Ex-Jefferson Abington doctor admits to lying about Pakistani child he employed as a domestic servant in his home

A former doctor at Jefferson Abington Hospital told a federal judge Friday he lied to U.S. immigration authorities in an attempt to smuggle a child from Pakistan to work as a domestic servant in his Montgomery County home.

Rahat Memon, who had been working as a resident in internal medicine at the hospital since June 2020, pleaded guilty to one count of visa fraud, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

He told U.S. District Judge Gerald J. Pappert that he and his wife tried to pass the child off as their adoptive daughter in hopes of employing her as a live-in caretaker for their biological child.

Memon, 32, of Horsham, and his attorney, David Scott Nenner, did not respond to requests for comment about the incident following Friday’s hearing.

And prosecutors declined to discuss the case or confirm the age of the child the doctor sought to claim as his own, describing her only as “school age.”

But court filings surrounding the doctor’s guilty plea lay out a troubling series of events that began less than two years after Memon, a Pakistani national, came to the U.S. as part of a medical exchange program on a visa sponsored by the hospital.

In December, Memon submitted visa applications for his wife, his daughter, and the minor he sought to employ.

When his wife went for her interview at the U.S. Consulate General’s Office in Pakistan a week later and provided documents claiming the minor was their adoptive daughter, immigration authorities flagged them as suspicious and requested that the Memons provide additional records.

Prosecutors say she consulted with Memon and together they came up with a plan to falsify several additional documents including a family registration certificate, a guardianship application, photos of the child with their family and school records including report cards from a school in Hyderabad, India.

Memon later confessed to digitally altering the family photos to include the child and to bribing officials at the school with the equivalent of $162 to create fake report cards for the child, according to a plea memo filed as part of his case.

Investigators determined the Memons had been paying the child’s biological parents, who lacked legal immigration status in Pakistan, $39 a month for the child to work in their home.

Prosecutors did not accuse Memon of mistreating the child and a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined Friday to discuss the conditions under which she worked in the family’s home in Pakistan.

A 2022 study by the International Labour Organization, an arm of the United Nations, concluded that child labor remains alarmingly prevalent in Pakistan with one in every four households employing minors, primarily girls between the ages of 10 and 14, to work as household domestic servants. Much of the supply for that workforce is driven by deep poverty in the nation, the agency found.

In court Friday, Memon calmly fielded questions from Pappert on whether he understood the consequences of his guilty plea — which will likely include losing his license to practice medicine in the United States and all but certain deportation proceedings once he serves whatever sentence the judge imposes at a hearing scheduled for January.

“I wish to plead guilty, your honor,” he said. His attorney said Memon is eager to return to Pakistan.

A spokesperson for Jefferson Abington declined to answer questions about Memon’s employment status at the hospital or whether his departure had anything to do with the charges filed against him in August, saying she could not do so without Memon’s permission.