Anti-Immigrant Laws Put Women in Danger

Georgia's HB 87 immigration law is controversial for a great number of reasons, but one of the least discussed is the danger in which it places immigrant victims of domestic violence.

The delegation, led by Domestic Workers Alliance, National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, and others, described the stories of women who had suffered indirect consequences of anti-immigrant policies, due in large part to the intense culture of fear that deters women from coming forward about abuse they've suffered or seeking help from public institutions. Anxieties about any contact with authorities -- even as the victim of violence -- could turn many women away from seeking law enforcement protection, which further segregates immigrants, whatever their legal status, from the rights they deserve under the law.

Already, under current immigration policies, a woman who fears getting caught without papers may often make a cruelly rational choice to stay with an abusive partner, rather than report domestic violence--in hopes of avoiding deportation or separation from her children. Many women may also forgo basic health care for themselves or their children for fear of coming under the radar of law enforcement.

Some members of Congress are trying to expand such laws, and thus such fear, to the entire nation.

According to immigrant advocates, a new immigration enforcement bill being considered in Congress would undermine existing immigration law by removing prosecutorial discretion and deferred action, two components that protect undocumented victims of domestic violence.

Michelle Ortiz — the supervising attorney of Lucha, a unit within the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center — says that Rep. Lamar Smith’s Hinder the Administration Legalization Temptation Act (better known as the HALT Act) would force immigration authorities to deport victims of domestic violence who reach out for help.
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“Under the Violence Against Women Act, which has existed for 15 years, there have been specific protections for victims of domestic violence,” Ortiz says, “particularly for people who self-petition, who are victims of domestic violence at the hands of a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident.”

“When their self-petition is approved, and have already proven they are a victim and married this person in good faith, the Immigration Service gives them deferred action. That is not a legal status, but a protection from deportation, and provides a means to apply for work authorization.”

By ending deferred action, the HALT Act would strip immigration authorities of their authority to protect victims. The HALT Act would also affect the prosecutorial discretion memos issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which, according to Ortiz, are working.

We live in a state where nearly 100 women are killed each year in domestic violence homicides and in a country where a woman is battered every 9 seconds. We cannot afford any policies that deter women from seeking help, regardless of their immigration status. We will continue to update you if there are opportunities for legislative action on this issue.

"Secure Communities" Threatens DV Victims with Deportation

Advocacy agencies are raising serious concerns about the Department of Homeland Security's "Secure Communities" program. Many agencies are going so far as to tell undocumented victims of domestic violence never to call the police, because they risk being deported themselves.

Designed to identify and deport dangerous, undocumented immigrants with a criminal history, Secure Communities has removed about 58,300 convicts from the United States since its pilot launch in late 2008, according to ICE.

But 28 percent of the people transferred to ICE custody under Secure Communities from October 2008 through June 2010 were non-criminals, according to ICE figures. Some of the detained people--an unknown number--are victims of domestic and sexual violence.

While federal law protects crime victims from having to reveal their immigration status, if these victims are arrested or have been arrested in the past Secure Communities now discloses that.

This can affect victims in a scenario where a police officer arrives at the home and can't communicate with the couple. Police may arrest both parties or even arrest the victim if the abuser speaks English and twists the series of events that led to the police call.

Victims are also subject to "revenge arrests," when abusers call the police and accuse them of perpetuating the violence.

"The man says, 'Look she scratched me, I didn't do anything.' So the woman gets arrested and if undocumented, she gets reported to ICE," Neugebaeur said. "How can I as a lawyer say now in good conscience, free and clear, 'Don't worry about anything, call the police,' because if you call the police, you can be reported to immigration services."

Several Georgia counties are already enrolled in the program, including all 5 in metro Atlanta, and the entire state will be enrolled by the end of 2012. We hate to have to say so, but if you are undocumented or are counseling a someone impacted by domestic violence who is undocumented, consider the risk of deportation before you reach out to the police. If you choose not to call 911, please get to a safe place and then contact your local domestic violence safehouse. In Atlanta: (404) 688-9436. In Georgia: (800) 33-HAVEN. Elsewhere: (800) 799-SAFE.

Latinas Less Likely to Report Stalkers

CBS Atlanta interviewed our partner agency Caminar Latino to discuss the murder of Angelica Robledo De La Rosa by her stalker. The interview focused on reasons why Latinas are less likely to report stalkers to the police.

Last week's killing of Angelica De La Rosa has sent shockwaves throughout the Latin community in Cobb County. A Hispanic group who that works to educate women about domestic violence said Friday that Latinas are less likely to report violence or problems to police.

Tuesday, a friend of De La Rosa dropped her off at work. Police said that's when Armando Soto, 46, shot and killed De La Rosa. The shooting happened on South Cobb Drive in front of the Brito Supermarket, the place where De La Rosa worked as a cashier.

