SAN DIEGO -- For the first time in a decade, fewer people are applying for a visa designed to protect migrant crime victims -- a trend that advocates and immigration lawyers say is fueled by policies President Donald Trump's administration put in place to clamp down on illegal immigration.
The visa -- officially known as the U visa -- was created by Congress in 2000 to encourage people to cooperate with local law enforcement while offering them some relief in the form of legal immigration status. The visa was meant to stop abusers from using a victim's immigration status as a way of preventing them from reporting crimes.
In order to obtain a U visa, crime victims need to show that they cooperated with a local law enforcement agency when applying for the visa.
Data show that after years of increased popularity (U visa applications increased by 137% between fiscal years 2009 and 2017), the number of U visa applications declined for the first time in fiscal year 2018; a trend that is on pace to continue this year.
In fiscal year 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received a record-high 62,990 U visa applications. Last year, the agency received 58,991 applications. This year, they are on pace to receive 49,508 applications, according to agency data.
"I think the U Visa is a critical form of relief both to aid law enforcement and also provide humanitarian protection for survivors of serious crime in our country and this administration is creating barriers to that," said Alison Kamhi, supervising attorney for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
Through a series of policy memos and decisions by the attorney general, the Trump administration has made applying for a U visa more expensive and made it more likely for applicants who are denied to get deported. The memos and decisions also limited immigration judges' ability to delay deportation proceedings while U visas are processed, records show.
A June 2018 memo directs officials to place migrants who are denied U visas in deportation proceedings. That memo is a direct result of the president's Executive Order 13768, which "emphasizes that enforcement of our immigration laws is critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States. The Executive Order also provides that the Federal Government will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement," according to the memo.
Critics of the memo say crime victims will think twice about applying for the U visa because receiving a deportation notice if the visa is denied is very risky.
In August 2018, the Office of the Attorney General wrote an order that narrowed judges' authority to delay deportation cases in order to wait for an individual's U visa application to be processed.
Before that order, immigration judges would place deportations on hold to see if an applicant received a U visa. The thinking was that it didn't make sense to deport somebody if they were going to be allowed back into the country after receiving the visa.
The attorney general's memo states that too many cases were being put on hold and that was contributing to the growing case backlog in immigration courts.
"In 2012, the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General concluded that 'frequent and lengthy continuances' were a 'primary factor' contributing to delays in immigration courts," the order states.
These memos come at a time when there is a growing backlog of U visa applications. Because the number of visas granted each year is capped at 10,000 the backlog grows every year. Currently, there are 239,000 pending U visas that have already been approved.
The backlog is so large that it takes Citizenship and Immigration Services more than four years to process new applications.
During that waiting period, applicants who are undocumented have no protection from deportations and cannot get a work permit.
"The fact that an application is pending for four years and provides no formal protection from removal, no access to work authorization, that is a disservice to the victims," said Cecelia Friedman Levin, senior policy counsel for the nonprofit ASISTA Immigration Assistance.
Several U visa applicants have been deported while their applications were pending, and Friedman Levin is concerned that the number of deportees will increase.
A Section on 09/06/2019