"The nation's most prominent domestic violence hotline reports a sharp increase in calls from abuse victims struggling with issues related to their immigration status.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline, established by Congress in 1996 and partly reliant on federal funding, says in its newly released annual report that it responded to 323,660 phone calls, texts and online contacts in 2016. Of these calls, 7,053 evoked immigration-related issues — up nearly 30 percent from 2015.
Katie Ray-Jones, the hotline's CEO, said many of the callers were not U.S. citizens and were warned by their abusers that they and their families would be deported if the abuse was reported to the police. In some cases, she said, the abusers had threatened to call federal immigration authorities."
Read the full article here. For more information on this topic, see our Immigrant Women and Domestic Violence collection.
