Virginia Villalobos’ father came home in the early morning, drunk and raving. Grabbing a knife from the kitchen, he advanced on Virginia’s mom. She screamed, convinced she was going to die right there in the living room. The yelling woke Virginia, but what she didn’t see as she left her bed and interrupted the standoff was her father tucking the would-be murder weapon under a couch cushion to hide it from his daughter. 5-year-old Virginia may have saved her mom’s life.
That was the last incident in a years-long onslaught of physical and verbal abuse Virginia’s alcoholic father levied against her mother. The family had had enough. A few days later, Virginia, her two siblings and her pregnant mother abandoned their home with little more than the clothes on their backs. Virginia’s grandfather helped them gather the funds for a one-way trip north. A bus picked the family up from Monterrey, then they split up to cross the border at Laredo, leaving Virginia in charge of one of her younger brothers. Virginia was instructed to stay quiet unless officers asked her direct questions. They did. She gave a false name. It worked, and Virginia became an American – in all but legal status.
Now Virginia is 23, engaged, and mom to Abraham, a not-quite-2-year-old who is in that stage of believing that his purpose in life is to bang on things. Her apartment in Pleasant Grove, which she shares with Abraham, her grandmother, a dog and a goldfish, is tight but warm. Virginia is an eager hostess. She just picked up her green card last week, and is understandably ecstatic. “It was wonderful,” she says. “It will give us the opportunity to do more and succeed and better ourselves.”
But the path to legal status was no easier than her trek across the Texas border away from a violent home life in Mexico. Virginia and her family did not have a route to legalization when they arrived; it only became a possibility because of sexual abuse, two years of court proceedings and a high-profile law with little-known provisions just for families like Virginia’s.
Into the Fire
The four moved in with relatives, became one big happy family and lived the apple pie life – at first. Like many undocumented immigrant families who cross our borders to escape hardship, Virginia’s family eventually found trouble here, and not from immigration police.
The fastest-growing area of immigration services at Catholic Charities of Dallas is for victims of abuse and violent crime, says Vanna Slaughter, director of immigration services at CCD. Armed with the threat of revealing the victim’s status, an abuser can extort favors or enact violence without fear of the victim running to authorities. And the abuser makes sure the victim can’t change her status by isolating her from the community and any resources she might seek out. “Most of these ladies can’t even go to school or learn English or anything,” says Sonia Robles, a caseworker for CCD. “They just work and come home. That’s it.”
Typically, the abuser is a male U.S. citizen or permanent resident who is in a relationship with the undocumented victim. So Virginia’s family fit the pattern when her mom began dating a legal Iraqi immigrant we’ll call S.K. But it wasn’t her mom who encountered abuse in the new relationship. This time it was Virginia.
Sadly, she’s not an anomaly. CCD sees other cases of child abuse among the undocumented community, often at the hands of legal residents or citizens who can hold those same threats of deportation – or death – over their young victims’ heads.
Virginia says that two of S.K.’s male friends started the exploitation. They made advances on the 7-year-old and touched her inappropriately. When Virginia was 8, S.K. began sexually violating her as well, in a variety of terrible ways no parent ever wants to think about. But Virginia’s mom had no idea what was going on. Virginia was afraid to tell her – S.K. had threatened to kill Virginia’s family, to burn down their house, if she said a word. So she stayed quiet and the abuse continued unchecked for three years. She never imagined that speaking up about S.K. would eventually secure legal status for her entire family.
One of the United States’ most controversial laws includes a protection for undocumented victims of abuse and violent crime. The Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994 and (barely) re-authorized earlier this year, allows men and women who’ve been victims of abuse in this country to self-petition for asylum. To obtain a U-Visa, a special kind of permit outlined in VAWA, they must also cooperate with law enforcement to bring the abuser to justice. Only 10,000 U-Visas are granted every year, but victims can add their family members to the original petition, and U-Visa holders gain access to permanent legal status.
But finding a way to live legally in the United States wasn’t on 11-year-old Virginia’s radar – just finding a way out of her situation. “I felt like running, I felt like escaping,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to be alive.”
