‘Please God, make me invisible’: The undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who has spent 40 years in the shadows

Before leaving her home in Los Angeles, Laura looks up at the sky and whispers a prayer: “Please God, make me invisible.” She fears encountering immigration agents, getting detained, and being deported to Guatemala. It is the same prayer she has repeated since she arrived in the United States 40 years ago. Since then, seven presidents have served, and there have been multiple failed attempts to regularize millions of undocumented people. But Laura continues to live in the shadows, now with less hope than ever of changing her immigration status.

Laura agreed to speak with EL PAÍS on the condition that her real identity be concealed. One of her greatest fears is ending up on the radar of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has stepped up raids in Southern California since the summer. “Cover me with your cloak, don’t let them see me if those people are around,” the 60-year-old woman pleads before boarding public transit to go earn a living cleaning homes and offices.

Like so many other immigrants, she put down roots in the United States long ago. She has three children and four grandchildren. She has lived here longer than in Guatemala, a land she barely recognizes in the photos and videos she watches on her cellphone. Since she emigrated, she has never returned to her country, not even for her father’s funeral. After four decades, this woman has been suspended between two worlds: she no longer feels completely Guatemalan, but without papers, she does not feel she fully belongs where she lives.

“I arrived here and thought life would change for me, that I would achieve something,” she recounts of her life in Los Angeles. “It’s very hard, very difficult not to have papers. I get very nervous thinking about ICE. Sometimes it even gives me headaches, my bones hurt, I get depressed, I have panic attacks.”

Left out of Reagan’s amnesty

In Guatemala, Laura’s routine was different. She says everything was better and quieter. She went to school for a couple of years — enough to learn to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. At 18, her mother emigrated to California and, some time later, Laura decided to follow her. She went to Mexico and illegally crossed the desert border to reach the U.S. The reunion with her mother took place in December 1986, a month after then-president Ronald Reagan signed an immigration amnesty that would benefit about three million undocumented people. She could not take advantage of that opportunity.

“I went to a church, and I asked the priest, ‘Could you help me to also get the amnesty?’ He told me: ‘You can’t because you just arrived,’” she recalls. The priest promised to call if another option arose, but that call never came. Every attempt at immigration relief since the 1980s — including Barack Obama’s 2014 proposal for undocumented parents (DAPA) — failed.

For Laura, trying to regularize her status through her eldest daughter, 33, who was born in the United States, also did not work. Her lawyer reviewed the case and proposed “waiting for a change of government,” extending her wait until 2029.

“I would like to have a better job to earn a little more money, to help my family. I only ask God to give me strength and calm to wait for someone who wants to help us,” says Laura, who trusts that another president will open a path to regularization, as Reagan did.

Despite the uphill climb, Laura has managed to get by on her own — sometimes cleaning houses and offices, other times caring for children or running errands. She raised her children alone: their father, a Mexican man, abandoned the family when they were still young and never returned. Despite the hardships, her eldest daughter earned a psychology degree from a university in Northern California, and her son completed a couple of semesters at a community college. Today, both help cover most of the household expenses.

Laura’s dream is modest: to get a work permit and be hired to clean a big store. “I asked a Costco cleaner: ‘Excuse me, what do you need to do this job here?’ He told me: ‘Do you have papers?’”

‘Trump has been very bad to us’

For decades, migration to the United States was circular: work for a few years and return home. But the tightening of border security, especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, changed that pattern. Leaving began to mean not coming back, not even for special celebrations, to care for sick relatives, or to bury parents. Greater surveillance measures along the U.S.–Mexico border made crossings more costly and more dangerous. Now, the hard-line policies of U.S. President Donald Trump — focused on deporting as many undocumented people as possible and reducing crossings — have only deepened the problem.

Several studies show how millions of undocumented immigrants like Laura have put down roots, with U.S.‑born children, mortgages, and long‑standing jobs. According to a Pew analysis, two‑thirds of unauthorized immigrants (66%) had lived in the United States for more than 10 years by 2017, up from 41% a decade earlier. Among Mexicans, the pattern is even more pronounced: the vast majority (83%) had been in the country for more than a decade, while only 8% had lived in the U.S. for five years or less.

There are roughly 675,000 undocumented Guatemalans in the U.S., with the largest wave arriving in the 2010s. Laura’s case is unusual because very few people were left out of Reagan’s 1986 amnesty. Those who arrived later often found other paths to legal status — through spouses, children, parents, or siblings. Laura, by contrast, has not obtained a single document from the U.S. government in 40 years.

A few days ago, she went to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to request an ID, but was denied because she did not have a Social Security number. So she went to Alvarado Street in Los Angeles — known for its document forgers — and paid $100 for a fake ID. She needed it to register at a clinic where, at no cost, she received urgent dental treatment. “They treated me. My mouth was very infected.”

It wasn’t the first time she resorted to such measures, common among many undocumented people. In the 1980s, she paid for a fake Social Security card — a tax ID that allowed her to work in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. The forgers told her it belonged to a deceased person. “I used it to work, not to do anything bad,” she says.

Laura feels the end of her working life approaching, and although she never paid into Social Security, she dreams of returning one day to Guatemala, building a house, and spending her final years there. “It will be like going back to another country, because everything has changed.”

She has a direct message to President Trump: “Don’t be ungrateful, help us. We are here to contribute to this country. Trump has been very bad to us. He has no heart, his conscience is hardened. It does not hurt him to harm people.”

Meanwhile, ICE agents keep prowling Laura’s neighborhood. One recent morning, while she waited for the bus, she saw a white van with tinted windows. She glimpsed four immigration agents inside. The vehicle passed slowly in front of her, entered a parking lot, and then returned toward the stop. Laura quietly stood up and walked to another spot, trying not to attract attention. The bus arrived before the ICE officers did, and she was able to get to work. It was only a scare.

The next day, before leaving her home, she looked up at the sky again to pray: “Please God, make me invisible, because I cannot go back to my country.” She is convinced her prayers have worked.

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