Gastonia police deny visa aid for immigrant victims

The requests trickle into the Gastonia Police Department. They are from crime victims living in the country illegally who reported wrongdoing to police and cooperated with prosecutors.

Their assistance made them eligible to apply for a U visa, which grants undocumented immigrants the right to stay in the United States for four years and seek permanent residence on humanitarian grounds.

But Gastonia police refuse to process such requests, even though the visa program is widely seen as an effective crime-fighting tool.

Congress created the U visa with bipartisan support in 2000 to encourage undocumented immigrants to report crime to police without fear of deportation. The law requires applicants to obtain a signature from a law enforcement agency verifying they were victims of a serious crime and cooperated with investigators and prosecutors.

Resistance from some law enforcement agencies has prompted debate about whether they are practicing sound public policy or anti-immigration bias.

Gastonia, which has 163 officers, says it doesn’t have the manpower to review paperwork and verify whether victims were helpful during investigations in cases that sometimes go back more than a decade.

The department said it is operating with 11 vacancies. Six current officers are still in basic training and will not be available for duty until the spring, officials said.

“We have a staffing issue,” spokeswoman Donna Lahser said. “There’s no perfect answer. As we get back to full staffing, we will look at this.”

Gastonia police have received eight requests for U visa certifications this year.

That’s far fewer petitions than many other police departments collect. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, for example, processes about 1,200 applications annually. CMPD informs victims whether the request was verified or denied within 45 days. CMPD has 1,849 sworn officers, according to its website.

“They don’t understand the program well enough or they just don’t want to help” undocumented immigrants, Gastonia immigration attorney Ron Shook said of his local police department.

Deborah Weissman, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor, said police can verify applications in most cases in three weeks or less. They simply need to fill out a checklist and review their own reports.

“It’s not that complicated,” Weissman said. “One has to ask what’s going on? Are there elements of anti-immigrant sentiment?”

Roadblock to citizenship

The federal government each year grants a maximum 10,000 U visas to people who can prove they suffered substantial physical or mental harm after a crime.

Victims start by asking a law enforcement agency – a police department, district attorney’s office or judge – to sign paperwork confirming they were victims of human trafficking, rape, domestic violence or other serious crimes.

The documents go to the federal government, which conducts background checks and determines whether to issue the visa.

But some crime victims who are eligible will not be considered because local law enforcement offices automatically deny requests, says a recent study by the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law Immigration/Human Rights Policy Clinic.

Researchers found more than 160 agencies nationwide that refuse to certify applications under any circumstances. About a dozen North Carolina agencies – including Gastonia – issue blanket denials, says the study, which is based partly on survey responses from immigration attorneys and advocacy agencies.

Survey results suggest that blanket policies denying certifications are most common in communities where there is anti-immigrant sentiment, according to the study. Such policies are also more prevalent in the law enforcement agencies that refuse training or education, researchers found.

“The U visa makes communities safer,” said Ana Suarez, spokesman for the Charlotte-based Latin American Coalition. “It makes no sense to be against this. Our suspicion is there is some discrimination going on.”

In response to complaints about anti-immigration bias and slow turnaround times, California lawmakers in September passed legislation requiring police departments to verify U visa applications within 90 days unless they can find compelling evidence to deny the request.

“It should not matter where you became the victim of domestic violence to qualify for a U Visa,” California state House Speaker Toni Atkins said at the time.

Living in fear

The issue carries consequences for people such as Gladys, a 29-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Gladys said she has been waiting for more than three years for Gastonia police to respond to her U visa certification requests.

She asked the Observer not to use her last name because she is afraid of deportation.

Gladys requested U visa certification from the Gastonia police in 2012 — three years after armed robbers forced their way into her family’s Gastonia home and stole some of their most prized possessions. At least one of the culprits was arrested and convicted after Gladys reported the robbery.

She paid a Charlotte immigration attorney $1,000 to fill out a U visa certification request, but she only got a form letter in response saying that processing would take an unknown amount of time.

Gladys has a new lawyer, who is working pro bono, and filed a new certification request in October. Once again, she received the form letter but got no answer.

Speaking through an interpreter, she said she lives in constant fear of being deported and separated from her husband and three children. Her husband has legal status.

She said she has had trouble finding work and was denied a rental lease for a mobile home because she does not have valid identification. A U visa would help her obtain a driver’s license and pursue training to become a nurse or at least do something other than menial labor, she said.

“I just want the person who was supposed to sign the papers to know people are suffering from day to day,” Gladys said. “I wasn’t shot, but this was a horrible thing to live through.”

A difficult task

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates there are about 325,000 undocumented immigrants living in North Carolina. Advocates say about 50,000 are in the Charlotte area.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for Immigration Reform, which opposes the U visa program, said it is wrong they can receive a benefit not available to legal citizens who are victimized.

“We should expect that people no matter their status would do the right thing,” Mehlman said. “This takes officers out of other operations to carry out a function that is not necessary.”

Some law enforcement officials say it is time consuming to research old cases and difficult to recall whether a crime victim was cooperative. The federal law does not set time limits on how long victims can apply after the crime.

Starting in January, CMPD will place a five-year time limit on petitions, Maj. Diego Anselmo said. There will be exceptions for victims in homicides, sexual assaults, assaults with deadly weapons that inflict serious injuries and domestic violence cases.

CMPD cannot keep up with the rapidly rising number of requests under the current policy, especially with some cases stretching back 15 years, Anselmo said.

“It’s reasonable,” Anselmo said of the change. “There are departments that impose stricter time limits than this. I know other departments that don’t do this.”

‘A slap in the face’

Anselmo said that CMPD met with prominent immigration attorneys and nonprofit officials to announce the new policy. He said the stakeholders understood the department’s position.

But Gastonia police never told attorneys and their clients the department no longer participates in the U visa program, said Charlotte immigration lawyer Theodore Maloney, who also handles cases in Gastonia.

A form letter the department sends to people who request a U visa certification reads: “Due to the significant increase in volume of certification requests and the considerable amount of staff time required to properly review these cases, please be aware that any processing that may occur is likely to involve an indeterminate period of time.”

Maloney said one of his clients has been waiting for four years to find out if the department would certify a U visa request.

Maloney said there is no reason Gastonia police cannot review applications since there have been only eight requests this year. That is down from 19 in 2011.

Lahser, the Gastonia police spokeswoman, said if there was prosecution in the case, undocumented immigrant crime victims may ask the Gaston County District Attorney’s office to certify applications.

But Gaston County District Attorney Locke Bell in May revealed that he refused to verify U visa applications for Latino crime victims if the assailant was also Latino. Bell said the federal law was only intended to help Latino immigrants who were harmed by whites or blacks.

Legal experts said his practice violated federal discrimination laws. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina in June announced that Bell would no longer use nationality to determine who qualified for the program.

This story was originally published December 25, 2015 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Gastonia police deny visa aid for immigrant victims."