Carina has lived in South Florida, where she works as a customer-service representative for an insurance agency, for almost twenty years. She rents a two-story home on a quiet street in a diverse neighborhood, which she shares with her two daughters—Karina and Carolina, both in their early twenties—and also her brother and their parents. A few cousins live nearby. The older of her daughters, Karina, works at a performing-arts center downtown, where she’s risen from intern to box-office manager. The center closed indefinitely last week, on account of the coronavirus, and her pay has been halved. Carolina had been working the cosmetics counter at Macy’s. She was recently sent home indefinitely, the result of pandemic-related belt-tightening; she hoped to be brought back when it’s safe to touch the faces of strangers again. Carina’s father, whom they all call Tata, is a mechanic who does house calls. He usually brings in the most money, but many of his customers are now balking at having him visit. Carina’s employer has remained open, and she has continued to go in to the office, working from nine until six o’clock every day, for her usual pay. But it’s never been enough to support everyone.
Carina has other worries. Her mother, who is in her late sixties, had open-heart surgery two decades ago, in their native Argentina, and still has heart problems—in recent years, she has suffered multiple heart attacks and a stroke. (She asked that I not use her name.) She left Argentina for the United States not long after the heart surgery, following Tata, who had immigrated two years before and had sent money home so that she, their son, and Carina and her two daughters could join him. (The father of Carina’s children stayed in Argentina; he and Carina are divorced.) Now, when Tata and his wife need medical care, they go to a clinic nearby, which offers free services to those who qualify, including those who—like Tata and his wife, and like Carina and her daughters—are uninsured and undocumented. (Karina and Carolina are both DACA recipients.)
“If my grandparents need medical attention, I don’t know what would happen,” Karina said recently. The clinic has limited resources—it lacks a ventilator and has been closed since March 20th. (According to a voice-mail recording, the clinic is closed for spring break and will reopen on March 30th.) Karina went on, “Most Americans have health care. Most of my friends have it. They’re calm about it. They go to private doctors and stuff.” It is already harder for the undocumented to get medical attention, Karina said, and, “in times like this, when everybody needs it, it will be even harder.” She wondered how her family members would be asked to identify themselves at a hospital. “They have only expired Argentinean passports,” she said.
Tata used to talk about returning to Argentina, but the virus has dampened his enthusiasm for the idea—he worries that it could be even more dangerous there than in the U.S., judging from the conversations he’s been having with those back home. “He tries to be the macho man,” Karina told me; he has been using FaceTime to reassure his brother in Argentina, “telling him that God would protect them,” Carolina said, but also encouraging family members to wash their hands frequently. Carolina and Karina wonder whether their grandfather ultimately will have a choice about where he lives. “I’ve seen how ICE is going into homes and trying to deport families at this vulnerable time,” Carolina said. “That’s so scary.”
On March 16th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out a raid in Los Angeles; the agency subsequently issued a statement promising that it would delay certain actions for the time being, though not all. “During the COVID-19 crisis, ICE will not carry out enforcement operations at or near health care facilities, such as hospitals, doctors’ offices, accredited health clinics, and emergent or urgent care facilities, except in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” the statement read. “Individuals should not avoid seeking medical care because they fear civil immigration enforcement.” Many immigrants remain frightened and are unsure whom to trust. Karina and Carolina watch Univision, but for news they rely mostly on Twitter users whom they regard as reliable, such as the fellow DACA recipient and immigration-rights advocate Juan Escalante. On Twitter, many shared a Los Angeles Times report on the recent ICE raid, and a Vice News story about hunger strikes in detention centers in New Jersey, where undocumented people have been protesting unsafe conditions, fearing that the arrival of COVID-19 will turn the centers into death camps.
