Miami’s fairy godmother for undocumented domestic workers

It is around 9:00 p.m. and Karla De Anda’s phone rings. The number is unknown to her. On the other end, connected to the free Wi‑Fi at a Miami airport terminal, a woman is sobbing uncontrollably. Her name is Rosa. She has just had her bags packed for her. A coworker told the family they both worked for that Rosa had been secretly talking to a stranger about the wages she was owed. The family would not hear any more: they bought her a one‑way ticket to her country of origin and put her in a taxi to the airport. Karla, who barely knows her, asks a single question: “Do you want to stay or not? Just answer me.” Between sobs the woman says yes. She hangs up, gets out of the departure line, and an hour later Karla is waiting for her at the arrivals gate with another activist, ready to take her to her home that same night.

Calls like that have been coming to Karla with a frequency that has risen markedly over the past two years, since Donald Trump returned to the White House and tightened the country’s immigration policy. In that time, the police have ceased to be an option for a large share of Miami’s undocumented domestic workers, who fear that reporting abuse will in practice lead to their own arrest. Into that vacuum has stepped Karla De Anda. There is a word that keeps coming up among the women she has rescued, and it is no ordinary compliment: they have nicknamed her the “fairy godmother.”

It is a nickname that does not sit entirely well with Karla, a Mexican and a former domestic worker. It sounds ironic to her, because no one rescued her when she needed it. And it weighs on her because she knows that, for many of the women who call her at any hour, she is literally the only door they can knock on. “They look for me when the problem is already on top of them,” she admits. There is no organization behind her, no official emergency hotline: just her personal phone number, passed mouth to mouth among undocumented women who clean homes and care for children in Miami.

The women she has helped describe what they lived through in almost the same words. “I slept an hour or two at night and spent the rest of the time working. I couldn’t take it anymore,” one recalls. “They paid me $730 a month, and from that they even deducted my cellphone,” says another. None of them, when they accepted the job, imagined it would end like this.

Karla arrived in the United States 25 years ago and, speaking little English, found the job that, she admits, is one of the few open to someone in her situation: nanny. She cared for the same family’s children for 15 years. She was paid $5 an hour, below the minimum wage.

Out of that domestic experience, her activism was born. Karla began as a volunteer at an NGO, and it was there that she encountered, systematically, what lies behind many domestic jobs: women who were not paid at all or whose employer withheld their passports so they could not leave.

Two years ago she decided to found The Right to Freedom Network, a nonprofit organization whose core is made up largely of survivors of labor trafficking. “You will never be able to organize a domestic worker without having been a domestic worker yourself,” she repeats.

Today she serves as a guide in a terrain that is doubly unfamiliar to many of these women: a country whose laws they do not know and whose language they barely speak, and their own rights, which almost no one has explained to them. She organizes workshops on what sexual harassment is, what discrimination is, and how to take action when an employer does not pay agreed wages, and she gives certified childcare classes through Cornell University.

When one of them decides to take the step, it is Karla who finds a lawyer willing to accompany her to the police station, who helps her fill out the county complaint form and who, if necessary, picks them up in her car at midnight. But above all, she stresses, she interprets an abuse that does not always have a name. “Many times you do not realize you are being abused,” she says, recalling her own experience. “Mistreatment can be very subtle, implicit rather than obvious.”

A safe place

Much of that accompaniment takes place, discreetly, inside a Miami church where she runs the workshops. Under the cover of training classes, Karla organizes meetings that in reality function as the only space where these women can gather without arousing their employers’ suspicion. They sit together, talk about what is happening to them behind closed doors, and for many it is the first time they say it aloud in front of someone else. In a community used to hiding, that church serves as an almost clandestine safety net: the only place in all of Miami where they do not have to pretend everything is fine.

Virginia, a 61‑year‑old Colombian who has been in the United States for eight years, arrived after being hired by a family she had already worked for in her home country. Before she traveled, they made her sign, in Colombia, what she remembers as “a contract no one could read.” A year and a half after starting, the family took her back to Colombia for a few days to renew her visa before it expired. While there, she asked to see her family. “I asked that they let me see my family. We were there for three months and I could not see them because they would not let me.”

On returning to Miami, the family also decided not to pay her for that time. “They told me they would not pay me because I had not been working here in the United States. But I was working there, caring for the children just the same.”

Finally, she mustered the courage to escape through a back door someone had left open, taking only “two blouses and one pair of pants.” And she ended up calling Karla to rescue her.

Mónica, a 59‑year‑old Mexican, worked for a family caring for five children, two adults and two dogs, with shifts from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. She slept, she says, in a makeshift room inside the garage, surrounded by garbage bags that no one removed, and she suspects she was filmed while sleeping because there was a camera facing the bed.

A year ago, also when it was time to renew her visa, her family suggested that she stay with them as an undocumented immigrant instead of going through the process of obtaining legal status. Mónica decided to stay as an undocumented immigrant, yes, but far away from that house.

She also managed to escape thanks to a plan she had devised without arousing suspicion: she left the phone the family used to track her in the bathroom and went straight to a new job she had already secured with Karla — until an old acquaintance of her former employer recognized her on the street.

