Immigrant Survivors of Abuse Struggle Within a Changing System

"I can scream, and nobody can hear me."

The walls had been closing in on Monica Bejar for years. She and her husband had both crossed over the U.S.-Mexico border for work, like countless other migrants. But only he had secured a green card. For over a decade, Monica's hopes of obtaining legal status depended, as far as she knew, completely on the man who battered her.

A host of legal binds tightened the grip of abuse. Bejar had banked on the hope that her husband would help her become a legal resident. Instead, to prove a point, he tore up her immigration paperwork and threatened to report her to authorities if she tried to leave. She feared losing her children.

The turning point came one day in a flash of realization: Bejar caught her children watching as she bled from a fresh wound, inflicted by their father's hand.

"I didn't want to put my children through that any more," she recalls in a recent interview.

After seeking help from an immigrant advocacy group, International Institute of the East Bay, Bejar learned of a narrow legal channel available to women in her situation. Through the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), she was able to leave her husband and petition for a green card independently, as a survivor of domestic violence.

"Women like myself, [who] immigrate from another country ... We don't know that we are protected by the law if somebody's abusing us," says Bejar, 37.

Poverty and harsh immigration policies leave undocumented immigrants vulnerable to all forms of abuse, from economic exploitation to more intimate forms of oppression. For those who live with domestic violence, social isolation only amplifies the terror at home.

Despite the general political hostility toward illegal immigration, Washington has opened special protections for undocumented immigrants who have survived domestic violence. Yet the legal framework is growing more complex and in some ways, more precarious. Since last year, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has broadened one path to legal status under VAWA, yet also solidified barriers for survivors seeking recourse through the criminal justice system.

A Clearer Path

Over a decade ago, lawmakers recognized that undocumented immigrants could be held hostage in abusive marriages because they depended on their spouses as green-card sponsors. The "self-petition" process under the Violence Against Women Act enables survivors to attain legal status independently. But it's not as simple as it looks.

Historically, a technical quirk in the statute led to uneven implementation. In some areas, officials applied a narrow reading of the law in the context of other overlapping immigration statutes. The restrictive interpretation required some survivors -- essentially, those who entered the country illegally since early 1998 -- to leave the country before petitioning. Once outside U.S. borders, some could potentially be subject to further immigration rules, like a punitive long-term bar on reentering the country. Self-petitioning would basically be a moot option: women would have to leave behind their jobs, homes and children indefinitely, just to secure legal status through VAWA.

Advocates argued that abuse survivors should be shielded from those strictures, pointing out that Congress specifically amended VAWA in 2000 to broadly permit applicants to remain legally in the United States.

In April, the government released new, clarified guidelines to ensure that battered immigrant women can petition from inside the United States.

Susan Reed, an immigration attorney in Michigan, says these new guidelines "give us clarity that we have not had for the last several years in our district."

The government's move follows the original intent of the VAWA self-petition, she adds: Congress had decided that "it's more important ... that women not be trapped in domestic violence situations because of their immigration status, than it is that long ago, they broke the immigration law in some way.'"