Barriers and Successes in U Visas for Immigrant Victims: The Experiences of Legal Assistance for Victims Grantees

This article, co-authored by Karen Monahan, was the result of a collaborative effort among immigration legal services providers, experts, researchers, and staff of the VAWA Measuring Effectiveness Initiative project at the University of Southern Maine\u27s Muskie School of Public Service. The original paper was developed and used to provide guidance to Legal Assistance for Victims grantees on how best to advocate for U visa-eligible victims; this peer-reviewed article provides more legal context and detail on the experiences of the grantees and the victims they represented. This article examines barriers encountered and successes experienced in the provision of legal representation and advocacy to victims of violence applying for legal immigration status under the Violence against Women Act’s U visa protections. The U visa is designed for immigrant victims who have suffered substantial physical or mental abuse as a result of being a victim of criminal activity, and who have helped, are helping or are likely to be helpful to government officials in the detection, investigation or prosecution of criminal activity. This article is based on quantitative and qualitative data reported by grantees of the Legal Assistance for Victims grant program administered by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. Legal Assistance for Victims program grantees provide legal aid to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and/or stalking and report semi-annually on services provided. The sample consists of grantees who reported serving high proportions of immigrant and limited English proficient victims of violence in 2007 and 2008. The article focuses on problems, successes, and creative solutions reported by attorneys and advocates working with immigrant victims eligible to receive crime victim U visas under federal immigration laws. Victims applying for U visa immigration relief must, under current law, submit a U visa certification signed by the head of a law enforcement agency, prosecutor, judge, or other government official with their U visa application. This research provides information regarding effective strategies and best practices used by grantees that are successful in obtaining U visa certification. The systemic barriers that immigrant victims and their advocates encounter when working with U visa are also discussed, along with creative solutions grantees are using to overcome these barriers

NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES: a data set on carnivore distribution in the Neotropics

Mammalian carnivores are considered a key group in maintaining ecological health and can indicate potential ecological integrity in landscapes where they occur. Carnivores also hold high conservation value and their habitat requirements can guide management and conservation plans. The order Carnivora has 84 species from 8 families in the Neotropical region: Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Otariidae; Phocidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae. Herein, we include published and unpublished data on native terrestrial Neotropical carnivores (Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae). NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES is a publicly available data set that includes 99,605 data entries from 35,511 unique georeferenced coordinates. Detection/non-detection and quantitative data were obtained from 1818 to 2018 by researchers, governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, and private consultants. Data were collected using several methods including camera trapping, museum collections, roadkill, line transect, and opportunistic records. Literature (peer-reviewed and grey literature) from Portuguese, Spanish and English were incorporated in this compilation. Most of the data set consists of detection data entries (n = 79,343; 79.7%) but also includes non-detection data (n = 20,262; 20.3%). Of those, 43.3% also include count data (n = 43,151). The information available in NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES will contribute to macroecological, ecological, and conservation questions in multiple spatio-temporal perspectives. As carnivores play key roles in trophic interactions, a better understanding of their distribution and habitat requirements are essential to establish conservation management plans and safeguard the future ecological health of Neotropical ecosystems. Our data paper, combined with other large-scale data sets, has great potential to clarify species distribution and related ecological processes within the Neotropics. There are no copyright restrictions and no restriction for using data from this data paper, as long as the data paper is cited as the source of the information used. We also request that users inform us of how they intend to use the data