On the night of September 10th, Sneha Philip went shopping, then stayed out for the night. In upstate New York, Juan Lafuente rested before a morning commute to Wall Street. A mother in Mexico looked forward to a weekly call from her son, Fernando Molinar, one of a number of undocumented immigrants worked in or around the World Trade Center.
The next day, planes struck the Twin Towers and thousands of New Yorkers vanished–including Philip, Molinar, and Lafuente. In the aftermath, there was an incredible amount of confusion about who’d actually been a victim of the attacks. The Disappeared digs through that confusion to explore who ultimately got recognized as a victim, who might’ve been left out, and why.
For more information about “The Disappeared” visit our website: http://www.shoeleather.org.
Transcript
MARIA ERIVES
It’s September 10, 2001. Joel Magallán is having a day like any other– running errands, making phone calls and organizing paperwork. He is the director of Asociación Tepeyac, a non-profit organization that fights for immigrant rights.
LUKE CREGAN
He’s got a lot to do. Because he, alongside other organizers across the country, are preparing for a big march that’s going to happen in Washington D.C. in a couple weeks.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
Estuvimos organizando una coalición nacional para luchar por la residencia permanente de los inmigrantes de todas las nacionalidades.
We organized a national coalition to fight for permanent residence for all immigrants of all nationalities.
LUKE
Joel believes that this march is a huge step toward immigration reform.
That’s because just days earlier, President George W. Bush and the Mexican president, Vicente Fox had a meeting. They’re trying to work out a compromise on the issue.
PRESIDENT VICENTE FOX
Por ello debemos y podemos llegar a un acuerdo migratorio antes de este mismo año…
We must and can reach an immigration agreement before the end of this year…
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
The United States is proud to stand beside you as your partner and as your friend.
MARIA
Both presidents want to make a path to citizenship for immigrants already in the U.S.
PRESIDENT VICENTE FOX
Let us build trust, along our common border.
MARIA
My mom still remembers how excited and hopeful the immigrant community was back then.
MARIA’S MOM:
Mucha gente este ya festejaba…
A lot of people were already celebrating...
MARIA
She, like many others, believes there’s going to be immigration reform.
MARIA’s MOM:
Como ya casi era un hecho, pues ya de hecho estábamos tratando de ver que vamos a necesitar y todas esas cosas, papeles, etcétera…
Since it was almost a reality, we were trying to see what we’re going to need, papers, etc…
MARIA
Joel and the coalition that he helped organize decide that it’s time to take full advantage of all the political momentum.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
Entonces teníamos dinero para viajar, para ir a hoteles y hacer reuniones con toda la gente de las uniones, de las iglesias, de las organizaciones para explicarles porque era importante trabajar por una reforma migratoria y porque era importante trabajar juntos.
So we had money to travel, stay in hotels and meet with everyone who was part of the unions, churches, and organizations, to explain to them why we needed an immigration reform and why it was important to work together….
MARIA
At one point, he stops to call a friend, who is supposed to get married the next day – on September 11th.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
hi nos ibamos a ir a las torres gemelas a desayunar.
And after that, we were going to go to the Twin Towers for breakfast.
MARIA
But the friend told him the wedding was off. And so all Joel has to do is continue preparing for the march and going about his usual day-to-day work.
LUKE
And so that next morning, September 11th, Joel arrives earlier than usual to the office. It’s primary day in New York, and voters are choosing their nominees for the upcoming mayoral election. Joel’s co-workers have gone to volunteer at the polls, so the office is empty.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
Y de repente todos empezaron a llegar. Muy temprano y yo digo, [cut] “que paso?, qué paso?” y me dicen, “lo que pasa es que choco un avión en una de las torres y se suspendió todo.”
And suddenly everyone started to arrive. Very early and I say, “what happened?, what happened?” and they tell me, “what happened is that a plane crashed into one of the towers and everything was suspended.”
MARIA
So they turn on the tv.
UNIVISION CLIP
Cómo están viendo en este momento son imágenes en vivo desde Nueva York. Un avión se estrelló precisamente hoy contra una de las torres del World Trade Center.
CNN CLIP
This is just in. You are looking at an obviously very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers.
MARIA
Joel and his coworkers race to the roof of their building. They’re a little more than 2 miles away from the Twin Towers. And they can see the North tower in flames.
And then, as they’re on the terrace watching, they see the second plane hit the south tower…And Joel realizes that America is under attack.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
Y nos quedamos ahí pues con el shock, no?
And we stayed there in shock, right?
MARIA
Everyone stays to watch in terror as the two burning towers eventually collapse.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
En eso se cae la otra y decimos, “esto sí que esta tremendo.”
That’s when the other one falls and we say, “this is frightening.”
