In today's TAP Online, Anabel Lee reports on how a proposal from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to narrow the interpretation of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) puts immigrant women abused by their citizen or permanent resident spouses in peril:
The anticipated policy change will affect undocumented women who entered the U.S. without permission but not specifically to flee abuse, preventing them from applying for permanent residency from within the U.S. Rather, they will be deported to their native country and will have to apply for residency from there. (Undocumented women who entered the U.S. illegally in order to escape abuse and those who overstayed visas and subsequently found themselves in abusive relationships will remain protected by VAWA and will continue to be able to adjust their status to permanent residency without leaving the country.) USCIS will issue its final decision via a memorandum, and a policy determination is expected soon.
Requiring undocumented women who are victims of domestic violence to prove a nexus between their unlawful entry and abuse means these women will have to meet a narrow exception that will leave many of them -- and their children -- trapped in violent homes. "In a policy context, it doesn't make any sense at all," said Gail Pendleton, who has done immigrant-rights work for 25 years now and is the co-chair of the National Network to End Violence Against Immigrant Women. "The people who would not be able to stay here to get green cards are the people who met their abusers in the United States, and those abusers are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. Those are exactly the perpetrators you want to get at, so to give them a weapon of power and control is crazy." USCIS is essentially trying to draw distinctions along the lines of when and where the abuse occurred, factors that Congress has already stated, in VAWA, do not matter.
Read the rest and comment here.
--The Editors
