In March 2018, a large group of Harvard students, faculty, and staff gathered around the John Harvard statue with locals from around the Boston area to rally in support of Temporary Protection Status. This demonstration was part of a nation-wide series of rallies responding to the Trump administration’s decision to end the TPS program for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan, and Nicaragua. It featured a diverse array of speakers, many of whom shared their own stories and the role TPS has played in their lives. Among these attendees was a familiar face: Laura Sanchez, who works for the Harvard University Dining Services as a card swiper at Annenberg Hall.
Her speech was short, personal, and intensely moving; its effect on the crowd was unmistakable. Yet despite her charisma, Sanchez, by her own account, was reluctant to speak publicly. She confessed that only the graveness of the situation impelled her to share her story. “It was a chance to let people know that we [TPS recipients] are working hard, that we are not bad people,” she said in an interview with the HPR. Sanchez described the acute pain she and many of her friends felt upon hearing of the changes made to TPS. She realized just how deeply and callously “they want to get us [Salvadorans] out of here.”
The Trump administration’s justification for ending TPS for Salvadorans was that the conditions caused by the 2001 earthquake, which prompted Bush to grant TPS to Salvadorans, no longer exist. Yet the “conditions” of these TPS recipients cannot be understood solely through the earthquake; many Salvadorans who received TPS were forced to flee during the 1980s and 90s because of the U.S.-backed civil war, and many still cannot return safely due to high levels of homicide and gang violence in the country. Despite the explicit apathy driving this decision, however, Sanchez is slow to accuse anyone of real malice. For her, the root of problem is not hate but ignorance.
“I think people just don’t know,” she said, explaining that it often falls to her and her family to describe these shifting political realities to other Americans. Her sense of personal responsibility continues to drive her to speak out, even in the face of widespread prejudice against TPS and Salvadorans. By standing up and saying “we are Salvadorans,” Laura hopes to combat the unawareness from which these stigmas are spawned.
Laura has found that even those familiar with the crisis facing many TPS immigrants are often incognizant of the daily realities of TPS recipients. For example, few people know that even after decades of living and working in the United States, TPS recipients still have to pay for their right to work — and it is not cheap.
“We have to pay $450 every 18 months to renew our working permits,” Sanchez told the HPR. Sanchez did not express any anger over the fact that TPS recipients have to buy what is, for citizens, an unquestionable right; instead, she responded with her characteristic, level-headed goodwill.
“There are good and bad people everywhere,” she said. The real root of the problem, then, lies in assumptions that particular backgrounds make people either good or bad.
Sanchez moved to Virginia 19 years ago in response to pleas from her family, most of whom had moved to the United States a few years before. “They said I would not regret it, and they were right!” she said, smiling. She worked as a custodial manager in Virginia for 10 years before moving to Boston to be closer to her relatives.
She knew what she wanted before she even set foot in Boston. “When they asked me to come over [to Boston], my goal was Harvard,” she recalled. When she arrived in Boston, Laura got in touch with friends from her hometown who were already employed by Harvard. Within a month, Harvard accepted her job application and she began working in Annenberg’s dish room.
Three years later, she was promoted to checking students in at its entrance, where she has been ever since.
When I asked her about the 2016 Harvard worker’s strike, she did not mention what is widely considered the strike’s central message — the alleged class feud between the 1 percent and service workers. Instead, her response pointed to the skewed student-worker relations that the strike illuminated: “If they hadn’t stood up for us, we would not have been heard,” she explained. “They were not listening to us as workers. They heard the students and parents much more.”
Her words were a reminder of another poignant moment in the rally, when Rosa Vazquez, a Harvard undergraduate, delivered a moving speech in which she pointedly refused to discuss her personal experiences as a student protected by DACA: “Today isn’t about my story but rather about elevating and empowering the stories of TPSianos because they are so constantly overlooked … In every single TPS recipient I am reminded of my family and their invisibility.”
Vazquez is not the only student concerned about the visibility of workers. As Laura Veira-Ramirez, another undergraduate, told the HPR, “When I got to the rally, they asked me to speak, but I didn’t want to take over.” This was a rally organized by and for TPS workers, not students. Yet she also mentioned her belief that Harvard students and workers can and often do collaborate in productive ways: “I’ve been to a few of their meetings,” she said, adding, “I think that they really value the relationships they’ve built with students.”
Brinkley Brown, a freshman at Harvard, also struggled to grasp the role of students within the biased system. “The administration should pay more attention to the workers,” she said to the HPR. “But if they don’t, do students have a responsibility to step in?”
The deprioritization of worker issues and voices has had an unmistakable effect on TPS rights. Even though Sanchez remains hopeful that political resistance and action will be enough to undo the harm wreaked by the Trump administration’s repeal of TPS and DACA, her optimism is somewhat tempered: “They’re fighting,” she said. “DACA will probably get something; I don’t know about TPS.” Laura’s prediction could very well be accurate, as TPS rights receive far less attention than DACA at Harvard and beyond.
It is difficult for Sanchez to face the possibility of having to leave the life she has made for herself over the past 19 years. She worries about losing the benefits she has earned over nearly two decades of constant work. “Where will my retirement go? Where will my social security go?” she asked. Yet Sanchez is not worried about herself as much as her children, who were very young when she brought them to the United States. Her daughter, who was five years old when they moved, is graduating from Lesley University this year, and one of her sons is getting married in a few months. After watching her children grow up and find a lives for themselves in the States, Sanchez struggles to imagine them trying to adapt to life in El Salvador.
“It is hard for us to think that we’ll have to go [to El Salvador],” she said. “My kids don’t know anybody over there. If we go back, they’ll feel like they don’t belong.” Indeed, with most of her family already living in the States, including her siblings, Sanchez says there is not a whole lot she can expect to return to.
Even as she worries, Sanchez continues to actively hope for change — and she is not alone. Moments like her speech at the Harvard TPS rally serve as reminders that despite their stigmatized and deprioritized status, TPS recipients can puncture their own invisibility.
Image Credit: James Blanchfield/HPR