Week 6
This week I got to work with one of the Victims of Violence program attorneys on parts of a U-visa application. U-visas are another form of status most people outside of the immigration law sphere have never heard of, but the U-visa can be the only path to permanent residency available for some immigrants who might be barred from seeking asylum or other kinds of relief.
If a person who is in the US unlawfully is the victim of a serious crime and they cooperate with law enforcement, they are potentially eligible for a U-visa. Domestic violence is one of these serious crimes, and, from my admittedly limited sample size, it seems to be one of the more common pathways to a U-visa, since a person is a lot more likely to be a victim of intimate partner violence than they are to be kidnapped or almost murdered. (Curiously, robbery is not on the list of qualifying “serious crimes.” I’m not sure what the reason was, but given the length of the list, it’s a notable exception.)
When the U-visa was first created by Congress in 2000, it probably seemed like a clever policy solution. Even now, it seems like the kind of “win-win” policy that should work and that all sides of the issue can get behind. Victims of serious crimes are encouraged to come forward and help law enforcement, and law enforcement gets information they need for as long as the case goes on. All U-visa petitions have to be accompanied by certification from local law enforcement that you are or might be helpful in investigating or prosecuting the case. If a person stops cooperating, they can’t apply for a U-visa, and if they’ve already been granted one, it can be revoked. In short, this means that local law enforcement has signed off on every U-visa petition and on every current U-visa. It was pretty neat to see how positive local law enforcement was about the help our client had given while they were prosecuting her attacker.
The theoretical “win-win” created by the U-visa has a big handicap. The law that created the U-visa capped the number of U-visas available to principal applicants at 10,000 a year. Once the annual limit is met, all the rest of the applicants are placed on the waiting list. Like many forms of immigration relief, demand far exceeds capacity. This week, the current average processing time for an application filed today is 57.5 months, according to the USCIS website. The nearly 5-year wait is simply to get a “bona fide determination,” which allows the people on the wait list to get employment authorization while they wait for their U-Visa. According to the USCIS, as of early 2022, the wait list had over 286,000 people on it, and it continues to grow every year. If nothing changes, this means that someone applying today for their U-Visa might have to wait almost 30 years to get one.
So much of the rhetoric around immigration policy revolves around the people who came to the US the “wrong way,” but this summer, it has been just as frustrating to see how the current immigration system also fails the people it’s meant to help - from Afghans who worked with the US military to fight the Taliban, to people fleeing oppressive regimes, to U-Visa applicants who have the full-throated support of local law enforcement to be able to stay in the US. The issues with processing U-visas are not an inherent, unfixable problem. Solving the backlog is a matter of political will. I hope that Congress and the administration will be able to find it.