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Her abusive husband had hurt her too many times.
So Carmen F., an immigrant from South America, called the police. He was soon deported.
Then she applied for a U visa, a special visa that gives crime victims a pathway to permanent residency in the United States if they cooperated with law enforcement to get their perpetrators off the streets.
Unfortunately, the wait time to receive one of these visas is often more than 15 years. There’s a massive backlog, and in the meantime the Trump administration has been deporting the applicants, contrary to longstanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has defended the deportations, arguing that crime victims can return later if their visas are eventually approved.
Last year, ICE detained Carmen (not her real name) and deported her and her young son back to their homeland—where her abusive ex was awaiting them at the airport.
Now she’s part of a class-action lawsuit by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. The suit seeks to return Carmen and other deported survivors to the United States. It also seeks an injunction to stop ICE from deporting others in similar circumstances. The case was filed in federal court in California in October on behalf of eight named plaintiffs and four immigrant rights groups. A judge is expected to issue a decision any day.
U visas were born out of a problem: Undocumented immigrants are exceedingly vulnerable to violent crimes, and they are less likely than citizens to come forward and help police catch the perpetrator, because doing so puts them at risk for deportation.
In 2000, as part of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, Congress created the U visa pathway to permanent residency for them. Immigrants who survived domestic violence, sexual assault, and certain other crimes could apply for the visa if they helped law enforcement investigate or prosecute the offense. Survivors of trafficking could apply for something similar, T visas.
“Seeing my child so afraid, I knew I had to protect him and had no choice but to call the police.”
But Congress capped the number of U visas that could be granted each year at 10,000, not nearly enough to cover all those who apply. Today, more than a quarter-million immigrants are in the backlog. In the past, they were allowed to stay in the United States until US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) could process their applications, so long as an initial review deemed them eligible. In the meantime, they could get work authorization and a status called deferred action, which protected them from deportation.
Carmen’s lawsuit, ICWC v. Noem, accuses the Trump administration of ignoring deferred action status and removing survivors from the country anyway; the administration is also deporting people like Carmen who don’t yet have the status but may be eligible once USCIS reviews her application. The case was filed against ICE and USCIS and seeks to represent a wide class of survivors who applied for U visas, T visas, and other protections under the Violence Against Women Act.
“These individuals were given a promise that they would be protected as long as they were vulnerable and shared their story with the cops. Now all of a sudden the government casts that aside,” says attorney Erika Cervantes, who filed the lawsuit with co-counsel Sarah Kahn at the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. “They’re just deporting people left and right nationwide.”
These deportations are “really significant departures from previous policies,” adds Cristina Velez at the nonprofit Asista, which also advocates for immigrant survivors. If applying for U visas or T visas comes with a chance of removal, she worries fewer people will do it. “That undermines the goals: encouraging cooperation with law enforcement and enhancing public safety.”
Carmen arrived in the United States in 2022 with her husband and young son. (Her real name, country of origin, and other identifying information were excluded from the lawsuit because she is still in danger.) They applied for asylum and rented a room from her cousin’s friends. Her son started kindergarten and joined a soccer team, which he loved. They went to church on Sundays.
But Carmen’s home life was becoming increasingly difficult. “My children’s father was drinking very much,” she said in a court statement. “He would yell and sometimes even hit me.” After an immigration judge denied their asylum claim in 2024, things escalated. That summer, her husband came home drunk, so she closed her door. He pounded on it, threatening to kill her, and her son became hysterical. “That week, I had endured several days of threats, intimidation, and sexual abuse,” she told the court, “but seeing my child so afraid, I knew I had to protect him and had no choice but to call the police.”
She received a restraining order, and her husband stayed away for a while. But one day that winter, she returned home and he was there. He beat her, according to the suit, and she called the police again. In March 2025, he was deported.
She applied for a U visa that month, but at her June check-in with ICE, the officers detained her. They sent her and her son to the family detention center in Dilley, Texas, where lawyers and detainees have reported horrible conditions. “ICE detained us just a few days after my son graduated from second grade,” Carmen said. “He had been looking forward to his summer vacation and he spent it in prison.” Carmen’s lawyer informed ICE that Carmen had a pending U visa petition, but they deported her anyway the following month.
Back home, Carmen’s husband has confiscated her passport and won’t let her leave the house without his permission.
Another plaintiff, Camila B., is from Mexico and has lived in Los Angeles for 23 years. She applied for a U visa in 2023, after she was punched in the face by an assailant at a bus stop; in May 2025, USCIS informed her that she qualified for deferred action status. But during the government’s massive deportation operation in L.A. last year, armed men surrounded her tamale stand and shoved her into a vehicle; she did not immediately know they were ICE. A judge ordered her released on bond, but months later she still needs to check in with officers weekly.
In Texas, meanwhile, an immigration judge refused to release plaintiff Paulo C., even though he has deferred action status after helping police prosecute the man who raped his then 13-year-old daughter. He “has shown up time after time,” his daughter wrote to the court. “The last couple of months without him have felt like an eternity.” Because the immigration judge wouldn’t let him out, he had to file a habeas corpus petition in a federal civil court to convince another judge to release him. He remains free but at risk for deportation.
DHS did not respond to questions for this story, but the agency has previously defended its practice of deporting survivors with pending U visa applications. Former spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that every deported individual has “had due process and has a final order of removal—meaning they have no legal right to be in the country.”
In February, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews decisions by immigration judges, argued in a related case that it was inappropriate for a judge to pause removal proceedings for someone who applied for a U visa. The board wrote that judges should not act in a way that “effectively grants amnesty to thousands of removable aliens because they may be eligible for a visa sometime in the future.”
That’s “quite escalated language,” Kursten Phelps, an attorney at the nonprofit Tahirih Justice Center who worked at USCIS until last year, said of the implication that people are exploiting the process to stay in the country longer. “I don’t know that I have ever worked with a survivor who was happy about the backlog, because it presents tremendous instability, long waits, lots of uncertainty, and lots of stress for individuals who are working toward building safe, independent lives.”
The solution, she says, is for Congress to increase or eliminate the annual cap on visas.
In court, DHS has suggested that deported survivors can return if and when their visas are eventually granted. Jessica Farb, deputy director of the Immigration Center for Women and Children, another plaintiff in the suit, isn’t swayed by that argument. It “greatly misses the point,” she says, “of all the harm caused by being removed.”
When Carmen disembarked from her deportation flight in July, her 8-year-old son in tow, her heart sank: Her ex was standing there waiting for her. He “told me it was such a coincidence that he was there when we arrived. I knew he was lying,” she told the court, though she still isn’t sure how he found out she’d be coming.
He took her home with him, where the abuse continued, according to the lawsuit. “What could I do? I had no choice, I had nowhere else to go and there was no one speaking up for me,” she said. Her husband confiscated her passport and won’t let her leave the house without his permission.
“Under prior policy,” her attorneys wrote in the suit, “she would not have been put into this impossible and dangerous situation.”
Carmen says she and her son are terrified. “I believed that the U visa meant that we would finally be safe,” she said. “[I]nstead, they put me and my child on a plane and sent us into the arms of the person we had sought protection from.”