If Carina were to become the only member of the household with income, I wondered, how would they get by? “We won’t,” her two daughters said. “We’re concerned about rent payments,” Karina added. “If Mom loses hours, we’ll need help.” They had heard that Congress was considering sending a thousand dollars or more to each citizen. “I feel like we won’t be prioritized with everyone else, since it’s not really our country,” Carolina told me. “Especially our mother and grandparents,” Karina added. Karina and Carolina were born in Mendoza but have lived in the U.S. since they were a few years old. “This is where our life is,” Karina said. “This is all we know.” But, in some ways, Carolina said, they all “live in the shadows.”
A week earlier, at a White House press briefing, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had told reporters, “Americans need cash now, and the President wants to get cash now—and I mean in the next two weeks.” What did the sisters make of this? “When the President says Americans will get checks in the mail, we are not sure who he means,” Karina told me. “Does he mean people like us, who have lived here almost our entire lives? Even though we are not American on paper?”
On Friday, Congress passed a two-trillion-dollar relief bill, which calls for sending payments of up to twelve hundred dollars to each American, with additional money provided for dependents. (The payments are phased out above certain income thresholds.) It also bolsters the unemployment insurance that states offer, for up to four months, and makes independent contractors and those who are self-employed eligible for that insurance. Carina’s family pays taxes, Karina told me, and they had become more hopeful that they would be included when relief checks are sent out.
But, according to Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, who has analyzed the bill, many mixed-status families—a category that, Hincapié noted, includes some eighty per cent of immigrant families—appear to be excluded. “A U.S.-citizen wife who is married to an undocumented husband, or Dreamer children with undocumented parents—those families, if they’re filing tax returns together, would not be eligible for the cash payment,” Hincapié said. Unemployment insurance will be offered only to immigrants with work permits, which Carina and her parents don’t have. And, though the bill provides funding for hospitals and health centers to offer testing and treatment for COVID-19, “it has no requirement that those services be provided to patients who are uninsured,” Hincapié told me.
Kerri Talbot, a lawyer who works for the Immigration Hub, an advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., said, “If we don’t open up emergency Medicaid and a state option for Medicaid to cover undocumented immigrants, then we’re gonna have trouble on our hands, because people aren’t gonna be able to pay for treatment.” This would be an issue for Dreamers, too, she noted, and “people with protective status and new green-card holders.” She and Hincapié both hope that subsequent relief bills will address these gaps in support. “In the meantime,” Hincapié said, “people are going to be suffering economically and health-wise, which puts us all at greater risk.”
Ivette is a member of a mixed-status family in Mesa, Arizona. A freshman at Arizona State, she is a U.S. citizen, as are her two younger sisters; they all live with their parents, who were born in Mexico and remain undocumented. One of her younger sisters, she told me, recently said, “We have to face the truth—we never know what might happen to our family if we’re separated or if our parents end up getting sick.” Ivette had been thinking about those words. “It made me sad, and it also moved me more to come up with a plan for what our family will possibly have to face in the next few weeks.” Her mother is a homemaker, and her father is a construction worker. “What will we do if my dad does get dismissed from his job?” she said. “What do we do if one of my parents gets sick? What do we do if one of my sisters gets sick and we do have to go to a hospital?”
“We might have to look for emergency jobs, so that we can help maintain our family,” Ivette went on. Her father’s boss recently warned him that he may have to stay home soon, as a precaution. Ivette and her sisters had found opportunities at local grocery stores (“they need help keeping up with demand,” Ivette said), but they had not told their parents that they were thinking of getting jobs. “Because we know that they’ve been stressed and worried,” Ivette said. “We don’t want them to feel even more pressured—especially my dad.” She worried, too, about the possibility of getting sick at the store and bringing the virus home to her parents and her sisters.
