Police blame deportation fears for drop in abuse calls

HOUSTON — For years, she slept with a gun under her pillow, living in fear of a boyfriend who beat her, controlled her life and threatened to kill her and her children. Domenica, who came to this country illegally from Mexico in 1995 and became part of the booming immigrant community in Houston, said her partner was a U.S. citizen and often reminded her that she could be deported if she went to the police.

“He told me nobody would help me, because I don’t have papers,” said Domenica, 38, who has a son and daughter with her boyfriend and asked that her last name not be used to protect them.

In August, fearing for the safety of her children, Domenica decided to flee. She never called the police. She said she would rather go into hiding than appear in court and risk being separated from her children, or sent home to Mexico.

“That scene is happening all the time,” Houston’s police chief, Art Acevedo, said in an interview. Although Houston’s immigrant population is one of the fastest-growing in the country, the city last year saw a 16 percent drop in domestic violence reports from the Latino community — a decline that police blame on a tough new immigration enforcement law in Texas and the increasingly hostile political climate across the country surrounding the issue of illegal immigration.

The Houston police recorded 6,273 domestic violence reports from Latinos in 2016, compared with 7,460 in the previous year.

Police departments in several cities with large Latino populations, including Los Angeles, Denver and San Diego, also experienced a decline in reports of domestic violence and sexual assault in their Latino communities.

“Undocumented immigrants and even lawful immigrants are afraid to report crime,” said Acevedo. “They’re seeing the headlines from across the country, where immigration agents are showing up at courthouses, trying to deport people.”

Although a general reluctance to contact authorities has always been a problem for police dealing with immigrant communities, police say that many of the steepest declines began early in 2017, when President Trump took office and ordered federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement to step up its targeting of those in the country illegally.