“He told me nobody would help me, because I don’t have papers,” said Domenica, 38, who has a son and daughter with her boyfriend, and asked that her last name not be used in order to protect them. “I was with him like that for a pretty long time. I felt like there was no help for me.”

In August of last year, fearing for the safety of her children, Domenica decided to flee. She never called the police. She said she would rather go into hiding than appear in court and risk being separated from her children, or sent home to Mexico.

“That scene is happening all the time,” Houston’s police chief, Art Acevedo, said in an interview. Though Houston’s immigrant population is one of the fastest-growing in the country, the city last year saw a 16 percent drop in domestic violence reports from the Hispanic community — a decline that police blame on a tough new immigration enforcement law in Texas and the increasingly hostile political climate across the country surrounding the issue of illegal immigration.