Ivette’s mother generally goes to a local clinic for medical attention. “My dad, he refuses to get any medical help and will just stick to home remedies instead,” Ivette said. Even if she could persuade him to go to a hospital, she worried that he could be “turned away and turned in to ICE agents and then detained.” She added, “We’ve been seeing headlines about how, regardless of the global pandemic, ICE agents are still targeting the immigrant community.” She had seen stories about this on Twitter. “There’s a distrust with our health officials right now,” she said. “They might possibly be working closely with ICE.” Talbot told me that this was not likely. The fear of it was not uncommon among the undocumented, though, she noted. “ICE should be more clear in its policy about how it’s going to treat undocumented people during the emergency,” Talbot said. “They’ve put out conflicting statements, and they need to be very clear that they’re not going to be enforcing at sensitive locations like hospitals.”
Adrian Escarate, a DACA recipient in his thirties, doesn’t have to worry about his parents quite as much as he used to: his father, Rodrigo, became a citizen in mid-December, and, just a few weeks ago, his mother, Jessica, did, too. The couple has lived in Miami for almost thirty years. “Now we do feel like we have rights,” Jessica told me, by phone, last week. “Because we lived so many years undocumented, we are still figuring out how to access our citizenship. How to exercise help—financial and medical. This is a new frontier.” Rodrigo has diabetes, which he had been able to monitor cheaply through Obamacare. “Moving forward, we’ll be more likely to ask for help,” Jessica said. “And, as we get older, the help will be essential.” But she worries about her undocumented friends and family members. “I don’t feel that now that I’m a citizen I deserve more attention,” she said. “The government should help all people, no matter what status.”
Adrian listened as we spoke, occasionally serving as a translator. He recently moved to San Francisco, where he works for a social-justice nonprofit that focusses on immigration. “You hear all these stories about citizenship being revoked, immigration officials being more stringent, Supreme Court rulings that hurt immigrants,” he said. “I’m overjoyed that my parents are finally able to breathe that sigh of relief and ride it out.” He went on, “I just hope they can continue to make money, the same hope that all of us in America share right now.” Rodrigo normally works at a tennis shop, and also drives for Uber and Lyft, but he has been staying home lately, to protect his ninety-six-year-old mother from the virus. Jessica was working at Marshalls, but her hours were drastically reduced, and then the store was shut down altogether.
I asked Adrian whether he might end up having to support his parents financially. “I posed the question to my dad last week, about helping out with money,” he said. “But you know how, like, kind of prideful people can be?” He went on, “At first, he kind of played it off, like, ‘No, it’s all right, we don’t need it.’ ” His father has savings and would reach out to his landlord about postponing payment for a month or two, Adrian said. “But, if this goes on for another month or two, I’ll definitely need to help them out.” Adrian also has savings, and a job that he can do remotely. “But if I were still teaching tennis, like I was doing back in Florida, it would be a different story.” And now he faces another potential obstacle: he has not been able to complete the process to renew his DACA status, because the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices in California are closed, like so much else, on account of the lockdown. He worries about losing his status and, with it, the ability to work. “I’m just taking it one day at a time and remaining hopeful,” he said. “It worked for my parents.”
Later in the week, I talked again with Karina and Carolina, elsewhere in South Florida. Shortly before we first spoke, they had thrown a birthday party for their mother, who was turning forty-nine. There had been cake and plenty of meat. (“We’re Argentinean, so we make great steak,” Karina said.) There had also been hand sanitizer, Lysol, and, instead of hugs, “fist bumps in the air,” Karina said. Empty aisles and empty shelves at the grocery store had brought Carina to tears days earlier. “It felt like a movie,” Carolina said of the grocery-store scene. “She was crying because she didn’t understand how it had gotten to this point.”
Now most of the family is home most of the time, and the days have been passing with little change. Karina’s boss at the arts center had given her a few more hours, which was good, though she was still working less than full time. When the family wasn’t working or cooking, they watched television: the elders preferred telenovelas, while Karina and her sister chose Netflix shows, in English. Carolina had found a murder mystery she liked. Karina was trying out one with a plot about gangs in high school. “Anything but the outbreak shows,” she said. “That’s just too much right now.” On Monday, Carolina was formally furloughed from Macy’s. She began researching how unemployment works and whether she qualified.
