Kathy Willens/AP Photo
The Brooklyn Immigrant Community Support mutual aid group coordinates emergency food aid during the coronavirus shutdown for undocumented immigrants who cannot receive government assistance, May 12, 2020, at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Within a minute of launching their online Undocumented Worker Fund on May 22, the immigrant advocacy group Movimiento Cosecha received over 900 applicants. Within a half hour, they had reached their application limit. So many people from the undocumented immigrant community were applying for the fund that the website crashed.
Founded in 2015 out of the realization that the legislative victory of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) did not address the need for a more permanent solution for undocumented immigrants, Cosecha did not initially set out to administer funds, but rather to build a movement. As Gema Lowe, an organizer for Cosecha in Michigan who is an undocumented immigrant, told me, “Our goal is to gain permanent protection for all undocumented immigrants … our goal is not [to be] a charity, or to raise funds or distribute funds, but it is something we had to do because nobody else was going to do it for us.”
Cosecha is one of several organizations that have shifted their priorities amid COVID-19, establishing mutual aid networks to directly support undocumented immigrants. Mutual aid broadly refers to support given outside of systems that produce the conditions for assistance, with control in the hands of those who are most affected.
Through online fundraising, Cosecha raised $1 million from 9,000 individual donors, and has trained undocumented leaders to disburse the fund. Part of their fundraising included a campaign for people to donate their federal stimulus check to the fund, which hundreds did.
Mutual aid broadly refers to support given outside of systems that produce the conditions for assistance, with control in the hands of those who are most affected.
The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), established in 2001 to improve the lives of day laborers in the U.S., has set up an Immigrant Worker Safety Net Fund. The Undocublack Network, a network of formerly and currently undocumented Black people, has also created a COVID-19 fund.
According to a 2017 Pew Research Center estimate, there are approximately 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., about 23 percent of the overall foreign-born population. Approximately 800,000 undocumented immigrants are DACA recipients.
Most undocumented immigrants work in jobs like construction, hospitality, and agriculture, which have been deemed “high risk” because of the difficultly of transitioning them to remote working. A 2020 Center for American Progress study examined three essential industries—health care, food, and education—and found that 202,500 DACA recipients were working on the front line of the COVID-19 crisis.
Yet, while undocumented immigrants comprise a significant chunk of the essential workforce serving the public in the struggle against COVID-19, they continue to be overwhelmingly locked out of federal benefits.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved Pandemic EBT, a program that allows families with children who would have normally received meals in school to use funds on an EBT card to purchase food. It has passed in 47 states and is available to immigrants irrespective of their status. Yet, this may be the only new relief assistance available during this time to the undocumented community. In normal times, undocumented immigrants are banned from state and federal benefit programs (with a few exceptions, such as emergency medical care under Medicaid or in-kind disaster relief). And the $2 trillion CARES Act, which provided unemployment relief and a stimulus check, excluded the undocumented community entirely.
Mutual aid and even government support struggle with the tremendous need in undocumented immigrant populations. Elizabeth Lower-Basch, director of income and work supports at the anti-poverty nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, used the recent example of California’s $125 million COVID-19 relief fund for undocumented workers as a cautionary tale. The first-in-the-nation relief effort, funded by taxpayer money and charitable donations, had a chaotic rollout, with the 12 nonprofits disbursing the funds overwhelmed by demand. Ultimately, the funds were only able to reach 150,000 undocumented people, out of the state’s estimated undocumented population of two million.
Mutual aid funds simply “do not have the scale to substitute for the federal government doing what it should,” Lower-Basch told me.
Yet Salvador Sarmiento, NDLON’s national campaign director, makes clear that for immigrant workers, COVID-19 is compounding existing vulnerabilities, creating an “existential crisis that translates into a matter of life and death for a lot of workers.” It is “not an understatement to say that [mutual aid] funds have literally saved lives when you have workers that are 60 or 70 years old having to go out to look for work because they do not have a disposable income,” he said.
For organizations like Cosecha and NDLON, waiting for the inclusion of undocumented immigrants in state and federal relief programs is not an option. As Sarmiento told me, “It was very clear to us that no one was going to come and save us, so it was necessary for us … to start fundraising to make sure we can help each other out.” In the worker centers, they have a saying: solo el pueblo, salva el pueblo—only the people will save the people.
The $2 trillion CARES Act, which provided unemployment relief and a stimulus check, excluded the undocumented community entirely.
A comprehensive solution to the problem has been elusive. On June 18, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration did not act legally in canceling the Obama-era DACA program in 2017. Some from the immigrant community see this decision as an important short-term victory, while more broadly expressing concern over DACA.
“Politically, it creates divisions,” Lowe told me, as it responds to a question of its own making—who is the better immigrant?—by introducing a generational cleavage, favoring undocumented youth over their parents. It also creates insecurity by putting beneficiaries in a state of limbo, unsure of whether their permit will be renewed in two years.
Dr. Margarita Alegría, a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told me that “immigrant youth have to navigate their own culture of origin with the host country,” and their ability to navigate these two poles of social identity “has tremendous implications for their emotional and behavioral health.” Yet, many undocumented immigrants live under threat, and do not seek services due to fear of exposing their status. Ultimately, existing in limbo and in fear of deportation contributes to social isolation, economic insecurity, and health disparities.
Cosecha sees the solution as permanent protection for all undocumented immigrants. The lack of an adequate response at the state and federal levels of government during COVID-19 renews the case for a more permanent solution that would remove the division of authorized versus unauthorized status as the deciding factor of who has a right to government relief during an emergency.
