citizens. 

In 2018, Lopez twice presented clusters of national-security immigration fraud cases at White House meetings.  These clusters involved foreign nationals using loopholes to bypass background  checks, hide criminal activities and get fast-tracked green cards and  U.S. citizenship. These people then quickly married active military with  high-level security clearances, often lived on U.S. bases, and  fraudulently sought federal benefits.  

The Department of Defense erroneously thought the Department of Homeland Security properly vetted such people before issuing access to secure government facilities. 

The FBI contacted her about these cases in 2016. 

Congressional leadership has known about these loopholes since 2006. Lopez warned them of the first national-security clusters when she discovered them in 2012. Instead of close the temporary loopholes responsible, congress and the president made them permanent law in 2013. 

President Biden's immigration reform proposals -- being undertaken by Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) -- actually seek to expand the loopholes.