“We have learned throughout the course of our investigation that De La Rosa and the armed male was a stalking situation,” Officer Joseph Hernandez said. “Investigators uncovered the male attempted to pursue a relationship with the victim; however, she continually denied his requests. A series of disturbing incidents, over an extended period of time, were initiated by the male towards the victim, however they were never reported to authorities."

The executive director for Caminar Latino, Jessica Nunan, sat down with CBS Atlanta News and told victims of stalking that there is help.

“Half of all Latinas don’t report incidences of violence,” Nunan said. “Unfortunately with the anti-immigration laws going on here in Georgia we see a lot of women not feeling safe enough to call police because they are worried they might lose their children if they are deported. Even though the Violence Against Women act protects her regardless of her status there is still that fear of being on the radar,” Nunan said.

Illegal or not, De La Rosa did not report her alleged stalker to police investigators, who said they worked together in the past.

De La Rosa was married with a teenage daughter. All of her family live Mexico, but her extended family in Georgia told CBS Atlanta News De La Rosa never told them she was
having any problems.

Soto was arrested in Gautier, Miss., during a traffic stop and is currently awaiting extradition back to Georgia. He is charged with felony murder and aggravated assault.

Visit caminarlatino.com for more information on assistance for Latina victims of domestic violence and/or stalking.

Obama Opens Asylum for Some Battered Women

The Obama administration has opened the way for foreign women who are victims of severe domestic violence and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States.

The action reverses a Bush administration stance in a protracted and passionate legal battle over the possibilities for battered women to become refugees.

In addition to meeting other strict conditions for asylum, abused women will need to show that they are treated by their abuser as subordinates and little better than property, according to an immigration court filing by the administration, and that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country. They must show that they could not find protection from institutions at home or by moving to another place within their own country.

The administration laid out its position in an immigration appeals court filing in the case of a woman from Mexico who requested asylum, saying she feared she would be murdered by her common-law husband there. According to court documents filed in San Francisco, the man repeatedly raped her at gunpoint, held her captive, stole from her and at one point tried to burn her alive when he learned she was pregnant.

The government has marked a clear, although narrow, pathway for battered women seeking asylum, lawyers said, after 13 years of tangled court arguments, including resistance from the Bush administration to recognize any of those claims.

Moving cautiously, the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately recommend asylum for the Mexican woman, who is identified in the court papers only by her initials as L.R. But the department, in the unusual submission written by senior government lawyers, concluded in plain terms that “it is possible” that the Mexican woman “and other applicants who have experienced domestic violence could qualify for asylum.”

As recently as last year, Bush administration lawyers had argued in the same case that in spite of her husband’s brutality, L.R. and other battered women could not meet the standards of American asylum law.

“This really opens the door to the protection of women who have suffered these kinds of violations,” said Karen Musalo, a professor who is director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Professor Musalo has represented other abused women seeking asylum and recently took up the case of L.R.

Read the entire New York Times article.

We applaud the Obama administration for recognizing the dangers of domestic violence and offering our country's protection to survivors, though it is ironic that one of the requirements for potential asylees is proof that domestic violence is widely tolerated in their country. We challenge an appeals court to find a country where domestic violence is not widely tolerated, including this one.

Follow-Up

This article ran in the opinion section of the Atlanta Journal Constitution today, reiterating many of the points we made in yesterday's post.

Last March, the American Islamic Fellowship, in partnership with the Progressive Muslim Network in Washington, D.C., and I AM: American Muslim in Phoenix, launched "Not in Our Name: United Against Domestic Violence." It was a campaign to unite all people of faith in an effort to bring an end to this problem that affects all our communities. Another Muslim initiative to fight domestic violence internationally is the Peaceful Families Project.

We need to support these efforts so that no life is ever taken in the name of religion.

We encourage you to read the article in its entirety.

Honor Killing?

Chaudhry Rashid, a Pakistani resident of Jonesboro, GA, stands accused of killing his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, because of her desire to end her arranged marriage. CNN.com reported that police discovered Ms. Kanwal dead in an upstairs bedroom of her father's home when responding to a call Rashid's wife made after she heard screaming coming from upstairs.

Authorities arrived at the home around 2 a.m., shortly after Rashid's wife called police. She reported that she had been awakened by screaming but couldn't understand the language, the report said. She said she was afraid and left the house to call police.

Police found a "distraught and possibly mournful" Rashid sitting behind a vehicle in the driveway.

"My daughter is dead," he told police.

When asked how she died, police said Rashid did not answer.

"He just dropped his head," the report states.

Clayton County Police spokesman Tim Owens said, "Apparently she and the father had argued over the marriage and the fact that it was arranged, and at some point during the altercation he did end up killing his daughter."

