Aggregated Immigration Stories

"She was 14 when her mother smuggled her into Los Angeles. She met her future husband, a legal resident, two years later.

He had all the cards, and played them cruelly, as she recalls. He would not let her go to school or work, dragged his feet on supporting her citizenship request, and called her fat and ugly after she became pregnant.

She endured it all — until she caught him romancing a 13-year-old girl from their church choir. When she complained, he beat her bloody, tried to rape her, and fled, with the girl, to Arizona, she said in an affidavit that is now part of federal immigration records.

Today, he is in prison, and she is caring for her children in San Francisco, with a driver’s license and a legal job baby-sitting. Her legal status came about through what is known as a U visa — a humanitarian “island of niceness,” as one advocate called it, in a sea of restrictive United States immigration laws."

KATHERINE ELLISON in the New York Times.