From the high-rise apartment buildings that overlooked the pile of concrete, steel beams and black smoke that remained after the collapse of the Twin Towers, Pedro could see recovery workers pull out limbs and cadavers.
Pedro, an undocumented Colombian immigrant who did not want his surname published, went down to Ground Zero during the days and weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001 to clean.
But Pedro, who helped get New York City back on its feet, doesn’t get a hero’s welcome. Instead, he and thousands of other undocumented immigrants not only suffer from 9/11 physical and mental health related injuries, but also from the effects of a failed immigration reform policy that forces them to live in constant economic hardship and in fear of deportation.
“I oftentimes do not have money for rent, and they’ve cut my telephone and cable. Sometimes there is hardly anything to eat,” said Pedro, a 47-year-old resident of Flushing who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, asthma, nasal drip, asphyxiation and exhaustion. “I know of a lot of fellow workers who are having a difficult time.”
According to Oscar Paredes, director of the Latin American Workers Project in Jackson Heights, about 3,000 undocumented workers assisted with the clean-up at or near Ground Zero the days, weeks and months after the attacks – most without the proper equipment to protect against exposure to hazardous materials.
“I would ask them about the conditions that they worked under. I’d ask them if they had masks and they said ‘no.’ If they had overalls, they said ‘no,’ if they had helmets and they said ‘no,’” said Paredes, who had originally ventured to Ground Zero to help workers with pay issues but ended up advocating for their health. “Lastly I asked them if there were showers, if they had water, if they washed their hands before they ate, and if they went home wearing the same clothes. Their answers horrified me.”
Paredes and others such as lower Manhattan Congressmember Jerrold Nadler referred to the lack of enforcement of the federal occupational safety and hazardous work regulations that required employers to protect their employees.
As a result, around 16,000 rescuers, first responders and clean-up workers became victims of the toxins and chemicals in the air.
And this included the undocumented workers like Pedro, who first cleaned at 100 Church Street before moving on to other apartment buildings between the third week of September 2001 and January 2002.
They and thousands of others hired by subcontractors got paid between $5 to $8 an hour for eight to 12 hour shifts, sometimes working up to seven days, according to Paredes.
These undocumented workers began to get sick, some right away, and others not for weeks, months or years later.
At first the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program, comprised of a consortium of occupational medicine experts in a series of hospitals that include Mt. Sinai and Bellevue, treated as many uninsured undocumented workers as they could due to limited philanthropic funding.
However, from fiscal year 2003 through current fiscal year 2009, Congress appropriated $393 million for medical monitoring and treatment to the World Trade Center responders, according National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) spokesperson Fred Blosser. This has funded the World Trade Center (WTC) Environmental Health Center at Bellevue Hospital and Mount Sinai Center for Occupational & Environmental Medicine, both of which have provided tens of thousands of treatment services for the listed WTC-related conditions under NIOSH.
Most of the undocumented workers who have been screened and their injury classified as caused by 9/11 receive monitoring and treatment through the WTC program. Paredes, however, quickly pointed out that this only covers their 9/11 related health problems and they still have no insurance to cover other health problems.
But, because of their undocumented status, their case is particular.
Psychologist Dr. Jaime Cárcamo said that he began to see patients related to the clean-up at ground zero as early as 2002. In total he sees about 60 to 70 patients and he estimates that 98 percent of them do not have legal residency status. Cárcamo said that the post traumatic stress suffered by this group varies from others because “everything makes them nervous.”
“They think that because they are undocumented they have no rights and so they refuse to take advantage of the options that are available to help them,” he said. “They fear that if they ask for help they will be deported. This aggravated their problems.”
Clean-up worker Alex Sanchez, an American citizen who now advocates and lobbies for 9/11 workers in Congress along with Nadler and Queens Congressmember Carolyn Maloney, agrees that the undocumented have had to face additional challenges.
“There has been an increase in police stopping people to ask for their identification. [The undocumented] live in fear and sometimes get erroneous information. It’s very difficult,” said Sanchez. “These undocumented are souls with out a physical presence, they are zombies.”
Maloney, who introduced a bill almost eight years ago to grant permanent residency to the spouses and children of the undocumented victims of 9/11, said undocumented workers who died have been attacked as Americans. She wants to focus on getting that bill, the ‘September 11 Family Humanitarian Relief and Patriotism Act,’ and the ‘James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act’ passed first.
“They were serving this country and they deserve to have legal status,” said Maloney. “You are talking about 16 people who lost their loved one and the amount of resistance to this bill was unbelievable.”
A Jamaica resident, 70-year-old Nayibe Padredino and her sister both began to clean three days after 9/11. The two Colombian women began to clean a three-story library near Broadway and Vesey before they moved on to myriad of offices.
Padredino said she and 30 others only got a paper facemask to clean the dust, ashes and debris. They used vacuums and washcloths. Within two months she began to cough, then exhaustion, headaches, and then in 2002 she got asthma.
“We are in the shadows,” said Padredino, who lives with her son and sister and has no source of income. “No one ever said that the undocumented couldn’t work.”
Read one 9/11 undocumented worker’s story in her own words. Click here
Read story on Congressmember Carolyn Maloney’s efforts to pass a health bill for 9/11 workers. Click here
— Additional reporting by Luc Cohen
