‘THEY ARE NOT ALONE’
Hispanic abuse survivors speaking out to help others
Without her quick wit, Blanca Keiser may not have made it to the emergency room. She went with her boyfriend late one night in 2013, claiming to suffer from a severe stomach illness. But while she received care, the staff at Deaconess Hospital in Oklahoma City received an anonymous call saying Keiser had been assaulted by her boyfriend.
Under the guise of needing X-rays, nurses separated the couple.
By 1 a.m., police were on the scene. The assault occurred at a friend’s house party, Keiser told police. Her boyfriend of two years struck her in the head, pulled her hair and bit her face and ear.
Keiser, a Guatemalan immigrant, faked the stomach illness so he’d take her to the hospital, according to police reports.
Police arrested her boyfriend that night, but three months later, he assaulted Keiser again in their apartment.
This time, he held a rag doused in ammonia over her mouth while threatening to kill her and her children. She lost consciousness, and when she woke up, her pants were pulled down and her shirt was off.
“I could no longer handle it,” Keiser said, her hand coming down hard on her lap during an interview last fall.
“Once my children went to school, I told him I was going to work – so that I could leave the apartment. And that is how I got out and went to the police station to make a police report.”
A problem for many
Each year, an unspecified number of Hispanic women in Oklahoma and across the country face a crippling scenario – how to leave the clutches of a violent intimate partner without becoming entangled in a legal system that, depending on who is in the Oval Office, may force her or her loved ones to leave the United States with little hope of legal return.
The magnitude of the problem is hard to quantify both in the Sooner State and throughout the nation. Most official reports are outdated, and outreach groups are left to conduct research that is often small in scope and relies on victims to self-report.
The concern in Oklahoma has intensified in recent years as the number of Hispanic immigrants has grown sharply. How frequently Hispanic women face abuse is hard to know because data from individual crime reports is rarely aggregated, according to experts.
A 2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most recent survey available, shows the rate of intimate partner crime is lower in the Hispanic community than in white, Black and other communities.
About 34.4% of Hispanic women reported ever experiencing contact physical violence, contact sexual violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. The same report showed that 47.5% of American Indian/Alaska Native women, 45.1% of Black women and 37.3% of white women have experienced such abuse.
While survey data suggests other communities in the United States face higher rates of intimate partner crime than Hispanic women, experts and advocates believe many domestic violence cases in the Hispanic immigrant community go unreported because of language barriers, fears of deportation, a distrust of authorities and other reasons.
The anti-immigrant rhetoric put forth by the White House during the administration of former President Donald Trump may have exacerbated those barriers, experts and advocates say.
As President Joe Biden faces a range of immigration issues, from a surge of migrants at the southern border to forging a path to citizenship for undocumented residents, those who work closely with one segment of the Hispanic population hope a new administration will ignite permanent policy and societal shifts toward helping victims of intimate partner violence escape the abuse without fearing deportation or the breakup of their families.
At least one count provides a glimpse at a problem that has grown over the course of more than two decades and now through five presidential administrations, after policymakers attempted to create a safe passage out of domestic violence for immigrants, and help law enforcement arrest abusers.
In October 2000, Congress passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act and created a nonimmigrant visa, known as the U Visa, to aid victims of mental and physical abuse who are willing to help law enforcement in their investigations into domestic violence, sexual assault, trafficking of noncitizens and other crimes.
In many domestic abuse cases, experts say, the abuser often threatens an immigrant victim by saying they will try to get them deported, or, at least, not pursue avenues that would grant the victim legal status in the U.S.
“If they don’t feel safe from the risk of being removed from their home, from the country, from the risk of being detained, then that’s just another tool that is used against them by the perpetrator,” said Laura Flores Bachman, senior legal counsel for Connecticut-based ASISTA, a national network of attorneys and advocates who help immigrant victims of gender-based violence.
While those who work with immigrant abuse victims drew hope from the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act and the U Visa, disillusionment set in as the visas were not issued until October 2007 because of governmental delays in codifying regulations.
And, by statute, just 10,000 such applications are approved each year. Biden has pushed to increase the cap to 30,000.
In its fiscal year 2009, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported 11,740 pending victim applications for the U Visa. By fiscal year 2019, that number stood at 151,758 pending applications, a nearly 1,200% increase over 10 years.
USCIS reported that between fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2018, those born in Mexico made up 68% of principal petitioners for the U Visa. About 13% of principal petitioners overall were in deportation proceedings.