Her response, in Mónica’s words, was “very cruel.” “She posted a photo of my passport on social media and said I had stolen $10,000 and jewelry. I have never taken anything from anyone.”

Since then she has lived in fear that the post will one day reach the police and point the finger at her, rather than at those who owe her seven years of wages. Karla, who was contacted through a friend, immediately classified what had happened to her as labor trafficking. The case is now in legal mediation; Mónica’s lawyers consider the family’s $28,000 offer insufficient.

“Promises that are not met”

These cases share an origin that Karla sees repeated constantly: women recruited in their countries by families or by informal agencies that manage the entire trip, including the tourist visa, with contracts that are rarely honored once across the border.

“They promise eight hours of work and they end up working 24 hours a day,” says Karla. It is, she says, the most common gateway to abuse: the woman arrives without knowing the language, without knowing the city and, almost always, without having fully read what she signed.

Karla has also worked with more serious cases. She recalls a woman, a domestic worker in a home north of Miami, whose employer began “accidentally brushing against her” while she was washing dishes. “He brushed against her a little more, then a little more. Until one day he showed up naked, and over the course of two months, he had raped her,” the activist says.

The woman took almost three weeks to report it, paralyzed by the fear that going to the police would result in her own arrest and deportation.

Fear of being arrested

The situations of exploitation these women talk about have been happening for years. What has changed — and very markedly in the last two years — is what happens afterward: the increasingly remote possibility of asking for help without fear of the authorities because of a lack of papers.

Before the current administration of Donald Trump hardened its immigration policy, any of them would have had more leeway to go to the police without fearing that step would end not in the detention of their aggressor, but in their own arrest.

The legal mechanism behind that fear has a common denominator. It is the 287(g) agreements, a mechanism provided for since 1996 in U.S. federal immigration law that allows police departments and other local and state agencies to sign agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so that their own officers, after training, perform immigration‑enforcement functions: they can ask about someone’s status during a traffic stop or, civil‑rights groups complain, at the door of the police station where a victim has gone to file a report.

The country’s first agreement was signed by Florida in 2002, and the program has fluctuated with each administration. Barack Obama limited the most aggressive model, and Joe Biden stopped signing new agreements, until Trump, on the day of his inauguration — January 20, 2025 — ordered their “drastic expansion.”

The result, according to data from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Immigration Council, has been an unprecedented escalation: from virtually zero such agreements at the start of 2025 to more than 1,000 today. Florida, moreover, prohibits its municipalities from declaring themselves “sanctuary cities” by law, which has forced many local police forces to join.

For Karla, the consequence is obvious: “They cannot tell me a victim is protected because it is a lie. There is no protection while these agreements exist, and even less so for a domestic worker,” she laments.

Threats to call ICE

And that fear does not arise only from the system; even employer families use it as a weapon. Karla sees it constantly with women who are threatened with a call to ICE “if they complain about sleeping in a garage without air conditioning, if they demand the agreed pay, or if they refuse to work more than the eight agreed hours.”

Virginia has just experienced this firsthand. The threat to “call immigration” did not come from a police officer but from the woman she worked for, at the exact moment Virginia stopped obeying. “You have no rights in this country,” she was told. It is a phrase that, Karla says, has been repeated in other cases: immigration status used as a leash to “enslave” domestic workers.

What Karla and her network have long been asking for, with little success, is state legislation, an executive order, or an ordinance that recognizes domestic workers’ basic labor rights as equal to those in any other job: limits on working hours, protection from harassment, and guarantees of payment. Eleven states, starting with New York in 2010, already have their own domestic workers’ bill of rights. Florida has none. Its only local tool is Miami‑Dade County’s wage‑theft ordinance, useful for claiming unpaid wages but powerless against forced confinement, threats, or assault.

“You’ll be part of the family”

In almost every case she has seen, Karla says, the abuse begins with the same seductive phrase that appears in the job ad before the woman has even packed her bags: “You’ll be part of the family.” It is, she insists, the hook used to convince these women to accept conditions they would never accept in another job. “After all, she is the family’s employee, not a family member. A worker who should have the same rights as a secretary or a doctor. If you make your own mother work 70 hours a week, you are a horrible daughter,” she exclaims.

Until that legislation arrives, Karla has chosen to build what the system does not provide. Her sessions are not only legal. They are the first place where many of these women hear that what happened to them has a name and is not normal. There she has earned, more than the title of activist, the role of a beacon for them all. “I cannot take them by the hand to a courtroom or guarantee that the next call to the police will end well,” she admits, “but I can teach them where the door is, even if they have to open it themselves.” That is why she insists on cultivating leaders within the group itself, so that this support network does not depend on her alone. If something were to happen to her tomorrow, she says, the network must be able to continue on its own.

On November 1, if all goes as planned, Rosa, Mónica, Virginia and 39 other women will put on a gown for the first time in their lives to receive a certificate from Cornell University instructors officially certifying them as domestic workers. They are part of the sessions Karla runs in secret at the Miami church.

Miami’s undocumented domestic workers’ fairy godmother does not grant wishes: she only makes sure that the next time one of them cries, someone answers on the other end. Tonight her phone is still on and, in all likelihood, it will ring again.

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