COCONUT CREEK, Fla. — On Valentine’s Day 2018, Bruna Oliveira’s geography teacher was shot dead at her feet as he ushered students into his classroom to shield them from an approaching gunman. Crouched near his body, holding her breath, the girl feared she would be killed next — dead at 14. But the shooter moved down the hallway on his rampage.
When the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, occurred, Oliveira’s Brazilian family was living temporarily in the United States with no intention of staying. Her mother, an architect enrolled in an English immersion program, had brought her two children along on her student visa.
But the worst high school shooting in U.S. history made Oliveira an American, or a would-be American. It was a baptism by bullet, not just for her but also for scores of other immigrant and international students at her school. Many had fled their homelands to escape violence, and now their journey was turned on its head. While their horrified relatives urged them to return to their native countries, the teens, bonded by trauma, dug in their heels.
“It was a massive event that took a real toll on us, but it also, like, truly bonded us forever — to each other and to this country,” said Oliveira, now a premed college senior who aspires to be an emergency medicine doctor because of her experience.
Advised that the government offers a special visa to victims of serious crime who are helpful to law enforcement, Oliveira and 74 other survivors of the massacre applied for what is known as a U visa.
Little did they know then that the well-intentioned U visa program is among the most dysfunctional in the whole troubled immigration apparatus, with benefits far more delayed than those of the notoriously backlogged asylum program.
During this campaign season, debate on the volatile issue of immigration has focused on unauthorized crossings at the Southwest border. But many already in this country are thwarted when they try to play by the rules, and the little-known U visa program serves as a potent example of just how broken the system has become.
Created by Congress 24 years ago with overwhelming bipartisan support, the visa was meant to encourage immigrants living in the country without legal permission who were fearful of deportation to report crime; it was double-billed as a law enforcement and a humanitarian tool. But, underestimating the prevalence of serious crime and the dearth of other pathways to legalization, lawmakers imposed an annual cap of 10,000 visas that now undermines the program’s intended purpose.
With three times as many applicants most years, a backlog has mushroomed.
U visa applicants today will wait an average of five years for work authorization and as long as 20 years for the visa itself. In comparison, an asylum-seeker generally secures working papers in seven to eight months, and cases wend their way through immigration court in about four years.
If the U visa system worked as Congress had intended, Oliveira and the other Parkland survivors would possess not only U visas but green cards by now.
Instead, they are inching forward on a slow-moving queue alongside not only hundreds of thousands of victims of domestic violence, rape and armed robbery but also other survivors of the nation’s growing number of mass shootings — including the 2017 attack at a music festival in Las Vegas and the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
The lengthy wait, advocates say, reduces the incentives for immigrants to come forward and leaves those who do vulnerable.
For survivors of domestic violence, it can be especially perilous to wait years for working papers after reporting abusers on whom they are financially dependent. In the worst cases — as with a Latina immigrant in New York City forced into prostitution and a Mexican mother of five in western North Carolina whose body was found in a ditch — women have ended up trafficked or murdered by their abusers in the interim.
For others, like Oliveira and her family members, who were allowed to apply along with her, the protracted process is less catastrophic but nonetheless burdensome. They linger in legal limbo, temporarily permitted to live in the United States but without formal immigration status for the indeterminate future.
“The human impact is vast,” said Cristina Velez, legal and policy director of the nonprofit ASISTA Immigration Assistance. “Their lives are frozen in amber.”
A rush of applications
From the outset, the U visa program was stymied.
It took the government eight years after Congress created the program to begin issuing the visas, and only then after prodding by lawsuits. This set a precedent; the U visa has spawned a cottage industry of litigation.
Initially, applicants got both employment authorization and visas swiftly, and many were able to report their assailants, help get them prosecuted, find legal work and kick-start newer, safer lives.
As word spread, though, the number of applicants exploded. Ten years ago, some 46,000 immigrant crime victims had pending applications; as of June, 229,568 did (along with 152,109 of their close family members).
That is partly because over time, many people who live under the radar get victimized in their neighborhoods and workplaces.
Christopher M. Casazza, a Philadelphia immigration lawyer, said that at least half of his 1,000 U visa applications involve armed robberies.
“A lot of my clients get paid in cash, and they’re like walking ATMs, or they get held up working the register at gas stations and convenience stores,” he said. “If there wasn’t a U visa to protect them, they wouldn’t cooperate with the police.”
Sometimes, it is the police who will not cooperate by completing forms that verify applicants’ claims about reported crimes. Participation is discretionary for law enforcement agencies unless they are in a state or city that has ordered them to comply. And even cooperative agencies can take so long to comply that delays pile on delays.
That is where the litigation comes in. Arguing that Congress intended for U visa applicants to get working papers within 60 days, lawsuits usually succeed in getting results for individuals. But they do not change the system.
