Undocumented crime victims often denied help getting visas
On a winter day in early 2011, Billy Ventura Hercules rolled up to a Franklin County Municipal Court witness stand in a wheelchair. In front of a grand jury, he started recounting a shooting that changed the trajectory of his life.
Ventura Hercules, now 43, left his home country in El Salvador in 2004 and crossed the border without documentation. In May 2010, he was shot in the back during a robbery outside his apartment in Whitehall. The bullet lodged in his spinal cord, and the doctor told him that he might never walk again.
On the day of the criminal trial, Ventura Hercules managed to get out of bed with his mother’s help. Sitting next to the alleged shooter, he remembered how the man repeatedly said, “I’m going to kill you,” fired at him when he tried to get away, and stepped on his injured body before fleeing the scene.
Despite the emotional trauma and physical pain, Ventura Hercules offered assistance to the police and prosecutors throughout the process, he said. With his cooperation, multiple men involved in the incident were charged with aggravated robbery, and at least one of them received a sentence, records show.
Years after assisting police, man denied U visa request worries of deportation
Ventura Hercules later found out from a friend that he might qualify for a U visa. It is a type of nonimmigrant status granted to undocumented individuals who work with law enforcement to solve violent crimes.
He was devastated, however, when the Whitehall police department refused to sign a form to prove that he had been helpful to the officers. Today, more than 10 years after he testified in court, Ventura Hercules still lives with the daily fear of arrest and deportation.
“I don’t understand why the police don’t want to help me,” he said. “People don’t know how hard it is for a person with no status to live their lives. Having a U visa would help me with everything.”
Ventura Hercules is not the only one stuck in this predicament. Due to the lack of binding national or state-level regulations, local law enforcement agencies in Ohio are free to deny any U visa certification request.
Whitehall police rejected 14 out of 18 such requests it received from 2018 to the present, according to documents obtained by The Dispatch through public record requests.
“U visa is an amazing opportunity for law enforcement because you want people to come forward and cooperate,” said Inna Simakovsky, a Columbus immigration attorney who took on Ventura Hercules’ case.
“Here, you have reported a crime, you have gone to a lineup, you have gone to trial and put the criminal behind bars, but the police won’t help and you still can’t drive legally or work legally,” she continued. “Nothing has necessarily changed for you even though you have potentially changed the lives of a lot of other people.”
A visa designed to help police, encourage immigrants to assist investigations
Congress created the U visa category in 2000. The goal is to alleviate immigrants’ anxiety when interacting with law enforcement and make it easier for police officers to do their jobs, according to Leslye Orloff, who contributed to the legislation’s drafting. She is the director of the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project (NIWAP) at American University’s Washington College of Law.
To start off a U visa application, the immigrant needs to obtain a certification from an agency that could confirm the person’s cooperation in the investigation or prosecution process.
But there is no federal law mandating officers to provide a signature. Nationally, only 35% of law enforcement agencies and 68% of prosecutors’ offices said they sign U visa certifications, according to a 2018 report by NIWAP.
There are also many misunderstandings about who qualifies for U visas, Orloff said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s official guide recommends that local agencies provide certifications to all immigrants who were helpful in the past, are currently helpful or are likely to be helpful in the future. It should not matter when the crime happened or whether an applicant’s assistance led to arrest or prosecution.
The purpose is to build long-term trust between officers and immigrant communities beyond one specific case, Orloff explained. But local agencies sometimes set up restrictive internal policies to limit the number of eligible immigrants.
“There are communities where the anti-immigrant views of the local police department are essentially interfering with their ability to fight crime,” Orloff said. “When a department doesn’t sign U visa certifications, they are endangering not only their own community but their own police officers.”
Even for those who are able to get a certification, there is still a daunting process to come.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is only allowed to issue 10,000 U visas per year. As of March 2021, there was a national backlog of more than 162,000 U visa applications waiting for final approval. It could easily take more than five years for an application to get processed, attorneys said.
“The visa process is long, and certification is only the first step,” said Mary Yanik, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane University. “When someone can’t even get the certification, that’s only further delaying what is a decadelong process of seeking status.”
Inconsistent U visa certification rules in Franklin County
More than a dozen states have passed their own U visa legislations in order to regulate certification proceedings. In Ohio, however, local agencies are free to set their own criteria for approval and denial.
Records obtained by The Dispatch show disparities among different agencies’ policies and practices, some of which are at odds with the Homeland Security guidelines.
The Columbus Division of Police approved slightly more than half of the approximately 200 requests it received since 2018, according to records.
The division follows the Homeland Security guidance, said Sgt. Dianne Yandrich, who was in charge of reviewing the department’s U visa requests until recently. She said Columbus police does not impose any additional eligibility criteria because it wants to assist as many qualified applicants as possible.
But in Whitehall — where census data show 16% of its population is foreign-born — the police do not approve U requests concerning criminal cases that already have been closed. Whitehall police Chief Mike Crispen said he set his department’s policy this way to stay away from immigration as much as possible.
“The policy is we’re not getting involved in the immigration process, but if I need you for court or I need you for investigation, we’ll take that extra step and sign this form,” Crispen said.
“It’s very clear in [the Homeland Security guidelines] that police are not to be coerced into doing this,” he said. “I understand the whole concept behind [U visas], but that’s not the only way of building relationships.”
Ventura Hercules initially got a certification from a Whitehall sergeant when he first tried in 2015, but the signer’s name was not listed on the form.
Early last year, the Citizenship and Immigration Services sent Ventura Hercules a request for evidence, asking him to fill in the signer’s name. But the police department responded that it would not address the technical issue. Crispen said that he has created new policies since 2015, and Hercules’ case no longer qualifies.
The Franklin County Sheriff ’s office did not approve any of the 13 requests it received from 2018 to the present and referred the applicant to the prosecutor’s office in every case, The Dispatch found. A spokesperson said this is because the sheriff ’s office usually does not know who has or will testify in court.
But all agencies involved in a criminal case have the ability to certify, Orloff said. The police could assess applicants’ helpfulness based on their cooperation during the criminal investigation. Or they could ask the prosecutor for more information. Referring applicants to another office could discourage them from seeking further help, she said.
A few cities in Franklin County have little experience dealing with U visa requests. Dublin police only saw one such case in the past three years. Reynoldsburg police said it does not deal with U visa requests and declined to offer an explanation. Upper Arlington police said it rarely gets U visa requests and does not keep these records. All have large foreign-born populations.
The reason that these places do not see many requests might have to do with both low community awareness and increased immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, according to Orloff.
“There’s no question that there was a chilling effect of immigration enforcement on victims’ willingness to file for immigration,” she said. “Both the victim advocates and law enforcement agencies need to do more outreach to immigrant communities to make sure they aren’t afraid.”
An immigrant family’s hope for relief
The shooting changed Ventura Hercules’ life forever.
Due to his undocumented status, he had no health insurance, and the expensive medical bills depleted his bank account. He learned to walk again after five years in a wheelchair, but with a bullet stuck in his spine, his back pain still flares up every day.
Ineligible for disability or unemployment benefits, Ventura Hercules now works fulltime as a landscaper to take care of his family.
“He’s in pain every time he comes home from work, unable to walk,” said Eunice Rivera, Ventura Hercules’ wife, who still can’t understand the police’s denial of the U visa request.
“I know his status can be fixed, and there’s no reason why the police should reject his case,” Rivera said. “Billy was almost killed. He deserves justice.”