The article goes on to define "honor killings" - the slaying by family members of a woman or girl thought to be bringing them shame - and cite the United Nation Population Fund's estimation that approximately 5,000 women and girls are killed in this way each year. CNN is not the only news outlet to choose this angle as their focus, and while the concept is important, the broader picture is covered up by relegating problems of widespread violence against women to the status of a cultural misunderstanding.

Samhita of Feministing writes,

Sounds so simple right? He killed her because his "culture" made him. Not because he might be mentally ill or pathological. There is no denying that in basically every culture there is pressure put on women to act a certain way and especially with regard to marriage or the ownership of her sexuality. But the way that "honor" killing is discussed in the media you would think it is some normal cultural phenomena, when it is not. It is a sign of illness, culture gone awry and patriarchy at its most exaggerated.

Even the expert CNN consulted in that same article criticizes this tendency to exoticize incidents of domestic violence.

Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, said many immigrant families struggle over cultural and generational gaps, but that most South Asian communities enjoy "wonderful" relationships within their families.

"My immediate reaction was that this is an anomaly in the South Asian community," Nair said Tuesday. "This isn't a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities."

Make no mistake, honor killings are a serious problem and they deserve attention. However, they are only one piece of the puzzle, and to introduce them without context is to minimize the root of the problem - that women are so often seen as property to be passed on from one man to the next, who will act as their gatekeepers.

Growing Advocacy for Muslim Women

Via The New York Times. Domestic violence in Muslim culture in the Unites States has been a difficult problem to address due to a lack of understanding of the culture on the part of outsiders, or a hesitancy to interfere in what is considered traditional religious gender roles. Thankfully, organizations founded by Muslim American women are fostering a movement to publicly define domestic violence as an unacceptable cultural practice. While domestic violence occurs in the Muslim American community at the same rate as most other groups, approaching the topic has been difficult because it is seen by many involved in the faith as an attack.

“The Muslim community is under a lot of scrutiny, so they are reluctant to look within to face their problems because it will substantiate the arguments demonizing them,” said Rafia Zakaria, a political science graduate student at Indiana University who is starting a legal defense fund for Muslim women. “It puts Muslim women in a difficult position because if they acknowledge their rights, they are seen as being in some kind of collusion with all those who are attacking Muslim men. So the question is how to speak out without adding to the stereotype that Muslim men are barbaric, oppressive, terrible people.”

Ms. Zakaria, and other women like her, believe that the best way to refute Muslim stereotypes is to show the public that Muslim women are addressing the problem of domestic violence. And while many organizers have been expelled from mosques and other Muslim activities for attempting to discuss the problem of domestic violence, recent attempts to find allies within the church are gaining ground.

Apart from self-empowerment and fighting stereotypes, there are other important reasons for Muslim women to be pro-active in tackling domestic violence.

First, many Muslim women who have sought help for domestic violence report that cultural misunderstandings often hinder their recovery. Take this story from the New York Times of a young Yemeni-American woman who went to a local shelter after suffering for seven years at the hands of her husband.

The shelter brought in a hairdresser, whose services she accepted without any misgivings. But once her hair was styled, administrators urged her to throw off her veil, saying it symbolized the male oppression native to Islam that she wanted to escape.

While these women probably had good intentions, they failed to recognize that this woman was fleeing her abusive husband and not her religion. Someone with an understanding of the Muslim culture and religion would have been able to highlight the ways in which this woman could find support and strength within her beliefs rather than fostering the harmful misconception that leaving an abusive relationship means giving up or betraying Islam.

Another reason for Muslim American women to get involved in the movement is that those Muslim women who are sheltered and who may not speak English run a higher risk of being victimized due to the difficulty of accessing accurate information concerning domestic violence and a woman's legal rights. Consider the story of the same Yemeni-American woman's first efforts to escape her husband by reaching out to her family.

The clerics offered marriage counseling, but only if the husband came too, a condition she knew doomed the idea. Her sister suggested she lose weight and be more obedient. Her father encouraged obedience, too, while her husband hit her through three pregnancies. After she filed for divorce, she said, her father hauled her home and hit her too, for shaming him.

Hamdard Center for Health and Human Services in Chicago is an advocacy group for Muslim American women, and they have developed several interesting solutions to this problem. Hamdard briefs area grocery store owners and hairdressers that cater to Muslims, which has produced numerous referrals. It also organizes mosque seminars about breast cancer, then inserts a small segment about domestic violence.

It is important to reiterate that the Koran does not condone domestic violence. There is one Koran verse that is cited by some as support for abusive behavior, but mainstream clerics, such as Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, the outreach director for Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, are currently lobbying to make the official interpretation of this verse that women must be obedient to God.

