Undocumented Immigrants Are Still Suffering With No Federal Relief
ed kashi
Undocumented immigrants have had to fend for themselves during the coronavirus crisis. by Mary Ann Koruth, a freelance journalist covering immigration and culture in New Jersey, and a core contributor to Newest Americans. Photography by Ed Kashi September 28, 2020
Driving along Throckmorton street off Route 9 in central New Jersey, one sees the railroad tracks appearing almost out of nowhere, side by side with the road, out of the shrubbery and trees that have grown like a hood around it. The immigrant workers of Freehold Borough call it La Via—the Way; for years they have walked along these tracks into the center of town to gather and look for work. You see them walking or sitting along the embankment—Hispanic men carrying backpacks, our pandemic era signaled now by the blue surgical masks they’ve donned to protect against Covid-19.
Freehold Borough—famous as Bruce Springsteen’s childhood home—is a tiny, historic town with a revolutionary past. A sign along the railroad on Throckmorton street commemorates the Battle of Monmouth, fought nearby in June 1778. In the 90s, Freehold became a hub for immigrant farm labor. By 2010, nearly half of its 12,000 residents were undocumented Hispanic workers and their families, crowded into the town’s barely two-square-mile radius.
In the early 2000s, Freehold’s day laborers congregated in the town’s unofficial “muster zone,” a shady patch alongside the tracks where workers waited to be picked up by contractors, landscapers, and anyone else hiring day labor. This irked some townsfolk who pressed the town council to prevent them from gathering. Things came to a head in 2003 when the incumbent mayor campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform, pushing for random home inspections that forced day laborers to stop looking for work. When protests and negotiations failed, the laborers filed a federal lawsuit against the Borough of Freehold and won. The court ruling permitted the men to return to the muster zone without fear of being ticketed by local police for loitering and panhandling, but when the pandemic hit in March 2020, there was still no town-sanctioned site where the workers could gather and safely seek work. These days, they cluster in the parking lot of a 6/12 convenience store that abuts the railroad, or outside the bus station and the Rita’s Italian Ice franchise adjacent to it.
Like it did elsewhere in the country, the pandemic shattered the fragile ecosystem of daily wage work in Freehold, subjecting its undocumented community to extreme loss of income. Studies have established that minorities and low-income communities are at persistently higher risk of falling severely ill from the coronavirus because of poor access to health benefits and economic challenges. The virus’s impact in Freehold is no different—by June, 72 percent of the town’s 404 positive cases self-reported as Latino/Hispanic. Casa Freehold, a local all-volunteer grassroots group that advocates for Freehold’s immigrant workers, began organizing food drives. Though the town stepped in to support the workers by providing free food and household supplies, and access to free hospital care, the CARES Act, the federal government’s bailout to aid families affected by the pandemic, completely passed them by.
The act has not only failed low-income, undocumented immigrant populations but, according to its critics, was designed to do so. It was widely criticized for denying financial relief to American citizens who are married to undocumented taxpayers and file taxes jointly, but in immigrant communities such as Freehold’s, it was a slap in the face to undocumented taxpayers because it excluded their dependent children who are American citizens. This exclusion of “mixed-status” families is particularly egregious because, in addition to denying relief to their American children, the CARES Act effectively penalizes undocumented workers for their compliance with federal law and for acting in good faith to document their residency in this, their adopted country.
Meanwhile, local health workers and activists have struggled to assuage stigma around the virus. Health educator Angelica Espinal-Garcia found herself advising concerned employers and encargados—middlemen who rent apartments to workers who live in shared spaces—against evicting sickened workers. Since encargados are not the actual homeowners, they can get away with charging high rents—as much as $500 per room—and can take over their renters’ lives, even holding their mail until the rent is paid. Even with the federal eviction moratorium in place, workers are afraid to come out and self-identify, she said. “They’re afraid of the police, of being fired.” One infected worker was told to move out within a week by his encargado, who feared he would infect other tenants. Casa Freehold had to intervene to prevent the eviction.
Men usually wire money on a monthly basis to their families back home from the local 6/12 store. Its owner told me that since the pandemic, the number of men coming in to do so has dropped; instead, in April and May, many came in to collect money that their families wired to them. He’s never seen this happen on such a scale. In the parking lot where the workers gather, I watched a car pull in and a group of young workers scramble to get in, ignoring an activist handing out free masks; the promise of paid work far outweighed the threat of the virus.