Abuse reports by immigrants climb
Director says people are ‘losing’ protection, citing narrowing immigration status options
It started with money. The woman’s husband wouldn’t allow her to ask questions about his salary or spending after they immigrated to Houston from India in 2009. Eventually, he started restricting her meals to three times a day, then two.
Meanwhile, the woman — who asked not to be identified because of concern for her safety — was left isolated from friends and family. She says her husband was verbally, emotionally and then physically abusive. She says he hit her for the first time shortly after the birth of their son, and continued to do so over the next two and a half years.
“As soon as we moved to the U.S., I lost all the strong parts of my life,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “My confidence went down.”
And yet the worst abuse were the repeated threats regarding her H4 spouse visa. She said her husband repeatedly told her that her immigration status was tied to his, and that she would be deported if she left him or reported him to police. She ultimately risked being separated from her U.S.-born son to get free of her spouse, an example of those who must choose between legal immigration status and their safety.
As the Trump administration has made it harder for immi-
grants to achieve legal status, advocates say they’ve seen a rise in domestic violence cases locally and nationally that involve an abuser wielding power over a non-citizen immigrant.
Abusers use lack of citizenship as a control tactic by threatening deportation, failing to file paperwork for visa applications and otherwise raising victims’ fear of reporting abuse to law enforcement. Victims are more fearful given the obstacles placed in the path of achieving legal status under the administration’s “zero-tolerance policy,” narrowing down the already limited options for survivors of domestic violence.
“After the elections, the volume of individuals calling with fear and stories of deep concern increased in our office,” said Anne Chandler, executive director of the Houston chapter of the nonprofit Tahirih Justice Center.
Tahirih centers nationwide received 620 phone calls concerning immigration in the first two months of 2017 alone, compared to 877 phone calls in all of 2015. The National Domestic Violence Hotline also saw a nearly 14 percent increase in calls from survivors who “indicated that immigration was a part of their story in some way” from 2017 to 2018, CEO Katie Ray-Jones said. And in the first nine and a half months of 2018, reports of immigration threats to Daya, a nonprofit that supports South Asian survivors of domestic violence and that supported the Indian woman, more than doubled from all of 2017.
“Our call volume stayed the same (under Trump), but the content of the calls was quite different,” said Rachna Khare, executive director of Daya. “You really felt that culture of fear within our immigrant survivors, whether they are here on valid visas or undocumented.”
Hana, a second woman who asked that her full name not be used, grew up in Libya with an abusive father. She went on to marry a man who she says abused her physically, sexually, emotionally, verbally and financially.
“My family would not protect me, the court would not protect me, the government would not protect me,” she said. “It was very dark around me.”
The idea of ending her life, she said, was comforting at times — but she held on for her three children. She briefly felt hopeful when her husband said they were moving to the United States, where he would work and she would be able to study. But the abuse continued until he abandoned her and their children, taking her scholarship money and the kids’ health insurance with him.
Broke, she stayed in Houston with her kids and ended her graduate studies, which put her at risk of losing her F1 student visa covering a temporary stay. She didn’t know what to do.
Because of increased vulnerabilities, immigrant women are twice as likely to experience domestic violence as the general population, according to Tahirih. Of abused immigrant women, 27 percent said they hadn’t reported their abuse because they feared being deported, according to a survey cited by Daya.
“Their spouses will tell them, ‘Go ahead and call the police, I’m going to have you deported,’” Khare said. “And they don’t know whether that’s true or not, and they can’t take the risk because if their spouse gets arrested and their visa depends on (the spouse’s) visa, where does that leave their kids? Where does that leave (the victim)?”
The fear is not unfounded. According to a 2015 survey of advocates and attorneys conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union, 54 percent of respondents said police are “sometimes” or “often” biased against immigrants.
And with frequent executive orders and news stories about stricter immigration enforcement over the past 21 months, advocates say deportation and family separation fears have heightened, emboldening abusers wielding such threats.
The spike comes amid an increasing reluctance within the immigrant community to report abuse to law enforcement generally. In the Hispanic community alone, Houston police saw a nearly 50 percent decrease in rape reports from 2017 to 2016.
Adding to the fears is SB 4, the Texas measure passed last year that allows local law enforcement to ask about immigration status during routine interactions and requires them to detain anyone that the federal government suspects is in the country illegally. Even before SB4 took effect last year, 86 percent of the arrests made by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Houston field office in the first four months of the Trump administration were from local jails in cooperation with law enforcement, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a Washingtonbased think tank.
