The unfinished hulk that Fremont's mayor calls the city's costliest eyesore isn't just a stalled construction project. It's the physical wreckage of one of the Bay Area's largest EB-5 immigration-investment frauds — the one whose lawyer-developer fled to Central Asia rather than face a jury.

Mission Hills Square, the four-story mixed-use skeleton visible from Interstate 680 near Sabercat Road, was meant to hold 158 apartments and street-level retail. Instead it has sat idle for years, and this week Fremont Mayor Raj Salwan went public asking a court to force the site's lender to finish it or tear it down. What the "eyesore" framing leaves out is how the building died: its developer and her regional center were charged by the SEC in 2018 with secretly pocketing millions from the foreign investors whose green cards rode on the project — and she skipped the country before the criminal case could be tried.

Head north on I-680 through Fremont and it's unavoidable: a concrete-and-steel carcass wrapped in chain-link, promising nothing. In an interview with KRON4 (external source, opens in a new tab) this week, Mayor Raj Salwan said work on Mission Hills Square began in 2017 and stalled almost immediately amid what he described as federal litigation, two bankruptcies, and the exit of the original developer. He wants the structure completed or knocked down, calling it exactly the kind of thing drivers don't expect to see at the gateway to his city.

The "federal litigation" is the part worth slowing down for.

In October 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged (external source, opens in a new tab) Atherton immigration attorney Jean Danhong Chen and her ex-husband Tony Jianyun Ye with running a fraudulent EB-5 scheme. The program lets foreign nationals earn U.S. green cards by investing roughly $500,000 in job-creating ventures. According to the SEC, Chen and Ye secretly owned the Golden State Regional Center — installing what the agency called a figurehead as its manager — then funneled Chen's own legal clients into its projects while collecting more than $10 million in undisclosed commissions they never revealed. Fremont Hills Development, the entity building Mission Hills Square, was the project's job-creating engine. Once the pair learned of the investigation, the SEC alleges, they backdated paperwork and wiped records to bury their role.

The "federal litigation" is the part worth slowing down for.

The agency's complaint asked the court for something Fremont residents might find familiar: appointment of a receiver.

The criminal case was harsher. As San Jose Inside (external source, opens in a new tab) has reported, a federal grand jury indicted Chen and Ye in March 2019 on visa-fraud and obstruction counts tied to more than 100 foreign investors and roughly $52 million routed through the EB-5 program. Ye pleaded guilty in 2021 and served a 12-month sentence. Chen, prosecutors say, fled the country the moment the SEC's 2018 suit landed and stayed beyond U.S. reach for years — until Kyrgyz authorities, acting on a Washington request, took her into custody, the first time that Central Asian nation had surrendered anyone to face American criminal charges. She answered the charges in federal court in San Jose in March 2025.

By then the building was already a corpse. The developer's side declared bankruptcy twice, and in early 2022 the Los Angeles construction lender Parkview Financial took over the roughly 13-acre site at 2501 Cormack Road for about $40 million, The Real Deal reported (external source, opens in a new tab) — a deal industry outlet The Registry (external source, opens in a new tab) separately pegged at $40.2 million and dated to a February 2022 county recording. Property-data service BLDUP (external source, opens in a new tab) still lists the parcel as an unbuilt 158-unit project.

That's where the mayor's frustration comes in. Four years after Parkview Financial acquired the site in that 2022 sale, reported by The Registry (external source, opens in a new tab), nothing has moved. Salwan says Fremont has declared the site substandard and a public-safety hazard and went to court seeking authority to install someone who could step in. So far, he told KRON4, the judge has instead granted Parkview Financial more time to chart a path forward. The station said the firm did not respond to its request for comment, and Parkview has offered no public explanation for the delay.

The result is a standoff that says as much about distressed-debt inertia as about civic pride. A lender that paid roughly $40 million for a fraud-tainted shell has little obvious reason to pour construction millions into finishing it — and a city, for now, has limited power to compel it. "We're committed to see this through," Salwan said. The investors who never got their green cards, or their money back, aren't in the frame at all.