Members of Congress are once again using horrific acts of violence against women to lay the groundwork for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan — this time with a bill that would put some domestic violence survivors at greater risk of deportation.
The Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act, also known as H.R. 30, passed the House with unanimous Republican and significant Democratic support last week and is set to be voted on in the Senate as soon as next week. On its face, the legislation makes it easier to deport domestic or sexual abusers, whether or not they have been convicted of a crime. In practice, advocates warn, it can be used against domestic violence survivors who face false allegations from their abusers.
The legislation was preceded by the passage of the Laken Riley Act, named after a nursing student who was killed by an immigrant who entered the country without authorization. The bill, which passed with bipartisan support, expanded the list of offenses that could lead to deportation — on the basis of criminal charges alone, rather than a conviction — and gave new sweeping enforcement powers to state attorneys general.
While delivering a speech in defense of H.R. 30 on the House floor, lead sponsor Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., argued that the legislation was necessary to protect women and children from a “hoard” of undocumented immigrants sexually abusing “American” women and girls.
“I rise today to demonize, as the word was used on the left across the aisle, to demonize illegal immigrants who are here raping our women and girls, murdering our women and girls, and who are pedophiles, molesting our children,” said Mace. “Our country has been ravaged by a hoard of illegal aliens molesting American children, battering, and bruising and beating up American women, and violently raping American women and girls.”
It’s “using the language of public safety and protecting women to actually enact these policies that are mass deportation and mass detention bills.”
Domestic violence and immigration experts are pushing back against Mace’s assertions, with over 200 domestic violence groups signing a letter urging Congress to reject H.R. 30. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., has also tried to rally opposition to the legislation. The critics argue that the bill does not make women and girls safer and, in fact, makes it easier to deport survivors who get caught up in the criminal legal and child welfare systems as a result of the abuse they suffered.
“This is part of a larger wave that is using the language of public safety and protecting women to actually enact these policies that are mass deportation and mass detention bills,” said Zain Lakhani, director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “They claim to protect women, but if you actually look at what they’re doing, they’re making the situation more dangerous.”
Levers of Control
The bill would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to broaden the definition of certain crimes related to sexual and domestic violence offenses, altering the standards for whether someone is “inadmissible” — ineligible for a visa or permanent status in the U.S. — or deportable. The bill imports a definition of domestic violence and other related offenses from the 2022 Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act that was intended to expand access to grant funding to help survivors, not to be used in the context of immigration enforcement. Survivors acting in self-defense, or who are falsely accused of one of these actions, may be deportable or inadmissible, regardless of whether they have been convicted of a crime.
“This is taking away that due process and really broadening that definition, so it’s folding in a lot more people, including a lot of domestic violence survivors who are either going to be subject to false allegations by their abusers who may have acted in self-defense, or who may be charged with failure to protect their children from witnessing their own abuse,” said Lakhani.
Domestic violence survivors are often subjected to false allegations from their abusers — also known as coercive control — whether in the form of criminal complaints or child welfare investigations, leaving them in a particularly vulnerable position. The bill would make it harder for people who have experienced abuse to access special humanitarian visas created by Congress to protect victims of gender-based violence, such as a U visa or a petition under the Violence Against Women Act.
“They could face deportation before they’re able to access those or access those visas, or they could be denied because they’re inadmissible,” Lakhani said. “So it’s really making it harder for victims to access the existing legal tools that already are there to kind of address the situation.”
For example, explained Lakhani, if a survivor is falsely accused and arrested, she might sign a no-contest waiver — accepting consequences without admitting guilt — to the charges to get released from jail and and be able to care for her children. “They may have no idea that this is going to subject them to immigration consequences, but now it’s going to subject them to mandatory deportation,” she said. A woman who physically fights back against an abuser could also be subject to deportation, in the absence of access to existing waivers that would have protected her ability to get legal status in the United States.
Other advocates worry that the legislation would embolden abusers and have a chilling effect on victims who might otherwise report the abuse. “These new sort of grounds, especially around child abuse, especially around domestic violence, give abusers another lever of control. Like, ‘Oh, you think you’re going to call the police to report my abuse?’” said Joy Ziegeweid, director of immigration legal services at the Urban Justice Center’s Domestic Violence Project. “‘I’m going to call the police, and I’m going to tell them that you are abusing our kid, and I’m going to tell them that you are abusing me,’ and it’s going to have a terrible chilling effect on people.”
Importantly, Ziegeweid said, the bill will not actually help any of the very real survivors who deserve protection and support. “There’s nothing in there to prevent domestic violence or violence against women. It’s maddening because it’s a huge problem, and it’s a problem whether the abusers are documented or undocumented,” said Ziegeweid, who also serves as vice chair of the Violence Against Women Act, U, and T National Committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “And I’ve got tons of clients whose abusers run the gamut in terms of their immigration status, and this law doesn’t help them at all.”
For Juliana Regina Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of federal advocacy at United We Dream, the fight against H.R.30 is about more than just one bill. It’s about the avalanche of legislative and executive actions in the works to not only deport immigrants en masse, but also lay the rhetorical groundwork to justify it.
“Republicans who are pushing these bills don’t care about women.”
“Republicans who are pushing these bills don’t care about women. They don’t care about the consequences of passing these bills,” she said. “They are really trying to build on the rhetoric and on the narrative that immigrants are criminals and deserve to be deported. I think these bills and others that will come are a setup for the mass deportation of immigrants, which is the whole, the main point of the agenda of the [Trump] administration.”
The legislation comes as Trump dismantles other protections for domestic violence survivors. On Tuesday, the Trump administration rescinded the “sensitive zones” memo, which prevented immigration enforcement officers from entering domestic violence shelters without extenuating circumstances, as well as other sensitive settings like hospitals, churches, and schools.
“Pulling down the sensitive zones memo makes it really dangerous for a survivor of domestic violence to go to a shelter because she might risk arrest and deportation there, whereas previously, she was protected in that space,” said Lakhani. “So if we look at how these are functioning together, we’re setting up a situation where it’s harder for migrant survivors of domestic violence to get themselves and their children to safety.”
Democratic Opposition
When the bill came from a House vote last week, it was widely opposed by Democrats — but still got the support of 61 members of the Democratic caucus.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who voted against the legislation, said that while some Democratic support is a result of misinformation or lawmakers trying to protect their seats in red districts, it’s also part of a larger trend of Democrats ceding the issue of immigration to Republicans. “It’s really unfortunate that when it comes to immigration,” she said, “we don’t seem to have true red lines of what we stand for and protect.”
Ramirez argued that the bill is about the appearance of caring about women while putting them, particularly Black and brown women, in harm’s way. “You’re not interested in protecting women from sexual abusers or from being attacked; you’re interested in protecting the women you believe are worthy of protection,” she said of her Republican colleagues. “But even in that, this bill doesn’t actually do that.”
“All of these bills are attempting to equate immigrants with criminality.”
Raskin, who gave a forceful floor speech against the bill, described it as part of a larger strategy from Republicans to paint immigrants as criminals and Democrats unwilling to do anything about it. “All of these bills are attempting to equate immigrants with criminality,” Raskin told The Intercept. “We are living in a time of extreme anti-immigrant propaganda and hysteria, and this happens periodically and recurrently in American history.”
The current anti-immigrant climate makes it hard for lawmakers to effectively message to the public what these bills actually do, he added. “During a period like that, it’s very hard to communicate a relatively subtle point,” he said, “like that the victims of domestic violence will be harmed by legislation which purports to be opposing domestic violence.”