During the Trump administration, the number of U Visa petitions submitted to USCIS fell by more than 40%, from about 60,700 in fiscal 2016 to 36,200 petitions in fiscal 2020.
Not only did the former president’s rhetoric about immigrants stoke fear about reporting abuse to authorities, but a 2019 directive issued by the administration made it easier for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport U Visa applicants, according to academics and advocates.
“A very large goal of U.S. immigration is family unity, and what we saw in the last four years was that a pillar was knocked to the ground because of that fear of being separated from their children, the fear of being forcefully returned to their home country where they would not have some of the protections,” Flores Bachman said. “Those threats are real and weaponized by abusers.”
Those threats are effective, no matter how terrible the abuse, one expert said.
“You can imagine how that killed enthusiasm for reporting to the police in the immigrant community,” Mimi Marton, director of the Tulsa Immigrant Resources Network with The University of Tulsa College of Law, said of the 2019 Trump directive. “And that’s tragic. It took away the U Visa’s magic. If I’m going to get reported to ICE or turned over to
ICE, I’m not going to call the police when I’m beaten or when I’m raped or when I’m robbed.”
Marton, whose group provides direct services to Tulsa’s noncitizen population, said the wait to be approved can now take more than a decade, and her group is still processing deferred action applications from 2015.
Without comprehensive immigration reform that includes laws dictating how noncitizen victims of abuse are to be treated, the victims are left at the mercy of shifting public policy.
“Every four years they hold their breath to see who is in office,” Marton said. “When Congress doesn’t do immigration reform, every four years our heads spin. Whatever your politics are, just put it down (in law) so we have something to work with.”
Elizabeth McCormick, associate dean for Experiential Learning at the The University of Tulsa College of Law, and director of the Immigrants Rights Project at the Boesche Legal Clinic, said while the U Visa backlog remains, the fallout in families and communities is widespread.
“If you’re talking about a domestic violence victim seeking to get away from an abuser, it’s someone who does not have authorization to work in the U.S. so she becomes more at the mercy of unscrupulous employers, she lives her life on an informal underground economy that makes it difficult for her, she can’t get a driver’s license, she can’t get legal identification, medical care and children enrolled in school, and an apartment and an address,” McCormick said. “It’s an escalating impact.”
Experts said many Hispanic abuse victims who are in the U.S. legally also stay away from potentially involving immigration officials in their lives.
“There is still fear of being targeted by ICE, by law enforcement, that family members can be impacted if they are not here legally,” said Jhumka Gupta, associate professor in the Department of Global and Community Health at George Mason University. “Even populations born in the U.S. have negative mental health outcomes when it comes to deportation. The structural issues are going to affect the family unit and the community at large.”
Gupta said to better serve Hispanic victims, policies have to be crafted at the intersection of domestic violence law and immigration-specific law.
But the information needed to formulate policy is sparse.
“Recent data, especially when we’re talking about nationally, is very hard to get,” Gupta said. “It’s hard to disaggregate the data.”
By statute in Oklahoma, statistical reports by law enforcement agencies do not include the names of any of the people involved in an incident of domestic abuse or any information that would serve to identify such people as individuals.
In other words, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation Spokeswoman Brook Arbeitman said, “by law, demographics are not collected as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting system.”
Arbeitman said that based on FBI guidelines, states are transitioning to a State Incident Based Reporting System that could contain demographics if the local agency reports that information through the system.
The Oklahoma City Police Department confirmed it does not break out domestic abuse incidents demographically.
Journalists from The Oklahoman and Telemundo Noticiero Oklahoma spent months gaining a better understanding of how domestic violence impacts Oklahoma’s Hispanic immigrant population.
In addition to service providers and victim advocates, The Oklahoman and Telemundo reached out to several women in various stages of the U Visa process. Each of those women declined to be identified and interviewed for this report.
However, other Hispanic women, who were immigrants when they came to America, spoke openly about their abuse and how they escaped being victimized.
Some faced intense pressure to not involve immigration authorities. In one case, false rumors about the reporting system led one woman to stay longer in her abusive relationship. All the women worried about how the abuse impacted their children.
Most of the interviews were conducted in Spanish, while the stories were written in English. The Telemundo journalists provided translation for both, in order to provide full versions of all stories in both languages.
An underserved community
Individuals whose race is Hispanic or
“If they don’t feel safe from the risk of being removed from their home, from the country, from the risk of being detained, then that’s just another tool that is used against them by the perpetrator.” Laura Flores Bachman Senior legal counsel for ASISTA, a Connecticut-based organization that helps immigrant victims of gender-based violence