Their work was both essential and easy to overlook: a construction crew on a midnight shift making road repairs on the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
But for a cargo ship striking the bridge March 26 and plunging the massive span and the crew into the Patapsco River, they likely would have remained hidden in plain sight, part of an immigrant workforce in a country eager for their labor but not for fixing a system that keeps many from becoming citizens.
Six workers died: Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera. Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes. Carlos Hernandez. Miguel Luna. José Mynor López. Maynor Suazo Sandoval.
The families they left behind in Mexico and Central America and those they built in the Baltimore area are now reuniting in mourning after years of living apart and in a kind of limbo: The men worked here, but also supported family there; they created new lives here, but their immigration status remained murky and subject to political vagaries.
It’s unclear where the men fell on the spectrum of immigration status, not uncommon given the fractured immigration system in which rules vary with individual circumstances and the process of achieving citizenship is complicated and restrictive, even for those who have worked here legally for years or even decades.
For construction workers — almost 40% of whom are immigrants in the Baltimore-Washington area, according to one university research center — the disconnect can be particularly jarring.
“I mean, they are building America, quite literally,” said Tom Perez, a senior White House advisor and former Maryland and U.S. labor secretary.
“They’re building bridges, they’re building roads, they’re building buildings,” he said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun. “And they don’t have that bridge to citizenship yet, even though they can work and they’ve been here for 30 years and their kids are U.S. citizens.”
Still, even during these devastating days, friends and family of the bridge victims and other immigrants say the U.S. remains the same beacon that it’s been for centuries for wave upon wave of immigrants fleeing the likes of war, violence and poverty.
“Making the decision wasn’t easy; it was hard, hard, the hardest,” said Carlos Alexis Suazo Sandoval, whose brother, Maynor, died in the bridge collapse, speaking in Spanish. “But the search for a dream of a better life brought us to the United States.
“The only country that gives us a solution is the United States,” he added. “It’s a country that is pretty and wonderful for us.”
In a well-worn tradition, Carlos followed Maynor here from their hometown of Azacualpa in western Honduras, leaving what he said was government corruption that left a dearth of opportunity.
He stayed with a nephew and his brother, who helped him find work, until he could get his own apartment in the same Owings Mills complex. Their sister, Norma, immigrated several years ago, as well, and lives about five minutes away.
On Friday, 10 days after the disaster, Maynor’s body was recovered from the wreckage of the bridge. But three other families anxiously awaited the recovery of their loved ones’ bodies. Divers had recovered earlier the bodies of Hernandez Fuentes, the crew foreman and a native of Mexico who lived in Essex, and Castillo Cabrera, a Dundalk resident originally from Guatemala.
A day after the bridge collapse, Perez, who has become a point man for Democratic President Joe Biden on Key Bridge recovery efforts, spent what he called a “very gut-wrenching two hours” with the men’s families at a response command center.
“How can we help?” said Perez, relaying an exchange with one particularly inconsolable woman.
“‘El cuerpo, el cuerpo, el cuerpo,’” he said she told him, “which is Spanish for [the] ‘body.’”
A port city
A port city, Baltimore has long drawn immigrants to its shores, with Locust Point in South Baltimore among the busiest points of entry in the 19th century after Ellis Island in New York. Among them, Perez notes, was an ancestor of Biden, who visited the scene Friday.
As earlier immigrants watch the news unfold about the workers lost in the bridge collapse, they say they see a mirror of their own journeys but with a difference wrought by time.
“We came for a goal. It’s painful to see that our people in the United States died in the attempt to achieve the dream that they were following,” said Maria Alvarado, who owns Diner Latino in Highlandtown and Middle River, speaking in Spanish.
Alvarado was the last of her seven siblings to leave El Salvador, arriving in 1998, driven away by crime that made it dangerous to walk on the streets after dark and so few work opportunities that she took three buses for a distant job.
Once here, she benefited from those who preceded her, particularly in the 1980s when many Salvadorans fled a civil war in which tens of thousands were killed or disappeared. They had stable jobs, and a fairly smooth path to citizenship at a time when, under Republican President Ronald Reagan, a sweeping immigration reform measure made millions who had entered prior to 1982 eligible for amnesty.
That was then, though, a time before immigration policy became a political hot button, subject to loud debates but little practical action to fix the citizenship process, which one immigration expert says is restrictive and complicated.
