Who is left out of President Trump’s CARES Act?
Illustration by Cherry Bomb Creative Co.
HOUSTON — Dressed in a faded cotton t-shirt and gray sweatpants pilling at the thighs, Margarita hovered by the threshold of the house she had cleaned once a week for two years now, anxiously tucking in phantom strands of hair behind her ear while she waited. The father of the family she works for returned to the door and handed her a wad of twenty-dollar bills totaling $200, a two-week salary for Margarita, urging her to stay at home and assuring her she would continue to be paid. Thanking him, she knelt down to pet the family dog one last time, feeling his wary eyes following each stroke of her hand.
The threat of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China but quickly swept the world with its decimating effects, has been described as a threat that does not discriminate. However, as governments order citizens to practice “social distancing” in an attempt to contain the virus, it is people like Margarita, unable to work remotely from home, who feel putting her health and others’ health first is a privilege difficult to afford.
Worried about the safety of her husband and two-year-old at home, however, she ultimately joined the ranks of about nine million citizens in the U.S. to be left without a job — with no certain end to their unemployment in sight.
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Although Margarita has established a reputation for herself as a meticulous, efficient housekeeper in high demand among the upper middle-class suburbs of Houston, she wasn’t always dedicated to cleaning strangers’ homes.
Born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Mexico’s famed pueblos mágicos, or “magical towns,” Margarita was raised primarily by her father and extended family. She was only 11 years old when her mother left them for the prospect of a better life in the U.S., but Margarita didn’t blame her.
In high school, after being pushed by her father to use her two months of Christmas vacation productively, Margarita enrolled in First Aid training through the Red Cross, inadvertently stumbling upon a passion and knack for medical aid that she didn’t know she had.
Margarita went on to pursue a career as an Emergency Medical Technician, an EMT, applying her skills as soon as she graduated by working the emergency ambulances for Caminos y Puentes Federales de Ingresos y Servicios Conexos, or CAPUFE, a government agency that operates and maintains federally-owned roads and bridges. Stationed at a San Luis Lagos de Moreno tollbooth, she spent her days responding to calls for help from car accident sites peppered along the highway that crosses her hometown.
Although Margarita visibly lights up when speaking about the many people she helped patch up, including the countless young children in grisly condition, she also explains that the job was not without its hazards.
“It was quite dangerous,” she said. “We risked our lives every day, every time we stepped foot into that ambulance.”
Although far from the northernmost border, where highways are infamous for being the most dangerous in the country, the area Margarita worked at was also “un lugar de entronque,” a colloquial term for a strategic point often used by drug-traffickers and controlled by regional cartels in order to oversee the transportation of drugs using specific highways.
“The narcos would often follow us. Even though we had to drive 100 miles an hour in the darkness, with injured people in tow, they insisted,” she remembered, shaking her head in disbelief. “Although they never actually did anything to us, they had no respect for what we were doing. It was a power trip.”
Despite the constant nuisance, for Margarita, the job promised an escape from a reality more immediately dangerous, and a person she feared far more than any drug trafficker who might pester her on the road.
In her early twenties at the time, she had been seriously dating a man for several years. While he had been kind and caring at the beginning of the relationship, soon she began to see a more violent side to him — a common occurrence she had seen aunts and friends in her pueblo experience, but that Margarita never imagined she would have to live herself.
“He was an expert at humiliating me in the painful way only someone who knows you well can,” she said. “ It was day after day of physical abuse and beatings, of mistreatment, of emotional manipulation,” she trailed off, “but I couldn’t leave.”
Margarita remembers a time when she considered suicide, feeling there was no way out of a relationship that might take her life either way.
She also remembers the moment, however, that saved her life.
Uncertain whether to call it a true religious miracle or not, Margarita describes the day she sat, hopelessly slumped on the cold bathroom tile at her house, uncontrollable sobs ripping themselves from her vocal chords, as she hesitantly fingered a blade.