Finally, Virginia cracked and told her cousin everything. Through a grapevine of concerned family members, Virginia’s mom got the details. She took Virginia to McDonald’s, and over a Big Mac her daughter opened up about the abuse. It was hard for Virginia’s mother to accept that her boyfriend could be doing these things, that her daughter had not found a safe home in the United States. But that day she left S.K. Like many other abuse victims – documented or otherwise – the family made their way to Genesis Women’s Shelter in Dallas.
Emotional Rescue
Genesis does not check ID at the door. The shelter doesn’t ask families about their immigration status, and they don’t push anyone to become legal, because they understand the anxieties the women carry with them. “There is a lot of fear behind saying, ‘I’m undocumented,’” says Viviana Urdaneta, a counselor at Genesis. “They don’t know if you are going to call immigration on them, because that’s what the person who is abusive tells them all the time.”
So Genesis does not demand Social Security numbers or any other papers. But they do make sure everyone who comes through the shelter receives information about VAWA and the U-Visa program – because most aren’t aware it exists. “The majority of them want to be documented,” Urdaneta explains. “They just don’t know about the terms.”
If a client reads the literature handed to them by Genesis and wants to pursue legalization via VAWA or U-Visa, the shelter plays the role of supporter and advocate. The U-Visa process requires multiple documents, including a detailed testimony from the victim. Urdaneta recently counseled a woman whose husband tried to kill her. They met four times over two weeks – during which time the client wrote just 1.5 pages. “I cannot imagine her writing that by herself,” Urdaneta says. “You need to relive the whole thing. How in the world would you write or talk about that just right after it happened?”
Though she was not yet applying for the U-Visa, Virginia followed a similarly arduous process while she stayed at the shelter, talking to counselors and law enforcement about her experiences, over and over. At the time, she didn’t think the counseling helped her. She was withdrawn, sullen. “When someone goes through something – physical abuse, verbal abuse – it messes with you mentally,” she says. “It messes with your spirit and your soul.” It’s hard to imagine the thoughtful, earnest mother as a bitter pre-teen, but Virginia admits she was suicidal by age 12. “I was like this closed shell. I was always crying. I was always angry.” She faltered in school, turning to alcohol and marijuana for escape.
S.K. was indicted in March 2001 for aggravated sexual assault of a child, and over the next two years Virginia’s family was in and out of police stations and courtrooms as she continued to spiral into depression. Virginia did not know at the time that her cooperation with law enforcement – however painful – was key to the U-Visa process. She just wanted revenge. “I wanted him to pay. I wanted him to suffer and to feel what I felt,” she says.
She did not get quite what she hoped for, because near the end of the whole ordeal she stopped cooperating with authorities. S.K. was able to get the charges reduced to a Class A misdemeanor, and instead of jail time received two years of probation and a $1,500 fine, along with a court order to stay away from Virginia and her family. They have not seen him since.
By the time Virginia was 19, she had (mostly) righted the ship, ditching the less-than-wholesome lifestyle she’d adopted to deal with the trauma of her childhood. She made good grades and attended college. And perhaps most important, she gained an optimism born of resilience. “I try to see the best of everyone and everything,” she says. “I want my son to grow up in a positive environment.”
In 2008, with the help of CCD, Virginia decided it was time to tackle her family’s legal status. “After everything, I wanted to get my residency. I wanted my papers.”
Happy Endings
Virginia had two choices: A relative could petition for them, but the family would have to return to Mexico for 10 years to complete the process. Or she could revisit those days she lived in fear of S.K. and what he might do to her and claim the U-Visa she earned through suffering. “What happened to me had to happen for a reason,” Virginia says. “I was able – we were able – to get our green cards.”
What does Virginia plan to do with her freedom? Her eyes shine as she pounces on one possibility after another. She’s training to sell insurance, but she’d like to become a teacher’s aide, or a nurse or a social worker or a public speaker – anything that allows her to make other people’s lives better. “I want to be able to help and provide, and not just for myself and my son,” she says. “If I can help others, then I’ll do it. If I can save somebody’s life, I’ll do it.”
She also wants to teach her son that despite all the bad she’s encountered, good people are still out there. “I want to be the best mom I can be,” she says. “He’s my motivation.”
Published November 2013
