Immigrant Victims of Crime Wait Years in Growing Visa Backlog

200,000 immigrant victims of crime and 125,000 of their family members are waiting for U visas to come available. Some of them will wait 20+ years.

Everywhere you look in the immigration system now it’s backlog, backlog, backlog.

Over 1.6 million people are stuck in the employment-based green card backlog. Over 2.3 million people have cases pending before the immigration courts. And, as my forthcoming article in Georgetown Law Journal with Laila Hlass and Rachel Davidson shows, tens of thousands of young people from Mexico and Central America are stuck in the SIJS (Special Immigrant Juvenile Status) backlog and forced to put their life on hold until visas come available. Learn more at the End SIJS Backlog Coalition.

Now add to that the U visa backlog. The U visa was established in 2000 as a tool for reducing barriers to cooperation between immigrants and law enforcement by providing a pathway to status for victims of crime who help in a police investigation. If approved, U visa applications also provide a pathway to status for certain family members (i.e. children), as well.

Imagine a scenario where a person who is undocumented witnesses a violent crime or is the victim of a crime. Naturally, that person might be reluctant to work with law enforcement out of fear that they may be deported. Yet typically the highest concern from a public safety perspective is to prosecute the person who committed acts of violence, not get tangled up in federal immigration law. The U visa provides a relief valve for these types of cases.

In 2013, I interviewed maybe 125 or so sheriffs, prosecutors, and attorneys across Georgia about immigration enforcement in the region. It was during these interviews that I learned about the U visa, and, in fact, it was a local prosecutor in a county in the greater Atlanta area that told me she was enthusiastic about using U visas to build a relationship between law enforcement and prosecutors on the one hand, and the immigrant community on the other. She was very clear with me that she had no interest in anyone’s immigration status and neither did the local sheriff or police chief.

Her disposition towards U visas was notable because one crucial step in the U visa application process is getting a law enforcement agency to sign off that the applicant has been useful to their investigation. I spoke with another sheriff in the region who was adamant that he would never sign a U visa application because he didn’t want to grant lawful status to “illegals.” It was a common misperception among law enforcement officers who were opposed to U visas that by signing the paper, they were granting the immigrant status; in fact, USCIS is responsible for adjudicating the petitions.

Congress allocated just 10,000 U visas each year. (This 10,000 number applies only to the principal applicant, not to family members.) And since 2009, as the latest data from USCIS show, demand has greatly exceeded supply, with as many as 37,300 or so U visa applications submitted in 2017, and an additional 25,700 family members affected for a total of 63,000 in that year.

As a result of the built-up excess of demand over supply, the backlog of people waiting has grown dramatically to around 325,000 as of the end of Q2 of FY 2023, or the end of March. If 10,000 U visas are granted per year, some of those 200,000 people waiting now (plus their family members) will wait 20 years for a visa to come available.

These data were updated most recently on June 28, 2023, on the USCIS website. You can get the .csv file or view the formatted PDF document. I want to commend USCIS overall for doing such a good job of posting generally well-formatted data. I also want to thank Matthew Hoppick for drawing my attention to this in a recent post on a social media platform that shall not be named.

For more information, consider the following resources:

• The Niskanen Center has a useful write-up about U visas.

• See Alex Nowrasteh’s article on the dangerous conflation of immigrants with criminal activity.

• Yilun Cheng has a great article in Slate titled “When It’s Up to the Cops if You Get Your Visa.”

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