As her children gather around their dinner table, Josefina ladles out platefuls of one of their family’s favorite snacks — hot dogs strung through with spaghetti noodles.
The mother of six said she learned to make the unusual dish through watching a video on YouTube. It takes a quick moment to figure out that she had poked several sticks of uncooked spaghetti into the hot dog segments before tossing them into boiling water.
The dish satisfies as a mid-afternoon meal for her children, the youngest of whom is a 1-year-old engrossed in a cartoon on a smartphone. The others are eating intently and quietly, after spending the earlier part of their summer day chasing around their noisy, white and black kitten, and taking turns pushing each other about on a cart outside their five-bedroom apartment.
The family’s living room walls are festooned in school craft projects, trophies and medals. In one corner, a Christmas lights display designed by the father, Mateo, hangs from the ceiling. Josefina said her children are doing well in school, and she has a dream “for every child she has.”
“For the older one, I want him to be successful and one day get a good job,” she said of her 15-year-old son.
It feels like a typical day, but there are many worries weighing on Josefina and her husband’s minds about whether their efforts to help their children lead a normal life could come to an end.
While their children are U.S. citizens, the parents are in the country illegally. Mateo is from Guatemala. He said he crossed the borders of two countries, and walked by foot into Arizona’s deserts to get to the United States. Josefina was 17 when she and her siblings made their way into the U.S from Mexico, by crossing over a mountain, also by way of the U.S. border at Arizona.
“In our country there is not enough food, jobs,” Josefina said of the reason she came to the U.S. “(The fact that) we could come to this country, is like a blessing.”
Mateo works the night shift as part of the sanitation department at a food company that makes sandwiches and other ready-made meals, to earn enough to pay the rent for their five-bedroom apartment at San Fernando Gardens, a public housing complex in Pacoima managed by a city agency. Josefina said she does her part by volunteering hundreds of hours a year at her children’s school. The parents do not receive federal assistance, but are able to afford the apartment because their children are eligible for the the funding.
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has threatened raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and news blared on television of more young children being held in substandard living conditions at immigration detention facilities.
But the nerves of many residents at the Pacoima public housing complex, like Josefina and Mateo, have been on edge for an additional reason.
More than 100,000 people across the country, including an estimated 55,000 children who are legal residents and citizens, could be evicted due to the immigration status of some members of their households, under rules proposed in April and published in the federal registry in May by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The deadline is July 9 for the public to give input on the rules.
About a quarter of the more than 400 families living at San Fernando Gardens face the possibility of being booted from their apartments and becoming homeless, if the rules were to be adopted. Josefina and Mateo’s family is one of them.
In Los Angeles, more than 900 families, many of them with children who are U.S. citizens or who have legal immigration status, could be forced out from apartments overseen or issued Section 8 vouchers, according to the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, the housing agency that operates San Fernando Gardens and 13 other public housing sites in the city.
The average household income is $24,424 annually at the public housing that HACLA oversees, compared to the citywide average of $54,501 a year, according to demographic data from the housing agency.
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson defended the proposed rule in May against accusations that it was “cruel,” saying that the goal is to prioritize U.S. citizens who are on years-long waiting lists.
Douglas Guthrie, the director of HACLA, said that the majority of those affected would be children, many of them U.S. citizens, a point that was made by U.S. HUD officials themselves.
The families that would be affected “have played by the rules,” Guthrie said. “There’s not one dollar of federal funding that is supporting an undocumented resident.”
Those families also pay higher rents than those in which all members of the family are citizens or legal residents, and are eligible for aid as a result, he said.
“This is intentionally targeting the immigrant community in the most mean-spirited way possible,” he said.
Guthrie said that agencies have allowed families, in which the members have “mixed” immigration status, to live in public housing. The rule dates back to 1994 and refers to a statute from the early 1980s, he said.
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The idea that thousands of people could be pushed out of their homes in Los Angeles alone, due to the proposed rule, is almost unthinkable for public housing officials and city leaders already grappling with how to house the more than 36,600 people who are believed to be homeless on a given night.
Guthrie joined other advocates and six Los Angeles City Council members who took an official stance opposing the rule last week outside City Hall. They urged members of the general public to submit comments to the federal government. They hoped to garner enough comments via the website https://www.keep-families-together.org/ to persuade HUD to drop the proposed policy.
But even amid the effort to defeat the policy, residents of the San Fernando Gardens public housing, such as Nora, are worried that any discussion about their potential eviction could scare their children and put them under unnecessary stress.
Her eldest “is listening to everything that is happening,” Nora said.
If her family were to be evicted from their three-bedroom apartment, they could become homeless, and it would not be for the first time. But Nora said she is putting on a brave face.
“I want to demonstrate to my children that I am not worried, or they will get worried too,” she said.
Nora and her husband moved out of her mother’s place five years ago after their family had gotten larger. But they could not find an apartment they could afford. For about a year they slept in their car, or crashed at the home of any friend who would take them in, until they were finally accepted for an apartment at San Fernando Gardens.
When Nora looks around the housing complex, she said she sees many children running around. She suspects many more families “are going to go through the same thing,” she said.
In addition to the threat of eviction, some of the families at San Fernando Gardens said their lives have been affected by Trump’s announcements that ICE raids would occur in several cities, including Los Angeles.
Sundays are usually when the family goes out for a walk or to get something to eat, said one resident, Mirna, but they stayed indoors a couple weekends ago, when a raid had been scheduled, but then called off.
Those types of incidents rattle their family, as do loud knocks on their door. Usually it is only the mail man, but her children fear that she would leave them, Mirna said.
While Carson has said that priority needs to be given to U.S. citizens, Mirna said that if there was one thing she wished more people could understand, it would be that she came to the country out of necessity, and they are willing to do jobs that some here would not be willing to do.
Her husband does piecework sewing, and as a family they collect cans and bottles for additional change to pay for their $900 rent. At one time, she was cleaning bathrooms, Mirna said.
“As immigrants we do every job, because we have a need,” she said.
But even faced with eviction, some families said that they did not wish for their children to have to leave their schooling to help with rent and household expenses. Mirna said that one of her older sons has already volunteered to help bring in money, but she told him no.
Imelda, another resident, said she told her children the same.
“The older one wants to work so she can help, but I don’t want them to stop going to school,” she said. “When they start working they don’t want to keep going to school. Once they start getting money, they don’t want to go to school anymore.”
“They will have a better lifestyle, if they can keep going,” she said.
But some of the younger residents said they will not have much of a choice but to interrupt their education, in order to help their family pay rent at an apartment outside of public housing.
Leticia Duarte, 22, said that if her family were to be evicted, she would need to go to work full-time, instead of pursuing a sociology degree at Mission College. Others in her family have educational goals as well, including her brother, 16-year-old Nicolas, who said he has plans to study engineering.
Their family of nine people moved to San Fernando Gardens from a two-bedroom apartment in Panorama City, Duarte said.
“It was very crowded, and it didn’t bother us at the time,” she said. “But coming here, having five bedrooms, you notice the difference. Everybody has their own space.”
Duarte said that she feels lucky to be an American citizen, taking for granted opportunities that her parents lacked in their home country.
“I can’t say I’ve suffered like my parents,” she said. “We don’t know what they went through. I think here, we’ve had everything we’ve needed. We go to school for free. Over there, they didn’t. They had to stop going to school at 16.”
