The Seemingly Small Changes That Could Shut Out Immigrant Survivors of Domestic Violence

The Trump administration’s approach to rooting out fraud from a program meant for immigrant victims of domestic violence could leave people with valid claims at risk of deportation, advocates say.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently announced changes it said were aimed at tackling rampant fraud in the program, which was established more than three decades ago under the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA.

While experts say fraud is a real problem, they’re worried about how the changes could restrict access to aid for the people the law is intended to help.

“What we’re seeing from this administration is a very fraud-centered approach on these benefits, especially victim-based benefits,” said Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS policy analyst who is now director of social policy at Third Way, a moderate think tank. “They’re determined to weed out any less-than-legitimate applications, but, unfortunately, the very broad-stroked way that they’re going about doing this is going to harm legitimate victims.”

The policy change is one of many by President Donald Trump in the last year to restrict pathways to legal immigration status. The change in the domestic violence program follows USCIS shortening work permits and halting processing for visas, asylum, green cards and citizenship for immigrants from countries on Trump’s full and partial travel ban lists.

USCIS began in December to consider damaging information to an immigrant’s case submitted by the abusive spouse to deny applications, a switch from past practice of weighing the information if it could be independently verified. This change also applies to visas for sexual abuse and human trafficking survivors.

“That, to me, is extraordinarily concerning because what that does is basically opens up the ability for an abuser to manipulate the process,” said Cecelia Levin, advocacy coordinator for the Alliance for Immigrant Survivors.

USCIS did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment about these concerns.

During the past 10 years the backlog in applications for VAWA, for which only spouses of U.S. citizens or permanent residents are eligible, has jumped from around 5,000 to more than 181,000, according to USCIS data. For applicants, this means they have to wait nearly four years for the agency to finish processing their cases. USCIS cited the skyrocketing number of petitions as a reason it’s trying to combat fraud.

“When unqualified aliens misuse the VAWA program, it causes significant processing delays, harming survivors with legitimate claims,” a USCIS alert from Dec. 22 announcing the policy change states. “We are prioritizing the integrity of the immigration process and the VAWA program as a resource for women and other alien survivors of abuse.”

The agency did not provide data about how many cases it has flagged as fraudulent, but Pierce and another former USCIS employee during Joe Biden’s presidency told NOTUS it is a problem mostly stemming from attorneys submitting large swaths of applications for immigrants unaware VAWA is meant for domestic violence victims.

Centering the program around victims and the types of evidence they can submit while trying to filter out “bad actors” was difficult, Pierce said.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior counselor to the USCIS director, said the agency had started interviewing immigrants to ensure they knew the claims their attorneys had submitted.

In February, USCIS announced that an attorney from New York was sentenced to nearly 6 years in prison for submitting fraudulent VAWA petitions from 2016 to 2023. He was also ordered to pay $16.5 million to the immigrants he scammed, according to the Department of Justice.

The applications from that attorney were often denied, according to the DOJ. The rise in petitions has not translated to a rise of approvals, which have remained mostly steady in the last five years.

Still, advocates say the changes raise the burden for domestic violence victims and put them at risk of being deported. They worry USCIS’ changes will require people to present additional evidence, such as a copy of their spouse’s passport or lease proving shared residency, for claims they filed years ago.

“You cannot have this tension where you are now limiting accessibilities for victims in a way that extraordinarily overcompensates for any other concerns about integrity of the program, like it just pushes it so far in the other direction,” Levin said.

Levin said the government has recognized since the early years of the program that domestic violence victims fleeing emergency situations wouldn’t have access to critical documents. Former President Biden spearheaded the bipartisan push for VAWA in 1994.

Since last February, USCIS has sent immigrants whose claims are denied to deportation proceedings. Previously, denials weren’t automatically referred for removal from the country, which made it easier to convince domestic violence victims to move forward with their claims, said Cristina Velez, the legal and policy director at ASISTA, a network of 2,500 attorneys helping victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

Attorneys who work with ASISTA have had to help people defrauded by others in the profession, senior staff attorney Rebecca Eissenova said. Given the Trump administration’s efforts to limit migration, Eissenova said she was skeptical the changes were meant to reduce fraud.

“There’s a big climate of fear right now participating in the immigration process at all,” Eissenova said. “VAWA was a place where that was a little bit lessened because there was trauma research built into the education, and now that’s eroding as well.”

The Democratic Women’s Caucus wrote in a Jan. 15 letter that its members continue to receive reports of victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and trafficking being put in immigration detention, demanding Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem release them from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

Targeting crime victims for deportation goes against the protections Congress passed, the 24 lawmakers wrote.

“The predictable result of these failures is that women are less safe, less likely to report abuse or crime to the police, and more likely to remain in dangerous situations,” the letter reads.

Advocates are unsure of what the changes to how USCIS considers VAWA applications will mean for their clients because they’ve only been in place for a month. However, the number of new applications being put into the system has come to nearly a halt. From April to June, USCIS opened 193 new petitions. Levin called it a “tremendous frontlog.”

That could be the result of staffing: From the start of Trump’s second term, 3,047 employees have left USCIS, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s workforce database. It could also be due to fear, Levin said.

“It’s hard to tell how much of it is a chilling effect versus how much of it is internal systems inefficiencies,” she said.

Although the domestic-abuse policy changes are not as drastic as other decisions the administration has taken regarding immigration, it shifts the landscape for domestic violence victims who view VAWA as a path to safety, Eissenova said.

“These changes might seem a little bit niche and like, ‘How important really is this in the scheme of things?’ But anybody who’s thinking of applying right now is thinking of that,” she said.