Efforts to lift the cap have been rebuffed by Congress along with other immigration reform plans. Project 2025, a right-wing policy blueprint, proposes that Congress eliminate the visa entirely. “Victimization should not be a basis for an immigration benefit,” it says, expressing concern about fraud.
Because the visa process is so slow and because about three-quarters of applications are ultimately approved, advocates believe fraud is minimal. Still, like any benefit program, the U visa has attracted some scams, and unusual ones at that.
Over the last five years, at least six prosecutions have accused immigrants and conspirators of staging robberies in order to qualify for U visas. In Houston this year, a bystander stumbled on one such bogus robbery in progress and shot the fake robber dead.
‘The worst three hours’
In 2016, when Brazil was going through a volatile period, Oliveira’s parents decided it would be a good time for their two children to get a break from Sao Paolo. They themselves had been exchange students in the United States and valued the experience.
As the mother, Alessandra, settled with the children in Parkland and began her English studies, the father, Luiz, a finance manager for Motorola in Brazil, stayed behind but visited regularly.
On Feb. 13, 2018, the father took Bruna to the local Dollar Tree to purchase Valentine’s Day teddy bears and chocolates for her friends. At checkout, the young male cashier appeared to glower at her Marjory Stoneman Douglas hoodie. Father and daughter were both creeped out.
The next day, the parents were finishing a Valentine’s lunch at Red Lobster when their cellphones started buzzing. The Dollar Tree cashier — they would make the connection later — was carving his deadly path through their daughter’s school. They rushed over but could not get beyond a phalanx of ambulances and police cars. In the dark about their daughter’s safety, they huddled with hundreds of other parents under a highway overpass.
“The worst three hours of my life,” her father said.
Inside the school, Oliveira and her classmates had curled up on their classroom floor in frozen silence, their teacher’s body straddling the doorway. For a long time afterward, Oliveira was haunted by the idea that Scott Beigel, the teacher, had died “because she was the last one back into the class, and he was holding the door for her,” her mother said.
Eventually, police led the ninth graders out single-file, their hands on one another’s shoulders. Oliveira squeezed shut her eyes as they passed “the blood and all the bodies in the hallway.”
“Bruna was OK, thanks to God, but I was thinking, ‘What now? Do we go back to Brazil?’” said her father, now 59.
The following day, when hundreds gathered at their church to mourn and commiserate, her parents watched in tears as their daughter was enveloped in hugs by her friends. For months afterward, those friends were inseparable; either she slept at their houses or they at hers.
“We knew: That’s it. Our life has changed. She’ll never leave here,” her mother said. But her four-year student visa would not allow the family to stay in the country indefinitely.
So they applied for the U visa. And, with Broward Legal Aid representing the students as a group, their cases were expedited, and they received working papers relatively swiftly.
Oliveira’s mother got hired as an architect by the county school system. Her father retired and joined his family in Florida.
For her visa application, Oliveira was asked to describe how the tragedy affected her. “I will not feel safe ever again,” she wrote.
But the treatment she received for post-traumatic stress disorder helped, and over the next few years, she blossomed. She excelled academically, played flute in the school’s marching band and clocked 800 hours of community service in an effort to “give back to the places that supported me.”
Graduating with a weighted GPA of 4.6, she qualified for a state merit scholarship. But early in her freshman year, the University of South Florida informed her that she would not be allowed to collect it because her immigration status was “deferred.” She was shocked.
“I actually didn’t know I didn’t have the visa,” Oliveira said. “I was so upset. I went to the Financial Aid office every Friday and cried.”
The university found a way to help her cover most of the costs of college. But the experience made her realize that as Americanized as she felt, she was still technically an outsider.
Over time, her parents faced issues, too. Her mother’s work permit expired, and she lost her job. Her father’s employment authorization was delayed for years. They lived off his pension, supplemented by making deliveries for Uber Eats and selling beauty products on Amazon.
Most trying was that they could not leave and reenter the country. They missed Oliveira’s grandfather’s dying days and his funeral, and now her grandmother is ailing, and they long to see her.
Oliveira and 22 other survivors of the Parkland shooting who had applied for U visas sued for permission to travel abroad. They lost.
Now, preparing to graduate in December, Oliveira is grappling with the fact that she is ineligible to attend public medical school in Florida and many other states. And she might have as long as another decade’s wait until she is a legal permanent resident.
Still, she considers it unseemly to complain, given that she has mixed feelings about deriving a benefit from the tragedy anyway.
“I feel so privileged and, like, so blessed, you know, that I was able to walk out of that incident safely, and I had so much help to heal,” she said. “So now I’m just going to have faith that everything is going to work out.”
