A state disciplinary judge has ended the Colorado career of an immigration lawyer and ordered her to pay $8,120 to former clients after determining she spent their money on everything from piano tuning to yoga classes, then falsified documents to cover up her misdeeds.
“She is unregulatable,” Judge Bryon Large wrote of the lawyer Lindsay Arroyo on March 4, “and she poses a significant danger to Colorado citizens. She must be disbarred.”
Arroyo, who also goes by Janet Lindsay Richardson-Vargas, has been a lawyer since 2009. She is licensed in New York but worked in Arvada and practiced in Colorado federal courts. She was at her own firm, Arroyo Immigration Services, while running afoul of state ethics rules.
Large’s order, which was released last week, details some of the most egregious wrongdoing by a Colorado lawyer in recent years, a pattern of bad behavior that left her desperate clients in dangerous situations while Arroyo enriched herself from their scant resources.
She “seriously injured her clients, the legal profession and the reputation of lawyers,” he wrote.
In 2017, an undocumented immigrant known in court documents as A.G. paid Arroyo $2,620 to request a waiver that would let him leave the country, visit his dying mother, and reenter the U.S. while his visa application was pending. Arroyo pocketed the $2,620 and didn’t pay A.G.’s visa fees, so his application was denied. He did not see his mom before she died.
“A.G. felt especially harmed because (Arroyo) gave him hope that he could see his mother and family but then betrayed that hope by doing nothing on his case,” Large wrote, noting that A.G. is still seeking lawful residency eight years later and was nervous about testifying at Arroyo’s disciplinary hearing because “he feared that immigration authorities might nab him.”
In 2019, a woman referred to as L.R. scrounged $2,400 from friends and family and paid it to Arroyo. The woman was in an abusive marriage, wanted out and knew that a work visa would help her and her children, ages 11 and 7, walk away. When Arroyo kept the money and failed to file L.R.’s paperwork — or even return it — L.R. had to remain married.
“As a result, L.R. recounted, her two minor children spent more time in the confines of a situation in which they witnessed their mother abused and mistreated,” Large wrote. “L.R. stated that she believes Arroyo takes advantage of people and that her experience with Arroyo has deepened her distrust of lawyers, whom she fears will take her money but again fail to help her.”
Beginning in the fall of 2020, Arroyo used a trust account for her clients’ money “as her personal bank account,” the judge determined. That meant spending clients’ money to pay her rent and car insurance, to cover yoga class fees and city fines, to tune her home piano and host a birthday party for her child. Some of the money paid for a required course on legal ethics.
In 2022, Chase Bank reached out to the Colorado Office of Attorney Regulation to say that Arroyo’s trust account was overdrawn, which shouldn’t happen since it is designed only to hold clients’ money. The office then asked Arroyo for three months of bank statements. Later, when the office subpoenaed Chase, it realized that Arroyo had falsified the statements she sent.
In addition to disbarring Arroyo, the judge ordered her by April 8 to pay $3,100 to L.R., $2,620 to A.G. and $2,400 to a third client she abandoned. Arroyo did not participate in the disciplinary proceedings and did not answer BusinessDen’s requests to comment.
“Undocumented immigration clients are generally considered the epitome of vulnerable victims,” Large explained. “(Arroyo)’s clients testified about their unsettled immigration status, which left them particularly vulnerable to predations from unscrupulous individuals — like her.”
This story was originally published by BusinessDen.
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