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Carmen’s abusive husband came home drunk one night last summer. He pounded and kicked the door. He threatened to kill her as her young son watched in horror. She called police, eventually obtaining a restraining order. Months later he returned and beat her again. Police came again and he was eventually deported.
Thinking she finally escaped his cruelty, Carmen applied for what is known as a U-Visa. The visa provides crime victims a way to stay in the United States legally, but the Trump administration has routinely ignored pending applications.
During a regular immigration check-in in June, Carmen was detained. Two months later, she was put on a plane with her 8-year-old son, who just completed second grade. She was headed to her home country, terrified her husband would find her.
Lawyers for Carmen along with several immigrant victims of human trafficking, domestic violence and other crimes last month sued the Trump administration in the Central District of California for detaining and deporting survivors with pending visa applications, some of whom have been granted status to stay and sometimes work.
They argue that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement implemented a policy in the early days of the administration that upended decades-long standards aimed at protecting victims with pending applications for a class of visas known as survivor-based protections.
Congress created those visas to ensure immigrant victims would report crimes to law enforcement and be safe, but lawyers for the victims argue the administration has reneged on those promises.
“These laws have existed because they keep us all safe, and there is a process and legal rights that attach when you seek out those protections,” said Sergio Perez, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, who is one of the lead attorneys on the case.
Carmen’s real name and certain details about her case weren’t included in the lawsuit because her lawyers say her life is still at risk.
But others were.
Immigration agents arrested Kenia Jackeline Merlos, a native of Honduras, during a family outing near the Canadian border. The Portland, Ore., mother of four U.S. citizen children had been given deferred status allowing her to reside in the U.S. after a man pulled a gun and threatened to kill her. Merlos has been in detention for about four months in Washington state. She was released late last month, weeks after a judge threw out her case.
Yessenia Ruano self-deported after immigration agents told her she would be removed, despite her pending T-Visa application for trafficking survivors. Ruano, a teacher’s aide in Wisconsin, fled El Salvador and had been trafficked in the United States. A mother of twins girls, she had been living in the U.S. for 14 years, fighting a removal order. Rather than have her children see her arrested and removed, she decided to leave.
Yessenia Ruano on her last day at the Milwaukee public school where she was a teacher’s aide. Ruano, who was a victim of human trafficking, self-deported along with her twin daughters in June.
(Yessenia Ruano)
Under the Trump administration, immigration agents no longer routinely check or consider a detained immigrant’s status as a crime victim before deporting or detaining them. The policy only makes an exception if it will interfere with law enforcement investigations.
The administration’s actions affect nearly half a million immigrants who are awaiting a decision on a pending application for survivor-based protections, the most common of which is the U-Visa. Because Congress capped the number of visas that can be issued annually at 10,000, it can take a person 20 years to have their application processed.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, defended the practice of deporting those stuck in limbo, saying every unauthorized immigrant ICE removes “has had due process and has a final order of removal — meaning they have no legal right to be in the country.”
The lawsuit argues the administration violated procedural rules in referencing the executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” as the main justification for the policy.
The invasion, it states, is “fictional” but the rhetoric has allowed Department of Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem and the immigration agencies to wage an “arbitrary, xenophobic and militarized mass deportation campaign that has terrorized immigrant communities and further victimized survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking and other serious crimes who Congress sought to protect.”
The lawsuit is one of several challenging the agencies’ practice as the administration focuses its enforcement campaign in Democratic-led cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and Washington, D.C.
“They just detain and deport them,” said Rebecca Brown, with Public Counsel, one of the groups litigating the case. “It’s is a policy of arrest first, ask questions later.”
Kenia Jackeline Merlos is seen during a family trip in 2023.
(Kenia Jackeline Merlos)
In Carmen’s case, according to a sworn declaration filed in the lawsuit, she arrived in 2022 to the United States and sought asylum. A judge denied her case. She scraped together money and found an attorney to file an appeal. She later learned he didn’t correctly fill out the forms and the case was denied. In the meantime, she did regular check-ins with immigration officials as the abuse worsened.
“I was terrified of these appointments, but I never missed a single appointment,” she said in the declaration.
The night her husband tried to knock down the door, her son was hysterical. The restraining order helped for a while, but a few months later, he showed up again.
Law enforcement eventually placed an ankle monitor on her husband, but he came to her son’s soccer games, stalking them and watching from afar.
Carmen submitted the U-Visa in March and learned he had been deported that same month. Finally, she thought she would be free.
Months later, she was summoned to an immigration check-in. She arrived alone. Officials told her to return the next day for an appointment with ICE. When she did, an officer told her she was being detained and would be deported.
Was there someone who could care for her son, the officer asked.
“I didn’t have anyone,” she said in the statement.
A family member brought her boy to the facility and the two were transferred to a recently reopened family detention center in Texas. There, her son, distraught, slept all hours of the day.
“My son suffered so much,” she stated. “He would try to sleep in the morning so the day would go faster and he wouldn’t have to endure the many hours imprisoned.”
After a month at the facility, Carmen’s new attorney informed authorities of the pending application and asked for her release because her son suffered from medical issues, as did she. The request was denied, as were others to pause the removal.
At the end of July, she and her son were deported.
“I had nowhere to go,” she stated.
She emerged from the plane to her nightmare.
“I saw a man standing across from us and my heart sank,” she said. “It was my husband.”
“My husband told me it was such a coincidence that he was there when we arrived,” she said. “I knew he was lying. He had found that we were being deported and he was there to take us.
“I had no choice, I had nowhere else to go and there was no one speaking up for me.”
Now she says she is even more trapped than before.
He took her passports, so she can’t travel. She must ask permission just to leave the house, and if she is allowed to, give him constant updates while she is away. At night, he takes her phone and checks it, interrogating her about every call she made.
“I never know what will make him angry,” she said. “We live in constant fear.”
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Rachel Uranga
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