Luke
Soon, the phones in the office start ringing nonstop. It’s people from the Hispanic community trying to find their missing loved ones. They don’t know where else to turn.
All planning for the march comes to a stop.
In a matter of hours, as news of the attack spreads, Joel and his colleagues have a new mission. They turn Asociación Tepeyac into a kind of relief center. They answer calls, write down names of the missing and try to reassure panicked families fearing for their loved ones.
By the end of the day, Joel has 900 names on a list of the missing.
MARIA
Many of the people on that list were undocumented immigrants. Some families were calling from Mexico.
Tragically, some names never came off that list. Some of the missing died in the Towers.
But to the authorities, on some level, the many undocumented immigrants on Joel’s list had always been missing.
LUKE
Or maybe a better way to put it: they’d always been invisible.
For all sorts of reasons, it would be very hard to convince officials that these particular New Yorkers had died in the attacks.
We want to know: who got to be recognized as a 9/11 victim — who didn’t — and what stood in the way?
SHOE LEATHER THEME PLAYS
MARIA
This season of Shoe Leather we go back in time to the day before everything changed… Before we all became accustomed to recording major events with our iPhones, posting our opinions on Twitter, or sharing our fondest memories on the internet.
LUKE
The year is 2001. The Yankees are headed for another World Series.
ANNOUNCER
Jeter hits it into right, back… at the wall… Game over!
MARIA
We wear low-rise jeans and tracksuits. The election dominates the headlines,
VOICEOVER
I think we need bold change in this city.
MARIA
…and Fashion Week is in full force.
VOICEOVER
Leather, lace, and everything in between, it is all moving down the catwalk at Fashion Week in New York.
LUKE
This is Shoe Leather Season Three, the Day Before.
You’re listening to The Disappeared.
MARIA
I’m María Erives.
LUKE
And I’m Luke Cregan.
The Missing, the confusion, the stakes…
MARIA
Joel Magallán would spend the days, months, and years that followed the terror attacks trying to filter through his list of 900 names, trying to figure out who’d died that day and who’d survived.
In the aftermath of September 11th, there was so much confusion about who’d been in and around the Towers when they fell.
MAYOR RUDY GIULIANI
The numbers that we’re working on are in the thousands. The best estimate that we can make relying on the Port Authority and everyone else that has experience with this is that there will be a few thousand people left in each building.
MARIA
The following days didn’t bring much more clarity. A week after the attack…
ARCHIVE
The number of missing rose again to nearly five thousand one hundred.
MARIA
Eventually, the list of missing people reached as high as 7,000 names.
LUKE
Desperate friends and relatives searched the city, begging reporters for help finding their loved ones, like when this woman talked to the Associated Press, on September 13th.
WOMAN
It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack it really is, and I’m, I’m just praying that he’s gonna be fine, he’s a very strong kid, and he’s a very loving person, and they didn’t… so… we’re just hoping we’ll find him.
MARIA
There were a few reasons for all the uncertainty.
LUKE
Survivors had been taken to hospitals scattered all over the city, making it hard to keep track of who was alright.
REPORTER
And you’ve been going everywhere, it’s not just been here at the Armory, but tell me where else have you been?
WOMAN
We’ve got friends going around, going to the hospitals, [cut] we’ve been looking at all the lists on all the different websites, we’ve been calling frantically, constantly to all the different numbers, just hoping and praying that we can find him.”
LUKE
Plus back then, you couldn’t just text someone to check in on them.
That caused an incredible amount of pain and worry, including for this pair that spoke to the AP on September 12th.
YOUNG MAN
She’s one of our friends, she worked at the Trade Center, Tower One.
We haven’t heard no response from her, nothing.
LUKE
Since cell phones weren’t that common, people didn’t leave the kind of digital signatures they do now.
On top of that, fires burning under the rubble destroyed human remains. Only about 60 percent of the official victims have ever been matched to a DNA profile.
Here’s Marc Desire, an Assistant Director at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner explaining why that is to an NBC reporter.
MARK DESIRE
Everything that destroys DNA was present at Ground Zero.
LUKE
To make things even more complicated, there were some people whose families last heard from them the day before, or that morning, who you wouldn’t immediately suspect were victims of the attack.
MARIA
So Joel had his work cut out for him trying to narrow down his list of names.
There was a lot on the line for the families he was trying to help. Money from aid groups and eventually from a victim compensation fund the federal government set up. Honor, from being a victim of this awful act of terror. And closure. Closure from just knowing for sure what happened to your loved one.
But he also faced a lot of obstacles.
Many of the people Joel was trying to help were undocumented immigrants.
That made things harder. People were afraid to go to relief workers.
LUKE
Joel and family members struggled immensely to convince the authorities that these undocumented New Yorkers had died in the attacks, that they deserved the same recognition and their families were owed the same compensation as everyone else.
