She Testified About Being Raped. Then ICE Showed Up.

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Beyond arrests at courthouses, other noncitizen victims seeking help from the legal system have found themselves being targeted for deportation. News reports have described a mother and her child taken into ICE custody in Austin in January after police responded to a domestic-disturbance call; a woman in Houston last April who called 911 to report domestic abuse by her ex-husband only to have the police contact ICE; and a mother of eight in Sacramento detained in September after reporting her case specialist—an ICE contractor—for sexual harassment. Many victims who are not citizens fear that if they interact with law enforcement in any way, they are putting themselves at further risk of being detained or deported, more than a dozen attorneys and advocates told me. A year into Trump’s first term, the ACLU and the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project surveyed 232 law-enforcement officers, and nearly 70 percent reported that investigating domestic-violence cases had become more difficult since Trump took office. That has become true again over the past year, experts told me, and the challenges are growing.

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For decades, bipartisan efforts tried to make it easier and less intimidating for victims who are not citizens to report sexual violence and seek protection from their abusers. In 2000, Congress passed a law that built on the Violence Against Women Act by creating new types of visas for victims of certain serious crimes, including domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, and false imprisonment, with the goal of removing immigration status as a barrier to cooperating with police and prosecutors. Although only 10,000 of these visas are available every year, applicants waiting for approval could be given “deferred action” immigration status, making them eligible to legally work in the U.S.

Proponents of these visas—of which the U visa is the most common—say that they have helped victims come forward and helped prosecutors convict more offenders. From 2017 to 2023, immigrants were 5 percentage points more likely than those born in the U.S. to report being a victim of a sex crime, according to an analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey by the Cato Institute. But research also shows that reporting falls at moments of increased immigration enforcement. During President Obama’s first term, when there was a historic spike in detentions and deportations, the likelihood that a Hispanic victim reported an incident to the police dropped 30 percent—and the likelihood that a Hispanic person was victimized increased by 16 percent, according to a recent study accepted for publication by the American Economic Review.

In 2021, the Biden administration built on existing protections by enacting policies directing ICE officers to check whether someone they were arresting was a crime victim, and to exercise leniency if they were. In January 2025, Trump officials reversed those guidelines. The DHS spokesperson said that the visa programs for victims had turned into “loopholes for illegal aliens seeking to stay in the United States.” The spokesperson added that the number of applications for the visas doubled from 2021 to 2024, which they attributed to “rampant fraud, abuse, and exploitation.” A Biden-era inspector-general report found that the U-visa program was susceptible to fraud, and last July, federal prosecutors indicted three police chiefs and two others in Louisiana for a nearly decade-long alleged conspiracy to commit fraud that the prosecutors say involved filing false police reports in exchange for thousands of dollars. Experts counter that although some fraud exists within any immigration program, these visas are among the only immigration benefits for which the consent of police, a prosecutor, or a judge is a prerequisite. And the rise in applications, they say, can be attributed to an increase in awareness about the program among both undocumented communities and the police.

An undocumented immigrant always faced some risk in coming forward, “but the risk was really pretty minor,” Gina Amato Lough, who leads Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and has worked with immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other crimes for nearly two decades, told me. That isn’t the case anymore. The risk level started to change under the first Trump administration, and drastically escalated in the second, she said. For the first time in her 18 years doing this work, she is seeing a growing number of victims get detained and deported even when they have a U visa or deferred-action status, or are in the process of applying for either.

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