Immigrants in abusive homes often live in fear

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Aug. 18, 2003 | 10:57 a.m.

For longer than Samantha wants to remember, she didn't want to go home because she would be hit. But the 30-year-old mother of three also couldn't go to the police because her husband said he would send her back to Mexico, which hadn't been her home since she was a teenager.

Her life is still in danger and she doesn't want to see her real name or current whereabouts in print.

She is not alone in Nevada. A growing number of Nevada residents, mostly women, find themselves far from their native country facing violence in their homes. Usually the abuser keeps the victim from going to the law by threatening deportation -- even though federal laws now protect such victims.

"The numbers are definitely going up -- it could be because of the growth, cities becoming more cosmopolitan, more outreach or all three," said Liliana Loftman, supervising attorney for immigration at Clark County Legal Services, a Las Vegas nonprofit that gives free legal help to undocumented women who are victims of domestic violence.

Loftman said she is getting about 50 percent more calls on the issue this year than last year, with about 23 people, mostly women, calling per week.

Few statistics are collected on abuse of undocumented immigrants, but the trend can be seen in numbers collected by Suzanne Ramos, a victim's advocate in the Reno city attorney's office. About 212 Hispanic women have called her office each month in the first four months of 2003, an estimated 90 percent of whom were undocumented. That's more than twice as many as last year and triple the number from 2001, when she got about 70.

But the problem is not limited to Hispanic households. Ramos said that recent cases have included a university professor visiting from Iran who abused his wife.

Detective Michael Jeffries, one of 10 detectives in Metro's domestic violence unit, said about 10 percent of the estimated 24,000 cases his unit handles in a year involve undocumented immigrants, increasingly from countries other than Mexico.

"People don't have any idea how many of these cases we run across," he said.

Loftman has seen a similar trend.

"Whereas before it was almost all Hispanics, we're actually seeing an increase in (women from) Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean," she said.

Though agencies such as Loftman's offer help navigating the federal laws that give legal status to undocumented women under the thumb of domestic violence, language barriers and fear often keep these women from leaving their houses.

"It's hard enough for victims of domestic violence to leave their partners," said Ramos, a statewide leader on the issue who organized a Las Vegas workshop with local and national experts last year.

"But with undocumented women, they feel as if they have no rights at all and can't make it on their own."

Annette Scott, who works for a nonprofit called Safe House and helped Samantha get into her agency's temporary housing, says her agency used to keep track of immigrants by having them indicate "Caucasian," "Hispanic," "African-American," "Asian-American" or "other" on the agency's intake form.

Now the agency is going to ask women to indicate a wider range of ethnicities and countries of origin, because women from a growing list of countries are seeking their help.

"We're seeing a lot of so-called mail-order brides and women from war-torn countries," she said.

Samantha's case was neither of those, but it shows that each woman's situation is different, especially over time, Scott said.

Samantha crossed the border illegally as a teenager in 1989 to join her mother in California, who was a resident, the step below citizenship. Then her mother died of cancer in 1994, derailing the paperwork that would have brought her into legal status.

Samantha got married in 1996 and began having children, whose ages she doesn't want to reveal.

"The marriage was up and down ... he would take drugs and get violent physically and verbally," she said.

Her husband promised a move to Las Vegas in 2000 would be accompanied by a change in behavior. It wasn't.

Samantha found a national domestic violence hotline number in a public restroom and was directed to Safe House's shelter. She is now waiting for a temporary work permit while seeking status as a U.S. resident through a 1994 law called the Violence Against Women Act, which helps undocumented women who are victims of domestic violence with husbands who are residents or citizens.

Another law helps women in the same situation who are not married through a process known as the U visa.

The federal government's processing of cases such as Samantha's has slowed down in recent months -- "as with every other process post-Sept. 11," said immigration attorney David B. Thronson, who works with Safe House. Reaching legal status under the law may take two years, Thronson said. The lag is in part due to the split-up of the Immigration and Naturalization Service earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Samantha -- like thousands of women in Nevada -- hopes to recapture the dream that brought her to the U.S. more than a decade ago.

And though Scott acknowledges that many people might oppose extending help to those who might have entered the country illegally, she said abuse throws the issue into a different light.

"Them not being citizens is often beyond their control," she said. "And they're still human beings."