“It’s not like going to the MVA to get your license,” said Elizabeth Keyes, a University of Baltimore law professor. “You have to fit into a category that the United States Congress has said is a priority for immigration, and those categories are pretty limited, and the ones that are more open have long waiting lines or really complicated processes.”
Additionally, “there’s no visa available just because people have spent a certain amount of time here, and it’s not even automatic if you have U.S. citizen children.”
Therefore she and others say, even immigrants who have proper work permits are left in a state of fear, wary of drawing attention to themselves or asking for help even when they are entitled to it lest it jeopardize a future or ongoing application for a more permanent status.
As a result, said Gustavo Torres, executive director of the immigrant rights group CASA, the potential for exploitation is ever present.
“Some employers feel that because you are undocumented, you are not going to complain, you are not going to defend your rights,” he said.
Maybe they don’t get paid, or they get injured, Torres said, but they don’t report it or seek help for fear of being fired.
“They decide not to go to the hospital,” he said. “It’s that simple: They are very scared.”
Bringing home the bodies
For those mourning the loss of loved ones in the bridge collapse, the fractious political debate over immigration is likely distant noise.
Instead, they are working on such details as how to get family members in home countries to Maryland for funerals, or how to arrange for transport for burial overseas.
Perez said he has put family members in touch with staff “at the highest levels” of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who will help them seek humanitarian parole that would allow a relative to travel here for a funeral.
“We have people literally on standby to help,” he said.
The family of Castillo Cabrera, who is from San Luis in the department of Petén in Guatemala, said they want to bring him home for burial, Perez said. The repatriation process is one with which he is “very familiar,” he said, as his own parents, immigrants from the Dominican Republic, similarly wanted to be buried in their birth country.
According to the Guatemalan consulate, the family of another victim, López, similarly have asked for his body to be returned to his home country. He is from Camotán in the Chiquimula department.
After Suazo Sandoval’s body was recovered Friday, his brother said his family plans to bury him in Honduras, where his mother lives.
Other families have decided to bury the men in the place where they spent their final years.
The family of Hernandez Fuentes, the foreman of the Brawner Builders crew, said they want him buried in the U.S., where he had children and had built a life after more than 15 years here, said Carlos Escalante Igual, the general director of migrant assistance for the Mexican state of Veracruz.
Hernandez Fuentes was from Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz, whose government is trying to help his sister obtain a visa to travel to the U.S. to say goodbye, Escalante Igual said.
The crew foreman is related to another man who perished in the bridge collapse, Carlos Hernandez, and brother-in-law of another worker, Adrian Julio Cervantes, who was rescued and survived. Hernandez and Cervantes came from the Mexican state of Mihoacán.
Sheela Murthy, an immigration attorney based in Baltimore County, said permission to travel to the U.S. for a funeral is difficult, particularly for those from poorer countries. Officials fear the travelers will take the opportunity to just stay, she said.
But the amount of attention from elected officials and the public could make it easier for relatives of the those who died in the bridge collapse, she said.
“There is a process. There is a system,” Murthy said. “But they’ll probably walk it through, and make it much faster.”
‘An environment of anguish’
At a certain point, life in El Salvador became untenable, a friend of Miguel Luna told The Sun.
“We lived in an environment of anguish,” said Alvaro Lizama, speaking in Spanish. “We left for work, and we didn’t know whether we’d be able to come back home.”
Gangs had taken over, demanding payment to leave or enter the cities and threatening physical violence, he said.
“The gangs — more than anyone — they hurt the hardworking people,” he said.
Lizama and Luna played together on the Once Berlinés pro soccer club in the city of Berlín, in the department of Usultán in eastern El Salvador.
Shortly after Lizama retired from the team, in 2005, he decided to take the same path as his friend and leave for the U.S. He lives in California, while Luna moved to Maryland to build a new life. A skilled welder, Luna also ran a Salvadoran food truck with his wife and helped care for children and grandchildren.
These days, Lizama said, his home country is in better shape, and the two sons he left behind as boys are now young adults who decided to stay there and complete their studies.
Lizama hasn’t seen them in person since he left for the U.S., instead making do with video and phone calls, and taking comfort in the funds he sends back to his family.
He works as a delivery driver.
“Nobody wants to say it, but we are the workforce that this country needs. For any job, because there we are,” Lizama said. “We never say no.”