MARIA
In this episode we look at the extraordinary complexity of figuring out who died at the World Trade Center that day — the steps the authorities took to work out ambiguous cases of people who weren’t expected to be in the Towers or who went missing in the lead up to the attacks — and why, for some undocumented victims, recognition never came.
Juan Lafuente
MARIA
We’re here, after… a very long train ride.
LUKE
It’s a really sunny day. Trees are starting to bloom.
LUKE
When we realized this was gonna be a story about recognition, we decided we’d better go to the memorial at the World Trade Center site, to see it for ourselves.
MARIA
There’s a lot of people taking pictures in front of it, there’s still flowers and U.S. flags all over the place.
LUKE
And yeah the name of the memorial is, Reflecting Absence, and the perimeter of it is panels with these names. And then that sound of water is water coursing down from these pools under the panels and pouring down into this shallow pool about thirty feet down, and then that feeds into a second one, that you can’t even see the bottom of.
LUKE
There are close to 3,000 names on these panels. Most are for the people who died at Ground Zero on 9/11. There are a few hundred more for the people died elsewhere in the country that day as a result of the terrorist attacks. And finally, there are a few more, six to be precise, for those who died in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
MARIA
There he is, Juan Mendez Lafuente.
LUKE
The story of Juan LaFuente is the story of how the victim recognition process was supposed to work, even when there were some tricky elements.
Juan lived about an hour and half from the Trade Center, in Poughkeepsie, a city in upstate New York. He lived there with his wife, Colette, and their four daughters. And he worked as a Vice President at Citibank.
His office was on Wall Street, about ten blocks away from the Trade Center. So far as his family knew, he had no reason to be in the Towers on September 11th.
MARIA
So when Juan never showed up at work that day, and then never came home, no one knew what happened to him.
His wife filed a missing person report. A detective from Poughkeepsie eventually managed to figure out that Juan had in fact been at the World Trade Center that day, and why.
But police don’t decide whether or not a missing person is dead.
And, they also don’t get to decide who is or isn’t a 9/11 victim.
That’s up to people like James Pagones.
JAMES PAGONES
Well my full name is James, middle initial D, Pagones. I’m the retired surrogate court judge and acting supreme court justice of Dutchess county.
LUKE
Surrogate judges are pretty unique to New York State. There’s at least one for each county… and they handle wills… peoples’ inheritances. That’s the important thing to remember. They also deal with missing people.
They’re a bit of a quirk of history, dating back to when we were a British colony.
JAMES PAGONES
In New York, the governor would then appoint a judge or a surrogate to help resolve and settle matters of estates, people dying with or without wills.
LUKE
Here’s how it works:
To proceed with a will, you need a death certificate.
Typically, a hospital or funeral home or what have you will pass along the required info to local officials. Then those officials — in New York City it’s the Department of Health — will issue a death certificate. From there, the family can execute the will.
But what about when there’s no body, no funeral, no autopsy, nothing? And instead, the person is technically only missing, like Juan Lafuente?
You have to remember—that was very common with 9/11 victims. DNA analysis has only ever matched about 60% of recognized victims to any remains at Ground Zero.
So without a body, you have to convince a surrogate judge that someone should issue a death certificate.
JAMES PAGONES
An application is made by Colette Lafuente, the surviving spouse of Juan Laufente, to have him officially declared deceased as a result of being exposed to a catastrophe or an act of terror, or some other unfortunate circumstance.
MARIA
And because of the complexities of the case, like the fact that Juan didn’t work in the Towers and didn’t have an immediately obvious reason to be at the Trade Center, Judge Pagones held a hearing.
At that hearing, Poughkeepsie police were able to show that Juan had gone to an event at Windows on the World, a restaurant at the top of one of the Towers.
JAMES PAGONES
There was no other conclusion that I could draw, other than the fact that Juan took the train on September 11, went down to the World Trade Center to attend a trade show on the 106th floor of the North Tower and that unfortunately, that’s where he was.
LUKE
He declared Juan legally dead.
That was that.
The family could take that decision—a judicial determination of death—to the town clerk for a death certificate.
And so by May 2002 — less than a year after the attacks — the Lafuente family had secured a judgment that would let them access Juan’s will and that would set his name firmly on the official list of 9/11 victims.
MARIA
That meant his name would be read with hundreds of others every year on the anniversary of 9/11. That it’d eventually be carved into bronze at the memorial, and that his family would be eligible for the government’s Victim Compensation Fund.
Sneha Anne Philip
MARIA
But it wasn’t always that easy and straightforward to prove that a loved one died in the Towers. And that brings us to the next person in our story.
A doctor named Sneha Anne Phillip.
On September 10th, Sneha had the day off. Her husband, Ron Lieberman, didn’t. He left that morning for his job at a hospital in the Bronx. He was a doctor too.
