MIAMI » The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials.

The woman, Estefanma Isamas, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids. But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Isamas could work for an Obama fundraiser with close ties to the administration.

It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the Isamas family, which the government of Ecuador accuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.

The family, which has been investigated by federal law enforcement agencies on suspicion of money laundering and immigration fraud, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to U.S. political campaigns in recent years. During that time, it has repeatedly received favorable treatment from the highest levels of the U.S. government, including from New Jersey’s senior senator and the State Department.

The Obama administration has allowed the family’s patriarchs, Roberto and William Isamas, to remain in the United States, refusing to extradite them to Ecuador. The two brothers were sentenced in absentia in 2012 to eight years in prison, accused of running their bank into the ground and then presenting false balance sheets to profit from bailout funds. In a highly politicized case, Ecuador says the fraud cost the country $400 million.

The family’s affairs have rankled Ecuador and strained relations with the United States at a time when the two nations are also at odds over another international fugitive: Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

But while scrutiny has typically focused on whether the family’s generous campaign donations have helped its patriarchs avoid extradition, the unorthodox help given to Estefanma Isamas, the daughter of Roberto, has received little attention.

In the spring of 2011, Isamas, a television executive, was in a difficult situation.

Her father and uncle were Ecuadorean fugitives living in Miami, but she was barred from entering the United States after she brought maids into the country under false visa pretenses and left them at her parents’ Miami mansion while she traveled.

"Alien-smuggling" is what American consular officials in Ecuador called it.

American diplomats began enforcing the ban against Isamas, blocking her from coming to Miami for a job with a communications strategist who had raised up to $500,000 for President Barack Obama.

What happened next illustrates the kind of access and influence available to people with vast amounts of money.

For more than a year, Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and his staff engaged in a relentless effort to help Estefanma Isamas, urging senior government officials, including Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, to waive the ban. The senator’s assistance came even though Isamas’ family — a major donor to him and other U.S. politicians — does not live in his state.

The Obama administration then reversed its decision and gave Isamas the waiver she needed to come to the United States — after tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the family poured into Obama’s campaign coffers.

An email from Menendez’s office sharing the good news was dated May 15, 2012, one day after, campaign finance records show, Isamas’ mother gave $40,000 to the Obama Victory Fund, which provided donations to the president and other Democrats.

"In my old profession as a prosecutor, timelines mean a lot," said Ken Boehm, a former Pennsylvania prosecutor who is chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog. "When a donation happens and then something else happens, like the favor, as long as they are very, very close, that really paints a story."

In 2012, the Isamas family donated about $100,000 to the Obama Victory Fund. Campaign finance records show that their most generous donations came just before a request to the administration.

Isamas’ mother, Marma Mercedes, had recently donated $30,000 to the Senate campaign committee that Menendez chaired when she turned to the New Jersey Democrat for help in her daughter’s case.

At least three members of Menendez’s staff worked with Isamas and her father, as well as lawyers and other congressional offices, to argue that she had been unfairly denied entry into the United States.

Over the course of the next year — as various members of the Isamas family donated to Menendez’s re-election campaign — Menendez and his staff repeatedly made calls, sent emails and wrote letters about Estefanma Isamas’ case to Clinton, Mills, the consulate in Ecuador, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

After months of resistance from State Department offices in Ecuador and Washington, the senator lobbied Mills himself, and the travel ban against Isamas was eventually overturned.

Menendez’s office acknowledged going to bat for Isamas, but insisted that the advocacy was not motivated by money.

"Our office handled this case no differently than we have thousands of other immigration-related requests over the years and to suggest that somehow the senator’s long-standing and principled beliefs on immigration have been compromised is just plain absurd," said Patricia Enright, the senator’s spokeswoman.

Enright said Menendez’s office worked on the case because Isamas had previously been allowed to travel to the United States six times despite the ban, and the decision to suddenly enforce it seemed arbitrary and wrong.

Menendez is under investigation by the Justice Department for his advocacy on behalf of another out-of-state campaign donor, Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, who ran afoul of federal health officials for unorthodox Medicare billing.

In the Isamas case, the senator wrote seven letters for various members of the family, including four on April 2, 2012, alone.

