Domestic abuse and human trafficking exist throughout our society, but immigrant women are often particularly vulnerable to these horrendous crimes. I am an immigration attorney and have seen too many of these cases. Sometimes they have suffered physical and mental abuse for years because they won’t contact the police, afraid of being reported to immigration agents, deported and separated from their children. Sometimes it goes on so long they end up dead.

But those women are not the only victims of crime in immigrant communities. Local police will tell you that immigrants have more often been the victims of crimes than the perpetrators. Criminals have always figured that immigrants would be afraid to report crimes against them to the police because they feared being turned over to immigration agents.  In certain neighborhoods crime waves occurred without the local authorities ever being informed. Immigrants lived in fear and the criminals flourished, which put all the residents of those cities in danger. It is a phenomenon that has frustrated police all over the country.

That can be addressed with U-visas. An immigrant who is willing to cooperate with law enforcement authorities to bring a criminal to justice can be issued a U-visa, which protects that person from being detained and possibly deported by immigration authorities. In the case of women suffering domestic abuse, the U-visa allows them to report the crime to police rather than live in silence and fear. Also, without the protection of a U-visa a woman who has reported her husband for domestic abuse-leading to his deportation-can end up being deported back to the very place her husband now finds himself, which puts her life in danger. I have represented numerous immigrant women who were saved from serious ongoing abuse-sometimes life threatening abuse-by the implementation of U-visas.

In Palm Beach County, where I work, relations and cooperation between immigrants and law enforcement have improved tremendously and made us all safer, in part by the use of these protective visas.

The use of U-visas is a smart and humane way for Florida law enforcement to reduce crime and human suffering. Local residents should press their police for the greater use of U-visas. They are good for all of us.

I was born in South Florida, of Guatemalan descent. I grew up in West Palm Beach, in a neighborhood known as Broadway, where many other Guatemalans lived. Local police often stopped cars driven by our neighbors for no other reason than to check people’s documents. It was an act of racial profiling; the offense they were guilty of was known as “driving while brown.” One day it was my father who was stopped.

He had been in the U.S. 22 years, had committed no crimes, had worked hard, now had a job as a driver transporting landscapers and had five U.S.-born children. My mother was a legal permanent resident and my father  had applied for the same status. He was still trying to get it.

The local police who stopped him on the street discovered a 17-year-old deportation order from immigration authorities, issued only due to his lack of immigration documents. They had no reason to believe my father was a danger to anyone given his long, peaceful residence in West Palm Beach, but they reported him to ICE agents anyway. My father was deported, forced to leave his wife and five children behind. He promised to come back to us.

He never made it. Four years later the Guatemalan Consulate in Texas examined the teeth in a skull found in the desert and identified those remains as my father’s. He had died trying to reunite with us. The day we heard he was dead was the saddest of our lives. He was the backbone of our family.

What did local police achieve through this act of racial profiling? Did they protect anyone from anything? No, they didn’t. They left five U.S. citizen children without a father and my mother, a legal resident, widowed. An American-owned company lost a trusted employee. All they achieved was that they created suffering; it was all so unnecessary. Here’s hoping the case of my family leads local city officials to help protect their immigrant residents and leads local law enforcement to think twice before they act in ways that can bring tragedy to people’s lives.

I am 27 years old, the mother of two children and came to the U.S. from Honduras in 2012. In that year, plagued by criminal gangs, Honduras had the highest murder rate of any country in the world. My father and two of my uncles, who resisted the gangs in our town, had been killed, and the rest of my family faced grave risk. I and other relatives fled for our lives, finally settling in Key West, where we lived quietly.

In 2017, I was stopped by a local policeman, accused of driving without a license and taken to jail. When family members tried to post bail, they were told I could not be released because federal authorities had placed a “detainer” on me while my immigration status was investigated. For almost four months I was jailed in various detention centers in South Florida  and my children and other loved ones were not allowed to see me. My daughter was five at the time; my son was two. I was then transferred to a detention facility in Pompano Beach, 200 miles from my family. When they were able to make the trip to visit me, they were only allowed to stay for a short time. My children did not understand and cried when they had to leave without me. For a mother, it was extremely hard.

Due to my attorney’s efforts, I was finally released after seven and half months. I learned that the police in Key West had reported me to immigration authorities and that I had been held based on an illegal detainer. I was told that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the continued detention of a person with no warrant issued against them, whose case is simply being investigated, even if that person is not a citizen.

Due to the viciousness of the gangs in Honduras, I and my family are currently in the U.S. under the protection of the Convention Against Torture and we have filed for asylum here. I am very grateful to the people of this country for saving me and my loved ones from the terror we faced in our homeland. The action taken against me by local law enforcement and immigration authorities was painful for me and my children and unnecessary. We pose no danger to our fellow residents. I sincerely hope local officials throughout Florida will ensure that law enforcement agents follow the law and that other immigrant families do not have to suffer what we did.