Luis Melean remembers his friend stopping in the middle of the street screaming, "We're being mugged!" Two men approached the duo in Memphis, Tenn., with guns and asked them to hand over any cash they had. Neither Melean nor his friend had any.
"It was really scary how close the guns were to us and we thought that night was the end," Melean said. "But as they walked away, they said, you're lucky we're not going to kill you tonight."
This was not the first time Melean had encountered something like this. When he lived in his home country, Venezuela, he got mugged three times in 30 days. It's one of the reasons his family chose to flee Venezuela and seek asylum in the U.S. in 2017.
But unlike those earlier incidents, the mugging in Memphis seemed to have a silver lining: a chance at a visa to stay in the United States.
As a victim of a crime in the U.S., he could apply for the U visa, a type of visa given to immigrant victims of certain crimes that presents an opportunity for a faster pathway to citizenship.
That was four years ago, and he's still waiting. He's not alone.
NPR spoke to 17 U visa applicants, each of whom have been waiting for two to seven years for their visas. They describe a program whose years-long delays put them in immigration limbo, spending months helping law enforcement catch their perpetrators while trying to survive in the country without the means to work legally.
"The goal was to be able to hold the crime offenders accountable and at the same time offer help and protection to the victims," Leslye Orloff said. She was one of the lead drafters of the U visa program when it was created in 2000. "It absolutely was not intended to take that much time."
