Four months ago, Yessenia Ruano put her home in Wisconsin up for rent, packed a few bags and left for her native El Salvador. She had fled gang violence in her homeland, and said she had survived forced labor on her journey north. But after living and working in the United States for 14 years as she fought a deportation order, Ms. Ruano seemed to be out of options.
Legal protections that had allowed her to stay while she sought permanent residency began falling away when President Trump expanded his mass deportation effort. Even though her petition to obtain a special visa available to victims of human trafficking was still pending, federal immigration officials refused to delay their efforts to remove her from the country.
Now, Ms. Ruano and several other immigrants say that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is violating the law by detaining and deporting victims of domestic violence or human trafficking who have applied for protection.
In a lawsuit filed this week in federal court in Los Angeles, lawyers for Ms. Ruano and the other plaintiffs say that the Trump administration’s policies violate the immigration relief provisions of the Violence Against Women Act and other measures that Congress established to safeguard victims and encourage them to work with the authorities.
Sergio Perez, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, one of the nonprofits leading the case, said the government was breaking its legal bargain with vulnerable people who had taken “a dramatic and courageous step in coming forward.”
“Our government is turning its back — arresting, punishing and deporting those individuals — and what we’re going to be left with is an even more traumatized, less open membership in our community, and it’s going to make us all less safe,” Mr. Perez said in an interview.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that every unauthorized immigrant whom ICE has removed from the country has “had due process and has a final order of removal — meaning they have no legal right to be in the country.”
The lawsuit filed in federal court late Tuesday is one of at least five that challenge the practices of ICE agents and other officers as the federal government has intensified its immigration crackdown in major cities including Chicago; Portland, Ore.; and Washington, D.C.
Congress has worked to create and expand pathways to legal status for immigrant survivors of domestic violence and trafficking, starting with the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994. Victims could request a delay in deportation proceedings while their petitions for various forms of legal protection were pending. And some who cooperated with law enforcement agencies to prosecute offenders could apply for visa programs that provided work authorization and paths to citizenship. The purpose was to prevent abusers from using the threat of deportation to control victims.
Under prior administrations, ICE agents were directed to focus on protecting victims when they were questioning unauthorized immigrants who had endured serious or violent crimes. And agents were generally required not to take civil enforcement actions against immigrants who were applying for legal relief as crime victims.
But the agency rescinded those policies early this year. An ICE memorandum told agents to follow an executive order issued by President Trump on the day he was sworn in for his second term, calling for “total and efficient enforcement” of immigration laws.
Anti-immigrant groups and activists have long argued that some kinds of victim-based immigration relief was ripe for fraud and exploitation, and that it tied the hands of law enforcement agencies in pursuing criminals. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for Mr. Trump’s second term called for the elimination of U and T visas, which protect immigrants who are victims of domestic violence or human trafficking.
Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, said the administration’s policy changes gave “ICE more flexibility to proceed with removal proceedings, whether that is for a crime or a prior order of removal.”
Lawyers and immigrant rights groups counter that under the new ICE policies, federal officers have been putting victims in expedited removal processes, detaining them for long periods or deporting them before they have had a chance to plead their case. New policies also have expanded the ability of agents to operate in “sensitive zones,” areas that had been considered off limits for immigration enforcement, like women’s shelters, schools and churches.
Prosecutors and victim services providers say that T and U visas provide important protection for people who testify in court to help hold traffickers and abusers accountable. Those prosecutions can take years to complete and involve extensive, invasive questioning, they say, and the fear stirred up by the Trump administration has made it even harder for them to persuade victims to cooperate.
“It creates more dangerous situations, because the longer the abuse goes unreported, the more we find that it escalates,” said Erin Aiello, an assistant district attorney and chief of the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Unit at the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit is a 46-year-old tamale vendor from Mexico, identified in court papers only as Camila B., who was swept up in an ICE raid in Los Angeles. She had lived in the city for 23 years, and applied for a U visa in 2023 after she was assaulted and knocked unconscious, the lawsuit said.
Another plaintiff, Kenia Jackeline Merlos, 43, a native of Honduras, has been held at a federal detention center in Washington State since June. Ms. Merlos applied for a U visa in March 2024, citing an episode about a year earlier in which she and her husband were threatened by a man with a gun. They reported the crime and cooperated with the investigation, the lawsuit says.
Ms. Merlos and her four children, who are U.S. citizens, were rounded up over the summer at a park near the Canadian border, where they were spending time with relatives including her parents, who were visiting from Honduras on tourist visas.
Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit said they endured physical or sexual abuse at the hands of spouses, relatives or others, the court papers say.
In an interview, Ms. Ruano, 38, said she had sought safety in the United States twice. The first time ended in 2011 when she was deported without being given a chance to plead for asylum. She returned that same year, fleeing gang violence in El Salvador, and on the way north, was victimized by a labor trafficking operation. Mr. Perez said the details of the trafficking case would be filed under seal to protect her against retaliation.
When she reached the United States the second time, a judge granted her permission to remain in the country and work while she pursued her asylum case, she said. She worked at a pizza factory in Milwaukee and eventually became a teacher’s aide. She married, and she and her husband, who is not a U.S. citizen, bought a small three-bedroom duplex with a yard for their white poodle mix, Copitos.
The school where she worked was so short of teachers that she was often called upon to substitute in social studies and Spanish classes, she said. “I felt really useful,” she said.
Years later, though, with her petition for asylum still unresolved, a lawyer suggested that she withdraw that petition and apply instead for a T visa, the type that protects trafficking victims.
She applied in February and requested that deportation proceedings be delayed, but that request was denied. Worried about being separated from her children — 10-year-old twin girls — she felt she had no choice but to self-deport.
With the permission of a judge, she left the country with the girls in June, she said, and her husband followed with their dog a month later.
“My hope now is that we can return,” she said.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
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