A month after succeeding in Isamas’ case, Menendez sent another letter to the head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to plea to waive a ban on her sister, Marma — who had also been deemed an immigrant smuggler because she had brought maids into the United States and left them with her parents while she traveled to Europe.

As that letter went out, their mother gave $20,000 more to the Obama Victory Fund.

Immigration officials forwarded the senator’s inquiries to Homeland Security Investigations, the immigration bureau’s investigative arm. Officials there noticed that the Isamas family had made several donations to the senator and informed the FBI in Miami.

Agents with Homeland Security Investigations are working to have the Isamas brothers deported. The Ecuadorean government has repeatedly requested that the men be extradited, but Washington has declined, saying that the extradition request was poorly prepared and did not meet legal standards. The criminal case in Ecuador was also mired by irregularities.

The Isamas brothers consider themselves political exiles unfairly attacked by the Ecuadorean government and have garnered support on Capitol Hill, where sentiment against Ecuador’s leftist president runs strong.

But the case involving Estefanma Isamas could prove awkward for Clinton, who was in charge of the State Department at the time high-ranking officials overruled the agency’s ban on Isamas for immigration fraud and whose office made calls on the matter.

Alfredo J. Balsera, the Obama fundraiser whose firm, Balsera Communications, sponsored Isamas’ visa, was featured recently in USA Today as a prominent Latino fundraiser backing Clinton for president in 2016.

Balsera declined repeated requests to explain what work Isamas has done for his company, which has close ties to the Obama administration. To stay in the country under her three-year visa, Isamas would have to remain employed by Balsera Communications, request a change of immigration status, or get another employer to sponsor her.

The company website does not list her as one of its 12 employees, though bios and photos of even junior account executives are featured, and news releases were issued when the others were hired. Isamas’ name has not been mentioned on the company’s blog, Facebook page or Twitter timeline, and she is not present in any of the dozens of photographs posted on social media sites of company outings, parties, professional and social events.

David A. Duckenfield, a partner at the company who is now on leave for a position as deputy assistant secretary of public affairs at the State Department, said Isamas works for the firm but declined to comment further. Another senior executive at the firm said she must work outside the office because he had never heard of her.

A spokesman for Clinton and her chief of staff, Mills, denied any special treatment for Isamas. Although Mills is unlikely to serve in any official capacity on a potential 2016 presidential campaign, she would undoubtedly be a strong behind-the-scenes presence and one of a small number of longtime advisers whom Clinton would rely on for advice.

"There are rigorous processes in place for matters such as these, and they were followed," said the spokesman, Nick Merrill. "Nothing more, nothing less."

A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, declined to comment, saying that visas are issued free from political interference by other federal agencies.

Linda Jewell, the American ambassador in Quito from 2005 to 2008, when Isamas’ immigration fraud was detected, said the intervention in Isamas’ case was far from routine.

"Such close and detailed involvement by a congressional office in an individual visa case would be quite unusual, especially for an applicant who is not a constituent of the member of Congress," Jewell said after reviewing emails and documents related to the case. "This example of inquiry is substantially beyond the usual level of interest."

Others have expressed concern. When Menendez’ office reached out to Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., to get him to write a letter on Isamas’ behalf, his office refused.

We "discovered from the State Department that there were some red flags associated with the individual in question and we took no further action," said Nelson’s spokesman, Dan McLaughlin.

Boehm, the former Pennsylvania prosecutor, said Senate ethics rules allow members of Congress to reach out to the administration on behalf of a constituent.

"Members of Congress do a lot for their constituents," Boehm said. "These folks are not his constituents," he added, referring to Menendez. The Isamas family did not return several requests for comment. Estefanma Isamas did not respond to emails and messages left at her home in Miami. Her lawyer, Roy J. Barquet, did not respond to several messages left by phone and email.

In an interview this year, Roberto Isamas said the family’s donations were targeted to members of Congress who fight for human rights and freedom of speech in Latin America. He said he had met Menendez once or twice.

"If you go to his website," Isamas said, "it says, ‘If you have an immigration problem, call me.’"

The senator’s website does offer such casework assistance, under a category titled "Services for New Jerseyans."

© 2014 The New York Times Company