They cleaned up ground zero. Now many are hiding from ICE

Lucelly, who asked NPR to withhold her last name, is an undocumented worker from Colombia who went to clean up at ground zero after the Sept. 11 attacks. Since then she has battled breast cancer and respiratory disease. Nate Langston Palmer for NPR hide caption

NEW YORK — Once a week, in a Queens office building, a group of immigrants in their 50s and 60s gathers. They've all known each other for some 25 years: they met when they were cleaning up ground zero together. They are among the thousands of cleanup crews who rushed to the destruction in lower Manhattan following the attacks of 9/11. Many of those workers were immigrants and as many as 6,000 of them were undocumented. They were all exposed to toxic debris, and psychological trauma. And as the Trump administration pursues its aggressive immigration agenda, many are living in enhanced fear of immigration enforcement.

"Every morning I would stand on Roosevelt Avenue and 82nd," says a woman in the group named Lucelly. She asked NPR to withhold her last name — like many here, she's undocumented. She came to the U.S. from Colombia in 2000, and would wait on the avenue to get picked up for cleaning gigs.

On the morning of September 12th, 2001, the day after the attacks, a van pulled up. "Come on, let's go!" she recalls the driver yelling. They offered her $8.50 an hour to clean the wreckage.

"If the driver had told us: 'We're going to a danger zone,' people would not have rushed in," she says.

A photo provided by a member of a Sept. 11 cleanup crew support group in Queens, New York, shows a group of workers at the ground zero site in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. hide caption

But she says it felt like just another job, and a duty to the city that had welcomed her. Like a lot of people who went to clean up at ground zero, she went armed only with her house-cleaning gear: a paper mask and rubber gloves.

The hours were long. "We would have lunch in the rubble, in the dust," she recalls. "Then we'd go home wearing the same clothing we'd been working in."