One report claims that the U visa program has become just another path to citizenship that has mired illegal immigrants in fraud and abuse.
The program, launched by Congress in 2000, was intended as an aid to law enforcement, and was thought to be a unique way to solve crimes in the immigrant community that would otherwise remain unsolved, mostly due to a lack of cooperation between witnesses and victims in that community.
The program allowed undocumented immigrants – both victims and witnesses – to work with police to solve crimes by providing tips and information about serious crimes. After working with police, the program allowed undocumented immigrants to gain legal status based on their assistance to law enforcement. But instead of helping police solve crimes, the software has become a burden filled with massive fraud, frivolous applications, and abuse.
Through its study, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found that as many as 416,000 petitions have been filed by immigrants, most of whom are simply granted the program’s generous benefits outright whether they actually help the police or not, even though the program is only supposed to allow 10,000 applications per year.
Police agencies across the country have been inundated with hundreds of thousands of often bogus requests filled with false information about non-existent crimes. In some cases, these mountains of false applications forced the police to spend a large number of working hours investigating the claims in the applications to separate valid applications from fraudulent ones.
In early 2024, Breitbart News reported that U visas were being abused by immigrants who staged fake robberies so immigrants could submit fake U visa applications.
“This is a common practice — mainly among Indians — to qualify for a U visa,” said Jay Palmer, co-founder of the Forced Labor Project and a former immigration adviser to President Donald Trump’s administration.
In fact, the problem of counterfeit crimes has been known for more than a decade, as Breitbart News reported in 2014.
The program itself invites fraud by offering overly generous benefits that allow applicants up to ten years free from facing immigration implications as well as allowing applicants with legal work permits to apply only. These benefits are not only given to the applicant. It extends to the applicant’s entire family. The lack of any real application requirements and automatic benefits make the program vulnerable to abuse, and a large number of illegals have gamed the system to gain legal status despite providing no real assistance to the police in any actual criminal cases.
The CIS report tracked the huge increase in these applications and the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who received generous benefits from the government due to abuse of the system.
One problem appears to be that the program has allowed tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to obtain legal status and work permits for themselves and their entire families without a background check.
The CIS adds that many applications are granted as soon as they are submitted without checking to see if the applicant has actually been involved with the police in any investigation at all.
Moreover, records also show that about 35 percent of applicants who received U visa benefits have criminal records. Many applicants do not fully qualify for legal status in normal circumstances or are already subject to removal orders.
In addition, many of the “crimes” that applicants claimed to report to the police were fraudulent and staged specifically so that applicants could file for a U visa, files that were automatically approved, in many cases, without any meaningful proof of the facts.
In fact, about 60% of the actual crimes that immigrants were reporting were beyond the statute of limitations and could not be prosecuted in the first place. Many of them were not investigated by the police, which means that the applicant did not assist the police at all.
Finally, law enforcement agencies across the country have seen that the U visa program does not really help them solve any crimes and is useless to them.
It also appears that applicants’ requirements were ignored in many cases.
To qualify for a U visa, immigrants must have suffered significant physical or mental abuse as a result of being the victim of a crime. The applicant must also have actionable information about criminal activity. The foreigner must provide meaningful assistance to solve the crime and cooperate fully with the police. The crime must have occurred within the United States of America or must have violated American laws.
CIS notes that applications started slow after the program was launched in 2000. But by 2010, as immigrants began learning about the program, applications began to pick up. Between 2000 and 2009, only about 15,000 applications were submitted annually. But by 2010, that number had risen to more than 40,000 per year, and 41,558 applications were submitted in 2024 alone, a six-fold increase compared to the first years.
The surge in applications has cost the government millions in paperwork as agents try to process them. “The significant increase in new orders means that the current stock of pending orders, which reached 250,000 in June 2025, would theoretically take 25 years to reach final adjudication and release if all orders are approved,” CIS notes.
Worse still, many blue states and jurisdictions — such as Illinois — have implemented local laws requiring police departments to seal applications whether or not applicants have helped police in a case, making abuse of the program systemic.
CIS recommends scrapping the program, or at least reforming it significantly with stricter rules for proving that applicants are crime victims and assisting police before they are granted protected status.
Ultimately, the study shows that while it may seem like a good idea, the U visa program is just another vehicle for fraud and abuse that allows illegal immigrants — many of them criminals — to game the system, steal from Americans, and cover up their crimes with the help of Democrats.
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