Maria, 39, recalls getting groceries on a frosty, northeastern afternoon in early December with her 12-year-old son. He stopped her as they walked through their neighborhood and asked:



“Mommy, why can’t you get a car?”

“I can’t afford it.”

“If you could afford it, would you buy it?”

“Yes honey, but mommy needs a driver’s license.”

“And why can’t you have that?”

“Because mommy is illegal.”

Maria – a pseudonym – says “it’s the little details you don’t think about” that make life difficult for her and other 11 million undocumented people living in the US. She routinely sees her three children noticing the differences between them and their classmates. “Other people get in the car, buckle the kids up, put the heat up and drive. I can’t do that.”

In Portugal, Maria was a professional seamstress. A fine career, but she still couldn’t make ends meet. Working seven days a week only covered the basic bills and rent, even with a joint income. Her then husband sometimes worked construction or other odd jobs. “Anything else I grew on my own, like fruits, vegetables ... I had animals”.

Portuguese citizens are one of 38 nationalities exempt from needing a tourist Visa. As a part of the Visa Waiver Program, they can lawfully remain in the US for up to 90 days. The family flew to New Jersey in 2002.

Once there, Maria and her family made the decision to stay. She hoped to find a stable job that could afford them savings, and schooling for herself and her daughter. They settled well into Newark’s Portuguese community, and soon Maria found consistent work as a housecleaner through a friend. She had two other boys.

Everything was fine for a few years until 28 October 2010, when her life changed overnight.

Maria was working an hour from Newark when she got a call from the police. Her daughter, then 17, was at the station and had reported that her father, Maria’s now ex-husband, had repeatedly raped her over six months and threatened to kill her if she spoke up. He was convicted two and half years later with an aggravated felony, and will be up for deportation to Portugal in January 2021 after serving a 12-year sentence.

That night, she stayed at the hospital while her daughter was treated and examined. “I gave up, sat on the floor and cried. What am I going to do now?” she recalls thinking. She came home two days later to a broken refrigerator. The rent was due, too. “I said, oh my god, I have to work harder than ever. So that’s what I did. I became a supermom.”

Today, she is a single mom of three and her household’s sole source of income. She starts her day at 5:15am six days a week by watching the news before heading to the gym where she works maintenance. It pays substantially better than housecleaning.

“I get their breakfast ready on the table. I leave and they get up after,” she says of her children. Her two younger boys go to middle school in the neighborhood. Her daughter, now 22, walks the boys over before going to work at a doctor’s office.

“It’s becoming easier. I got used to it. They stopped asking why daddy isn’t home, though they’re still in counseling.”

Maria’s life is stable now, but still far from normal – and it won’t be, she says, until she gets a social security number.

No life without a social security number

A nine digit SSN has become the bureaucratic base of an American life. It’s the standard way for companies to confirm your identity and track you down. You need one to open a bank account, get a credit card, health insurance, a driver’s license, a fair loan or a cellphone plan.

Staying in touch with her children wasn’t easy without a “real cell phone” she says. Applying for one without a social security number requires a down payment that can cost a up to $500, so for a decade she kept the same prepaid, chubby flip phone so she could be reached at the same number, being careful to leave just enough credit so her kids could reach her in case of an emergency.

In 2012, using her daughter’s Daca employment authorization number in place of a social, they signed a family phone plan.

Without a credit card, Maria lives month to month. She often bakes cookies and mends clothes at home to catch up on the month’s expenditures. This year, she worked Christmas day, which is also her birthday. “I have to save the money for Christmas gifts or I don’t have anything for the kids,” she says. “I can’t benefit from discounts without a store card.”

As American citizens, Maria’s boys qualify for medicaid but their mom and sister remain among the 38 million uninsured in the US. Earlier this year Maria fell sick with a bout of vertigo. X-rays, blood work and a few more tests ran $989. A few years back, a cyst in her bladder made it more complicated and expensive. “I had to have it removed. It cost $5,000.”

She’s taking the cost head on and paying the hospital about $100 a month, saying she refuses to be seen as a freeloader. She attributes the hospital’s willingness to admit her to her knowledge of English and knowing what to say at the right time.

“With insurance, you walk in, you show your card and that’s it. I saw a woman with her mother, neither spoke English. They had to call a translator, and of course they didn’t have insurance. They said the wrong thing, that they were going to apply for insurance and were asked to put down a $5,000 down payment. When I left [at 3:30am] they were still in the waiting room.”

Ice knocking at the door

Living in New Jersey, and with her ex-husband in prison, Maria feels safe and at home – but the fear of deportation, and being separated from her children, is paralyzing. She also fears for her personal safety. “If I have to go back, he’s going to be there and I’m going to be dead,” Maria says, referring to her ex- husband.

Though she has never committed a crime – in fact, she has filed her taxes every year since 2002 – she and her daughter are on Ice’s radar. The morning after Maria returned home from the hospital, two officers knocked on her door. She let them in.

“I was terrified. I thought that they were there for me. I didn’t think I had a choice. They demanded me to give them my ex-husband’s passport”. She did.

“We know you’re here, we know you’re illegal and we know you have three children,” she recalls the agents telling her.

“It’s really scary. Trust me. It’s terrifying. And there’s nothing I can do. They could be waiting outside or knocking on my door. I can’t run away. I have no other home. [Newark] is my children’s home.”

Maria says she’s lucky to have lived in the same apartment for nine years with a landlord she can trust, but she’s stuck there. Without an SSN or a decade of built-up credit to report, Maria can’t take out a mortgage. Ice knows where to find her.

Maria’s daughter, who is now pregnant, was not eligible to re-apply for Daca in October 2017. Unless Congress passes a law to protect Daca recipients, she will be eligible for deportation in August, but because she is a survivor of abuse, Maria’s daughter is eligible for a U visa.

Congress awards 10,000 U visas a year to survivors of mental or physical abuse who assisted law enforcement in the investigation. Maria is listed as a dependent on her daughter’s application.

They both started the visa process five years ago and are still waiting to to be waitlisted. If it is awarded , they can then apply for a green card after three years. According to Maria’s representative at American Friends Service Committee, Guisella Galindo, Congress is currently behind three to five years in granting these visas. About 150,000 other applicants are waiting.

Maria is stuck in limbo, but she has no time to be fazed. She has a family to support.