Double Jeopardy

Immigration has been a hot-button issue in the US for many years, and has prompted sweeping reforms under the current administration. In the wake of these reforms, immigrant victims of domestic violence have been put at risk. Consider the story of Ana Bertha Arellano.

According to Susan Ferris's article, Arellano married a U.S. citizen and had two children with him. In 1997, her husband encouraged her to enter the United States illegally and claimed that they would file to adjust her status once they were settled. Instead, her husband used Arellano's undocumented status to keep her under his control and subject to his abuse.

For years, Arellano believed she had no other option but to endure the abuse and hope that someday her husband would help her file for permanent residency. Fortunately, in 2001, Arellano met an attorney who informed her of the provision in the Violence Against Women Act that allows undocumented immigrants who are married to abusive U.S. citizens to apply for a temporary visa and permanent resident status without the sponsorship of their spouses. Through this provision, Arellano was able to obtain a temporary Violence Against Women Act visa and was optimistic that she would eventually be able to obtain a green card.

Arellano owns a restaurant and works as a janitor at night in order have a job that pays for health insurance. She does not receive public assistance of any kind and she has no criminal record. She did everything right, but her green card application has been put on hold indefinitely and her temporary visa is in danger of being revoked. This stall is due to a decision by the Department of Homeland Security to re-examine it's policy of allowing immigrant spouses to remain here when their abusive U.S. citizen or permanent-resident spouses refuse to help them obtain legal status. Without that protection, Arellano, and many other women like her, could end up deported by the same U.S. officials who agreed to shelter her from abuse. Arellano is panicked that she will be forced to uproot her family or leave her children with her abusive spouse. "I don't want anything else but a chance to have some stability for my family," she says.

Over 30,000 women have been granted temporary Violence Against Women Act visas since 1994. Many of these women are now uncertain if they still have a path to citizenship. In addition, the threat of deportation is assuredly keeping even more women from reporting the abuse they are experiencing. One of the best ways to stop family violence is to expose it, but this decision by homeland security may deter women from reporting crimes against them and allow abusers to continue to use their spouse's undocumented status as a tool of oppression without fear of any consequence.

For more information on how immigration reforms are affecting victims of domestic violence check out XicanoPwr and Legal Momentum's Immigrant Women Program.

Suicide - A Solution for Victims?

Many times when we talk to community groups about domestic violence, women insist that they would kill their partners rather than endure prolonged abuse. In the UK we are seeing a different shift: women killing themselves rather than allowing their partners to do it.

A large number of Asian women in Britain are committing suicide by taking to railway tracks, a report has revealed. One third of the total suicides in Britain now happen on a particular stretch of track going through Southall, west London, which has a large Asian community...

A women’s rights organisation, Southall Black Sisters, has claimed that domestic violence is forcing more and more Asian women in Britain to commit suicide on railway tracks. "The high instance of Asian women suicides is linked to abusive practices within Asian families. There is a correlation between these suicides and violence in homes. Psychiatric research has shown there are rarely cases of mental disorders in these cases, suggesting they are the result of social circumstances. These women are often isolated and find it hard to escape."

It is also true in this country that immigrant victims of domestic violence become isolated and are afraid to report abuse because of the risk of police harrassment or deportation. If the victim doesn't speak English, well or at all, this additionally complicates her ability to escape. This truth also applies to other minority populations who do not traditionally trust the police or the court system, and therefore would not seek their assistance if they chose to leave.

We would love to hear comments from our colleagues at Tapestri, Caminar Latino, The Center for Pan Asian Community Services, and others about how members of these often isolated populations can work against domestic violence in their communities.

Vote Expected Today on Amendment Harmful to Immigrant Surivivors

Via the National Immigrant Justice Center:

Vote expected today: Senator Vitter has offered a harmful amendment to the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill that would undercut community policing and endanger public safety, particularly the safety of immigrants who are victims of domestic and sexual violence.

Sen. Vitter's amendment #3277 (read it here) attempts to deny Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) funding to cities and states that pledge not to ask about the immigration status of crime victims and witnesses.

Both Legal Momentum, an advocacy organization for women and girls, and the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence (NAESV) sent letters to senators this morning warning that battered immigrants would be hurt by the proposed legislation.

"Victims of domestic violence need to trust the police to seek assistance, but fear of being reported to immigration officials is one of the most significant factors preventing immigrant victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking from seeking help," writes Lisalyn Jacobs, Legal Momentum's vice president of government relations.

NAESV President Monika Johnson Hostler points out that sexual assault is already one of the most under-reported crimes. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, she says, only 36% of rape and sexual assault victims report the crime to the police. "As a result, NAESV absolutely opposes this measure which will create additional barriers to victims coming forward," she writes.

Contact your senators and explain that the Vitter amendment #3277 will harm our cities by decreasing support for law enforcement and public safety. The Senate switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.