The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, announced on Tuesday the creation of a special office to help immigrants navigate the sometimes intimidating criminal justice system and to coordinate the prosecution of immigrant-related crime, including financial exploitation and violence.

The initiative was spurred in part by the scheduled rollout in the coming months of sweeping federal immigration initiatives, which immigrants’ advocates and law-enforcement officials say may set off a surge in fraud schemes that victimize the foreign-born.

While the district attorney’s office has frequently prosecuted cases involving the victimization of immigrants, Mr. Brown said the new entity, the Office of Immigrant Affairs, will sharpen and enhance those efforts.

“We recognize that with immigration policy changing and evolving on all levels of government, there is an opportunity to do more,” he said in a statement.

Queens is the third district attorney’s office in New York City to have a unit dedicated to immigration issues. In 2007, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney at the time, formed his office’s Immigrant Affairs Unit. Last year, the Immigrant Fraud Unit in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office was created.

In recent months, immigrants’ advocates had been lobbying Mr. Brown to create a similar entity in his office to help increase the protection of immigrants in Queens, the borough with the largest immigrant population and the highest concentration of immigrants.

Advocates say immigration fraud tends to spike with the implementation of any new immigration program. Furthermore, they say, the national debate over the past couple of years has both raised expectations and sowed confusion among immigrants, increasing their vulnerability to unscrupulous lawyers and others masquerading as authorized legal representatives.

Those concerns increased in November when President Obama announced his executive actions on immigration, including the expansion of a deportation deferral program for immigrants brought to this country as children, scheduled to take effect next month.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Brown emphasized that the decision to form the new office was driven in part by recent changes in local, state and national immigration policy, though he added, “We heard, certainly, from the advocates, as well, and we found that it would be appropriate to do the kind of thing we’re doing now.”

Mr. Brown has appointed Carmencita N. Gutierrez, a senior Queens prosecutor and a daughter of Colombian immigrants, to be the director of the new office, which will include a paralegal.

Ms. Gutierrez, who was raised in Queens, said part of her work will involve meeting with community groups and leaders to help demystify the work of the Queens district attorney’s office and other law-enforcement agencies and direct victims to the right bureaus for help.

Suspicion of government authorities is common among immigrants, particularly those who do not speak English or are undocumented. But Ms. Gutierrez said she hoped her office’s outreach would help to dispel that wariness.

“We have been doing it individually when we meet victims, saying, ‘Look, your status is not important to us,’” she said in an interview. “Our goal is to educate the community on a grander scale.”

At the same time, the new office will work internally to help assistant district attorneys handle immigrant-related cases and navigate immigrant issues. Ms. Gutierrez said her office will serve as “a main receptacle” of information related to immigrant populations and crimes against immigrants.

“I think it will be a good opportunity to enhance our ability to handle cases of that nature,” Mr. Brown said.