As threats of deportation continue to rattle immigrant communities, advocates and attorneys in the Washington area say they have seen a marked increase in undocumented victims of domestic violence choosing not to pursue legal recourse against their abusers.
Many victims are reluctant to even start the legal process, experts say, concerned that police will turn them over to federal immigration authorities or that their partners will retaliate by revealing their immigration status.
In a 2018 survey conducted by the ACLU and American University’s National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project, close to 400 advocates and legal service providers also reported the number of cases their offices filed for immigrant victims had declined 40 percent from 2016 to 2017.
“There’s a lot of fear around just entering a government building,” said Victoria Hernandez, a supervising attorney at Ayuda, which serves low-income immigrant women in the Washington area. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve worked with a client, and once I tell them they need to go to court, they don’t want to move forward.”
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