Making the Undocumented Crime Victim

This chapter examines the U visa under the Violence Against Women Act, critically theorizing the law’s requirement that undocumented survivors of gender and sexual violence cooperate with practices of policing. The chapter argues that U visa applicants are shuttled between innocence and culpability. This shuttling—labeled and simultaneously obscured as “cooperation”—not only shapes a coercive for survivors but also imposes political conditions on legal advocates, who themselves circulate in networks that both resist police and are required to cooperate with law enforcement because of the Violence Against Women Act. The chapter theorizes the making of survivors into racial figures of human cooperators and the legal fictions of mutual exchange and cooperation.