However, there are local law enforcement agencies and ICE field offices that have ensured they would not target abuse victims. The real concern that organizations like Daya and Tahirih have had since Trump took office is what happens after a victim comes forward.
“Before we would say to clients, ‘Here are pathways for you to be able to stay in this country legally with your children, and you can start working,’” Khare said. “And now those pathways are just getting a lot harder.”
Should I go back to India? Should I take a risk and bring my son with me, without second parent permission? But if I do that, I won’t be able to come back. And they might take my son from my custody at the airport. I don’t have legal status here. I can’t work here. But I can’t leave my son.
Those thoughts were racing in the head of the woman from India when she finally took her son and left her husband in 2012. She filed a protective order against him, according to court documents obtained by the Chronicle. She had a legal consultation with one of Daya’s partner pro bono attorneys. She applied for a U-Visa, an option for victims of domestic violence if they help law enforcement investigations. She stayed in the transitional housing that Daya had at the time. And she waited.
“That was very difficult for me to process… emotionally, financially, socially,” she recalled. “I felt like I was just dumb, very devastated, no hope. Nothing really seemed to make me happy — except when I was with my son, I would try to make myself happy.”
But then she received her work permit at the end of 2013. She was barely making enough money to survive, but it didn’t matter. She was getting her life back.
She was approved for one of the 10,000 U-Visas that are given out per year in the U.S. Her 2012 application was one of nearly 25,000 that year.
Hana’s life also turned around after she was referred to Tahirih and Daya in 2008. As the groups prepared an asylum case for her, she fought for herself. She worked for cash. She finished her graduate studies by 2011 and became a professor. In 2012, she filed for divorce and a restraining order, according to court records.
“I don’t know from where I got the courage,” she said. “I was thinking that enslaved women will raise slaved children, and free women will raise free children.”
And after seven difficult years, Hana was granted asylum in the U.S. in 2015.
“The process of asylum itself for me felt like abuse,” she said. “Time-consuming papers, going back to square one many times, justice and fairness… Time felt like it was running out of the door.”
But these women’s stories are an anomaly, especially in the current climate, some say.
“Things are getting a lot more difficult,” Khare said. “Every day the messaging is very unclear, and changes happen very quickly through executive orders. We’re losing some of the protections that kept people safe.”
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Session’s order that ultimately removed domestic violence as a credible qualification for asylum status in the U.S. — which would have barred Hana from being granted asylum when she applied — was a huge blow to the immigrant community.
The Trump administration also proposed a new rule last month that would make it more difficult for legal immigrants and tourists to obtain a green card or any type of visa if they or their dependents, including their American children, have used an expanded range of public benefits, from Medicaid and food stamps to the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The only visa options that abuse victims are left with are U-Visas, of which there are a limited number, T-Visas for victims of sexual trafficking, and the Violence Against Women Act Visa, which advocates support but find limiting because it’s only available when the abusive spouse is a U.S. citizen or green card holder.
Even with visa options, though, immigration attorneys say that each application requires volumes more paperwork and evidence than ever before. The process can take years, during which time victims may remain without legal status and income.
“Because it’s such an uncertain time, it’s hard for even us to parse out the myths and facts,” Khare said. “I love that there’s laws in the books that we can turn to that are protecting survivors. But we’re in this gray area, so now we have to do some preemptive planning with our clients just in case (they have run-ins with law enforcement).”
The woman from India and her son are both still traumatized by the abuse they experienced and for which they now get mental health counseling. But she has a twinkle in her eye when she talks about her life.
She got her license to practice in health care in the U.S. Her son, now 9, scored at the top of his class last year. His favorite subject is math, and he wants to be a NASA scientist when he grows up.
“It really affects life when immigration ties you. You’re confined,” she said. “But now, I’m confident, no fear. Just very happy in life.”
But the pain hasn’t subsided for Hana.
She hasn’t been able to travel to visit her mother in Libya for the past 10 years, she said, because of her immigration status. And when she finally had the opportunity to take her children to meet her mother in Jordan this year, she had to cancel their reunion so as not to risk her daughter’s green card papers.
“I told her, ‘Sorry, I can’t come, because Trump will not allow me to come back with my children,’” she said with tears in her eyes. “My case was approved, but my soul wasn’t relieved. The system was still trying to break me.”
“Their spouses will tell them, ‘Go ahead and call the police, I’m going to have you deported.’ And they don’t know whether that’s true or not, and they can’t take the risk because if their spouse gets arrested and their visa depends on (the spouse’s) visa, where does that leave their kids? Where does that leave (the victim)?” Rachna Khare, executive director of Daya