Victimization Can Lead to U Visas for Undocumented Immigrants

From SF Weekly:

The U visa was intended to improve immigrants’ unwillingness to call law enforcement. San Francisco police officers don’t inquire about the immigration status of people who report crime, yet the fear persists. Mug a day laborer or beat your wife, the thinking goes —what are the victims going to do? Call 911, so they can be among the more than 300,000 people deported annually? The bad guys go unchecked, police are in the dark about entire swathes of a city, and public safety suffers. Distrust of the authorities only worsened with the recent national rollout of Secure Communities, a federal program that checks the fingerprints of local arrestees against a national database to identify undocumented immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security finally issued regulations to issue U visas in 2007, and started approving them in significant numbers in 2009. In the Bay Area, attorneys, nonprofits, ethnic media, and the applicants themselves are spreading the word that the worst thing that happens to you in the United States may turn out to be the best. To date, 18,654 crime victims, most of whom were in the country undocumented status, have received the special visas. Read more…

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