The Importance of the U-visa as a Crime-Fighting Tool for Law Enforcement Officials

The U-visa has become an important crime fighting tool that helps law enforcement officials, including police, sheriffs, and prosecutors across the country to build trust with immigrant crime victims and their communities. In this report, law enforcement officials describe the ways in which the U-visa has helped them in detecting, investigating, and prosecuting crime in their communities.

As part of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 2000, Congress created the U-visa. The U-visa has become an important crime fighting tool that helps law enforcement officials, including police, sheriffs, and prosecutors across the country to build trust with immigrant crime victims and their communities. The U-visa offers undocumented immigrant crime victims the protection and support they need to muster the courage to approach the police, make police reports, and cooperate in the detection, investigation and/or prosecution of perpetrators of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, murder, manslaughter, felonious assault, and other violent crimes. The U-visa helps both law enforcement officials and immigrant crime victims because the U-visa and DHS policies contain the following key components:

• Protection of immigrants from deportation

• Access to legal work authorization

• Help for immigrant victims who come forward and report crimes whether past, present or future crimes

• Protection for victims against crime perpetrators tampering with crime victims to obstruct justice, such as perpetrators interfering with the adjudication of the victim’s immigration case by violating VAWA confidentiality protections

• Motivation for victims to report crimes and collect evidence that leads to prosecutions of serial offenders and rapists without regard to whether the perpetrator has been identified or whether the criminal case is being actively investigated or prosecuted at the time of the victim’s U-visa application

•  Creation of a path to lawful permanent residency for immigrant victims who cooperate in crime detection, investigation, conviction and/or sentencing.

Since its creation in 2000, the U-visa has served as “a powerful law enforcement tool, providing critical protection for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and other violent crimes, and ensuring that dangerous offenders are taken off our streets. The U-visa program has proven enormously successful, leading to the prosecution of thousands of violent offenders.”

The following are quotes from law enforcement officials that describe the ways in which the U-visa has helped them in detecting, investigating, and prosecuting crime in their communities throughout the United States.

Source