“I’m not sure if it was the tears or the lack of sleep or the grace of God that made me see this, but I saw something — I swear I saw it — on the edge of my left foot,” she recalled.
It was the faint image of a cross, a light “t” against the backdrop of her calloused foot. To her, that was enough of a sign to convince her to put down the blade.
Not long after, Margarita’s father, aware of the dire situation of his daughter, suggested she join some of her tías, her aunts, on the journey they were planning to make across the U.S.-Mexico border in a few weeks.
Although Margarita had never considered leaving Mexico before, much less expressed interest in a life “up North” far from everything she had always known and in a language she didn’t understand, it seemed a serendipitous opportunity. It was the solution she had been desperate to find but had never imagined to hope for.
Her good fortune didn’t stop there. Margarita obtained a tourist visa in a month, an uncharacteristically short amount of time for a process often lasting anywhere from six months to a year, and paid the hefty processing fee — twice what she earned in a month — with the help of another generous tía. To her pleasant surprise, she was not asked to present proof of anything other than her nurse registration and she was granted a one-year duration of stay — double the stated six-month maximum typically allowed.
With that hurdle out of the way, Margarita now focused on scraping together enough money to afford the bus ride out of Jalisco. Although she first reached out to her mom in the U.S. for help, it was her grandmother who finally agreed to lend her the $5,000 pesos she urgently needed.
On August 6, 2016 Margarita crossed the border with her visa, exactly one year after Donald Trump pledged he would build a thousand-mile-long wall across the Mexican border with a “big, beautiful door” for legal immigrants to use.
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She never returned to Jalisco. Now approaching nearly four years since she got on that bus, with a committed, loving partner she hopes to be able to marry legally in the near future, Margarita considers her life in Texas a “complete blessing.”
Her only complaint was that she couldn’t “go get ice cream in peace” with her family, because of the tense eyes and whispered comments of locals who express resentment towards their presence in the country.
That is, until a few weeks ago.
“This coronavirus has changed everything,” she said, citing fears that, should she or her family get sick, she’ll be discovered at the hospital and deported — a fate Margarita says she cannot risk now that she has a child of her own to take care of.
Her husband, who works at a car repair shop, has also been left with no choice but unemployment for the time being.
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It is a dilemma the U.S. government has partially attempted to address in a historic, $2 trillion economic stimulus package intended to offset the detrimental effects of containment measures on workers by distributing $1,200 checks to qualifying adults.
The key word is qualifying. For the nearly 12 million unauthorized immigrants estimated to be living in the U.S., the stimulus bill, known as the CARES Act, offers no economic relief, to a population already significantly more vulnerable to the virus due to inaccessible health care.
“Those who cannot obtain relief are likely to continue going out and trying to earn a living, at the risk of themselves and spreading the virus to others,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Institute, told Vox. “The cost of providing this benefit to them has to be weighed against the need to keep up the restrictions to stop the virus spread.”
To Margarita, the news of her exclusion is not entirely shocking.
“It is the cost of being illegal in a country that already never really welcomed you to begin with,” she said with a shrug.
However, that does not mean she doesn’t worry about the future. Although she and her husband have some savings stored away and she is grateful for the so-far uninterrupted income stream from her housekeeping work, she knows it cannot last forever.
With mounting bills, debts to pay, and a baby’s mouth to feed, Margarita believes she will have no choice but to go back to work somehow, somewhere, soon.
In the meantime, she is focused on doing everything possible to continue the English classes she had tried for three years to take. Finally able to find a class cheap enough, close enough, and with flexible hours, Margarita was sad to lose 12 out of her 15 classmates as the class moved online due to CDC guidelines and students weren’t able to access the internet. Her goal is to learn enough English to be able to return to the profession she once gave up, but never stopped loving.
“It would be an honour to volunteer at the local hospital, to help treat coronavirus patients,” she said. “I know it’s not really possible right now, but if they suddenly said they were taking anyone — whether they spoke the language or not — I would do it in a heartbeat.”
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*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.