WASHINGTON — For more than 15 years, Doris Landaverde has worked as a janitor at Harvard University, cleaning offices, classrooms, and labs, and shoveling snow in the winter. For just as long, she has hoped for permanent residency in the United States,the country she has called home since she left her native El Salvador at 21.
Nothing put her future here more in jeopardy, she said, than when former president Donald Trump began in 2017 to dismantle temporary humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including Salvadorans. Pushed by the fear of deportation, she joined other immigrant activists working to persuade Congress to build permanent pathways to citizenship for people like her who have been kept in immigration limbo for too long.
That battle, to her frustration, did not end with the election of a new president.
On Tuesday, she was among the thousands of immigrants from across the country who marched down the streets of Washington in an effort to sway President Biden to take action on immigration, as his administration has struggled this week to explain its treatment of Haitian asylum seekers in Texas and Democrats appeared poised to strip out avenues to permanent residency and citizenship for millions of immigrants from their massive spending bill.
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