Tashi Gordillo, a student at Chicago-Kent College of Law, has been named the winner of the 2025 A More Perfect Union Student Writing Competition. Gordillo’s paper examines how current U.S. immigration laws affect undocumented survivors of intimate partner violence, particularly those in nontraditional relationships.
In their work titled “Falling Through the Cracks: How VAWA Limits Pathways to Safety for Undocumented Immigrant Victims/Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence with Alternative Relationship Structures,” Gordillo explores the barriers that prevent many victims from obtaining legal residency.
“I think that there’s a great illusion that a lot of us care about domestic violence, but many people don’t understand the actual inner workings and the more complicated side effects,” says Gordillo. “People have this idea of what a victim should do and how a victim should act and how they should go about getting help. If you go outside of that response or format, you are societally rejected and you’re not able to get the help that you need.”
Gordillo describes their experience working at a Colorado domestic violence shelter in 2021, where they supported LY, an undocumented woman who had suffered various forms of abuse over ten years. Despite efforts to secure temporary housing for LY, significant obstacles arose when trying to help her achieve legal residency due to restrictive eligibility criteria.
The paper outlines three main legal pathways for domestic violence survivors seeking permanent residency: the U-Visa (which requires police cooperation), the T-Visa (which needs documented evidence of abuse), and self-petitioning under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). LY was unable to use these options because she was afraid to involve law enforcement, lacked necessary documentation, and did not meet VAWA’s marriage requirement.
“I wanted to highlight how the different pathways that we have to lawful permanent residency don’t help certain groups of people who don’t meet strict requirements,” Gordillo says. “Those requirements, in themselves, kind of uphold a certain ideal of who we want to prioritize giving lawful permanent residency in the U.S. It excludes a lot of survivors—and especially survivors who have more complicated stories and backgrounds and reactions to being abused.”
Gordillo notes that VAWA was enacted in 1994 during a time when perspectives on domestic violence were different. They say legislative priorities then focused more on prosecution than on survivor protection.
“I think that a lot of the legislation and funding for domestic violence services, they were put into place to combat domestic violence crimes,” says Gordillo. “The drafting of the legislation and the legislative history talks about how the law was made in order to encourage survivors to help prosecute more people for domestic violence crimes.”
They continue, “I think things would be different today in comparison to when VAWA was first enacted, if it had the focus from the start on protecting survivors rather than prosecuting people who abuse people.”
Currently clerking with Illinois Prison Project’s Women and Survivors Project—which handles clemency and post-conviction cases for criminalized survivors—Gordillo is also involved with organizations such as Ascend Justice and Women’s Justice Institute supporting incarcerated women. They plan to pursue public defense after graduation.
Reflecting on their advocacy work, Gordillo adds: “I remember being with my clients and watching them try to navigate the legal system when they’re in a domestic violence shelter, which for some are probably some of the worst weeks of their lives... Then you’re throwing legal jargon at them on top of that? I saw a lot of attorneys be so heartless about it.”