Humanitarian visas provide one of few potential pathways to citizenship for foreign nationals victimized within the United States and are an important aspect of immigration law. Yet one form of humanitarian visas—T nonimmigrant status (T visa)—has received scant attention in the socio-legal studies literature. “T visas” were designed to aid survivors of human trafficking and, though the US government estimates that tens of thousands of individuals are trafficked in the United States every year, only 15 percent of the five thousand T visas available annually have been granted since the program’s inception in 2002. Why are T visas such an underutilized form of immigration relief? Drawing on twenty in-depth interviews with immigration lawyers, law enforcement personnel, and non-governmental organization service providers routinely involved in T visa applications, we find that the low rate of applications and approvals is driven by a combination of structural barriers and expansive discretion of key actors in the legal process to interpret and apply the law, which results in a narrow and often misinformed construction of victimhood. We add to the literature on the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats to shape the law and determine how it is applied with considerable consequences for survivors of trafficking.

中文翻译：

---

对受害者身份的误认：街头官僚在人道主义签证方面的自由裁量权

人道主义签证为在美国境内受害的外国人提供了为数不多的获得公民身份的潜在途径之一，并且是移民法的一个重要方面。然而，一种形式的人道主义签证——T 非移民身份（T 签证）——在社会法律研究文献中却很少受到关注。“T 签证”旨在帮助人口贩运的幸存者，尽管美国政府估计每年有数万人在美国被贩运，但自 2007 年颁布以来，每年发放的 5000 份 T 签证中只有 15% 获得批准。该计划于 2002 年启动。为什么 T 签证是一种未得到充分利用的移民救济形式？根据对移民律师、执法人员的二十次深度访谈，和经常参与 T 签证申请的非政府组织服务提供商相比，我们发现申请率和批准率较低是由结构性障碍和关键行为者在解释和适用法律的法律程序中广泛的自由裁量权共同造成的，这导致对受害者的狭隘且常常误导的解释。我们在文献中添加了关于街头官僚制定法律和确定法律如何适用的自由裁量权的文献，这对贩运幸存者产生了相当大的影响。