09/12/2026
BREAKING🚨 Thousands of undocumented immigrants cleaned toxic debris out of ground zero after 9/11. Twenty-five years later, sick with cancer and lung disease, they are now hiding from ICE.
Once a week in a Queens office building, a group of immigrants in their 50s and 60s still meets. They have known each other for about 25 years, since they shoveled the wreckage of the World Trade Center together.
One of them, Lucelly, came from Colombia in 2000 and waited every morning at Roosevelt Avenue and 82nd Street to get picked up for cleaning work.
On the morning of September 12, 2001, a van pulled up and the driver yelled at them to get in. The pay was $8.50 an hour. She went with what she had: a paper mask and rubber gloves.
"We would have lunch in the rubble, in the dust," she says. "Then we'd go home wearing the same clothing we'd been working in." She has since battled breast cancer and respiratory disease.
The World Trade Center health program has now logged more than 57,000 cancer cases.
Many were never told where the van was going. The city hired contractors, who subcontracted, and those subcontractors subcontracted again and picked up day laborers off Queens street corners, says social worker Rosa Bramble Caballero, who runs the group.
Workers who did get compensation typically received around $80,000, she says, and it dries up, because they're too sick to work. She still meets people too frightened to apply at all.
Another woman in the group, Rosa, arrived from Guatemala days after the attack with union asbestos training and proper equipment, and was shocked to find people doing her exact job in little paper masks.
Supervisors blindfolded her with a sleeping mask and walked her to an area where she sorted through jewelry, wallets and IDs pulled from the dirt, as Jasmine Garsd first reported in NPR.
She sits where she can see the exit now. Without a door in sight, she panics.
The 9/11 Immigrant Worker Freedom Act, which would give these workers a path to citizenship, was introduced in 2017, again in 2021, and again in 2025 by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
No Republican has ever signed on. It has never left the House Judiciary Committee.
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