Courtney Brown / Kate Davidson (reporting lines chiefly Courtney Brown)
speaker
99 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 14 Nov
Courtney Brown / Kate Davidson (reporting lines chiefly Courtney Brown)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Her cleaning shift at a nearby office high-rise starts soon, where she goes cubicle by cubicle cleaning up trash.
Maria is in her 70s.
We're not using her real name because she's afraid she could be targeted by immigration.
She earns about $13 an hour at her cleaning job, which...
She enjoys.
But she does come home tired, and she's been working extra lately.
That's because roughly a third of her co-workers have had to quit since the Trump administration started rolling back work permits.
She's still able to work because the administration hasn't yet removed temporary protected status, or TPS, from Salvadorans.
She and her colleagues keep showing up to work, but they're afraid.
She's been a professional cleaner for about 30 years in Houston.
But if she loses her TPS...
Even though her kids and grandkids are here, she'll have to go back to El Salvador.
Even though immigration raids are getting a lot of attention, economist Pia Arrhenius with the Dallas Fed says there's something bigger going on.
Not just people with TPS are losing their work permits, but other humanitarian migrants, too, many who came in post-pandemic.
And now border crossings, which usually offer a steady inflow of labor, have also been reduced to a trickle.
So for employers who rely on foreign-born workers... They're kind of getting squeezed on all sides.
At Houston City Hall, dozens of people are becoming U.S.
citizens at a naturalization ceremony as they're serenaded by a barbershop quartet.
These are people who don't have to worry about work permits or green cards anymore.
I asked Alexandra, who came here from El Salvador as a teen, how she feels becoming a citizen.
Showing 61–80 of 99 · page 4 of 5
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