NEW YORK — Once a week, in a Queens office building, a group of immigrants in their 50s and 60s gathers. They've all known each other for some 25 years: they met when they were cleaning up ground zero together. They are among the thousands of cleanup crews who rushed to the destruction in lower Manhattan following the attacks of 9/11. Many of those workers were immigrants and as many as 6,000 of them were undocumented. They were all exposed to toxic debris, and psychological trauma. And as the Trump administration pursues its aggressive immigration agenda, many are living in enhanced fear of immigration enforcement.
"We would have lunch in the rubble, in the dust"
"Every morning I would stand on Roosevelt Avenue and 82nd," says a woman in the group named Lucelly. She asked NPR to withhold her last name — like many here, she's undocumented. She came to the U.S. from Colombia in 2000, and would wait on the avenue to get picked up for cleaning gigs.
On the morning of September 12th, 2001, the day after the attacks, a van pulled up. "Come on, let's go!" she recalls the driver yelling. They offered her $8.50 an hour to clean the wreckage.
"If the driver had told us: 'We're going to a danger zone,' people would not have rushed in," she says.
But she says it felt like just another job, and a duty to the city that had welcomed her. Like a lot of people who went to clean up at ground zero, she went armed only with her house-cleaning gear: a paper mask and rubber gloves.
The hours were long. "We would have lunch in the rubble, in the dust," she recalls. "Then we'd go home wearing the same clothing we'd been working in."
Since then, Lucelly has battled breast cancer and respiratory disease. She is among the tens of thousands whose health was severely compromised by exposure to the hundreds of tons of toxic debris the tower's collapse released into the air. According to the World Trade Center health program, there have been over 57,000 cancer cases, and a myriad other health conditions. Officials knew within weeks but called it safe.
What we know about the undocumented workers at ground zero
It's not known how many undocumented workers were involved in the 9/11 cleanup, but advocates say it's somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 people.
"There was this rush to clean everything up quickly," says social worker Rosa Bramble Caballero, who runs the clean up crew support group in Queens. "The city hired multiple contractors for the clean up. In turn these contractors subcontracted, and those subcontractors subcontracted, and hired day laborers who were standing in street corners in Queens. Mind you, these were companies who had received millions of dollars from the city. Many women who did housekeeping were taken there. And then they got there and realized they were actually at ground zero, which, by the way, sometimes they were not told that that's where they were going."
A nearly decade-old legislative push to give undocumented ground zero workers a path to citizenship has failed to gain traction. The 9/11 Immigrant Worker Freedom Act was first introduced in 2017, then again in 2021. It was reintroduced in 2025 by Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. No Republicans have signed on to the bill, each version of which has remained stalled in the House Judiciary Committee. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Representative Ocasio-Cortez told NPR she believes "this legislation genuinely should be bipartisan and non-controversial. These heroes, many of whom sacrificed their lives, are people who are absolutely deserving of citizenship." But with immigration reform remaining a highly divisive topic, it is unlikely the bill would advance.
NPR reached out to the White House for comment, and received no response.
"I was blindfolded": the psychological toll of 9/11 cleanup
A woman named Rosa, from Guatemala, says she arrived at the site the days after the attack. She asked that NPR withhold her last name: although she is legally in the U.S., she is nervous about increased immigration enforcement operations here in Queens.
Back then she worked in demolition, and unlike most in the group, she arrived at ground zero with union training on how to handle asbestos and other toxic materials, and the proper equipment. She says when she got to the scene, she was shocked. "It was mostly Ecuadorians, Colombians, Peruvians, Mexicans. There were so many people doing the same work as me … but wearing little paper masks."
Rosa has acid reflux related to exposure, for which she has received worker's compensation. But she is one of the only people in the group who did not go on to develop a debilitating disease.
The emotional scarring, however, runs deep.
"You might not have noticed this," she says, "but I'm sitting in this chair because I need to see the exit. If I don't see a door at all times, I get a panic attack."
Soon after starting at the site, she made a gruesome discovery. "An arm. I… I can't forget it. I will never get over it. I touched it. We had been trained to lift a little yellow flag when we found a body part, and I did. The police came, and we put it in a bin, we covered it, and we took it to the Trinity Church."
A few days after arriving, she says she was blindfolded with a sleeping mask by her supervisors, and escorted to another area. "When we got there, they were sifting in the dirt. They were sifting for body parts. They assigned me to go through found objects. Jewelry. Wallets. ID's. Those little name plates people put on their offices. I would put them in separate bags."
She believes she was blindfolded because of the amount of looting and attempted stealing. She says there were five people doing that job- herself and immigrants from Mexico, Paraguay and Poland. She says they worked in silence, and were closely monitored. Eventually, she was moved to an underground area with a vault. She and her coworkers worked alongside law enforcement. She believes it was the massive vault system underneath The World Trade Center, where hundreds of thousands of tons of precious metals were recovered.
In those days, Rosa also says she joined as a Red Cross volunteer, tasked with helping any of the cleanup and first responders who got injured. She beams, "they gave me a certificate of honor, responsibility and honesty. It makes me proud. I've told some people back home, but I almost never talk about it, because I consider it something personal. It is mine to remember."
9/11: For immigrant workers, a different kind of legacy
These days, Rosa is more concerned about the reality of immigration raids in Queens. Although she has legal status, she says she is afraid of being targeted, and is hypervigilant for her friends in the retiree cleanup group who are undocumented.
Undocumented workers are entitled to worker's compensation, and many have received it for their work in 9/11, as well as assistance through the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. But Bramble Caballero says to this day she meets people who are too scared to apply.
For those who have received compensation, she says, it's typically around $80,000. Bramble Caballero says that money only goes so far. "Because they are undocumented and their health has been compromised, they really can no longer work. So although they may have received awards, those awards dry out," she says.
The fear of being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as operations spike in Queens and nationwide, has added to the PTSD which most in the group suffer.
"I am scared. We are all scared", says Lucelly, the woman who took her lunch breaks in the rubble of ground zero. "My daughter lives in New Jersey, and I don't even go visit her, because I am scared of immigration. It is a new pain on top of an old one."
She says returning home to Colombia is not an option: she worries she would not have access to the same quality care for her health problems. It's a sense of limbo shared by many in this group: to return to their towns and villages might mean not being able to access quality care. The alternative is to live in the U.S., with the constant fear of being picked up, but access to medical treatment.
Lucelly says her bitterness grows as the anniversary of the attacks approaches.
"We gave it all. When we got to ground zero we felt so much fear. Oh the fear we felt! No one ever asked to check out immigration status. Oh no, they treated us like we were real important back then. It was: 'Go in Lucelly. Go Lucelly. Get in there.'"
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