RON LIEBERMAN
I kissed her, I told her I loved her… and, luckily I left my keys at home, so I went back and I got to kiss her again and that was the last time that I saw her.
MARIA
That’s Ron on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries in 2002.
The last time anyone “saw” Sneha was on security footage at a department store about a block from the World Trade Center. When she stepped out of the camera’s frame, at 7:18 pm on the night of September 10th, for all intents and purposes, she vanished. She never came home.
Now, you should know: there was nothing immediately worrying about Sneha staying out for the night. Here’s Marc Bogatin, a lawyer who helped Sneha’s husband.
MARC BOGATIN
They had both in the past had occasion to spend time on their own, nights out away from the apartment. And it was not unusual for Sneha to spend the night away, not unusual for Ron to spend the night away.
MARIA
This time, though, she never came back. That’s led to a lot of mystery around what happened to her. If you look her up you’ll see Reddit threads and true crime videos on YouTube.
HOST 1
This case is gonna center around Sneha Philip.
HOST 2
The confounding mystery…
HOST 3
She coulda met a killer that night
HOST 4
Was she a victim of foul play?
HOST 5
Was she living this double life?
HOST 6
Some Gone Girl shit.
HOST 7
Okay!
HOST 6
Literally…
HOST 7
Mhmm.
HOST 8
There’s just so many unknowns.
MARIA
There’s also an interesting podcast about her.
JON WALCZAK
From IHeartMedia, this is Missing on 9/11. The story of one woman who vanished on the eve of history, and my quest to find her.
MARIA
The podcast tries to exhaust every possible version of what could’ve happened to her after September 10th—other than the one that seems obvious—the one her family, private investigators, and the New York Police Department came to believe: that she was killed in the terror attack.
MARC BOGATIN
After that total investigation police found no evidence, no trace that she had been alive after September 11th.
MARIA
Sneha and Ron lived just two blocks from the World Trade Center. If she was coming home the next morning, she would’ve probably walked by it—or even through it. And, Sneha had mentioned to her mom that she wanted to go check out Windows on the World, that restaurant in the North Tower.
And according to Marc and the NYPD’s own records, based on all those factors that could’ve placed her at or near the Towers that morning, the police,
MARC BOGATIN
…they concluded that she must have died at the Trade Center.
MARIA
Now, normally from there, her situation would’ve been treated a lot like Juan Lafuente’s.
In both cases, law enforcement decided they must have died in the attacks.
And, like with Juan, her remains were never identified.
And so the family—not having a body—would have to go through surrogate court and ask for a declaration of death. If there was some doubt about whether she was really dead, they’d have to do a hearing, like Juan’s.
But there’s one major difference.
Unlike Juan, Sneha lived in New York City, like most of the potential victims. Because so many of those missing presumed dead lived in the five boroughs, the authorities, Mayor Giuliani and the courts set up a special process to expedite those cases.
MARC BOGATIN
They instituted a special procedure in surrogate’s court which would deal with the issue of the people who went missing on 9/11 as to whom no remains were found. It was basically one proceeding, a mass proceeding.
MARIA
That meant they were just going to go through the cases as quickly as possible. Normally, the process for a missing person could take up to three years. Instead, they’d expedite everything. Which would also mean skipping the kind of lengthy hearing Judge Pagones held for Juan Lafuente up in Dutchess County.
And then, a year and a half later, the surrogate court announced it was finished.
MARC BOGATIN
At the conclusion of the proceeding the court issued its finding that of all the thousands of people, it found they were all presumed dead at the Trade Center. [cut] The court said yes they went missing, they died at the Trade Center.
MARIA
The court made this ruling for thousands of people, about 2,400, in fact.
MARC BOGATIN
With two exceptions, there were two exceptions.
Two people who fell rather into a 3rd category.
MARIA
That third category was for cases that the surrogates decided QUOTE “do not meet the evidentiary tests but appear to have a ring of truth.” A judge wrote that she didn’t believe the two cases were frauds, but she also didn’t think there was “clear and convincing evidence” that they’d died in the Towers.
Sneha was one of them.
That meant that Ron and her family would have to do more to prove that Sneha actually died on 9/11.
LUKE
That’s where Marc came in.
MARC BOGATIN
I was hired by Ron Lieberman who had been the husband of Sneha Anne Philip.
LUKE
His job was to convince the surrogate judge that
MARC BOGATIN
That the absentee is not just absent, but is deceased.
LUKE
But it didn’t go Marc’s way.
MARC BOGATIN
Well, they found that Sneha was dead but they said no, we didn’t establish that she died at the Trade Center so the court said yeah, she’s dead, but we don’t put her at the Trade Center.
LUKE
Once again: the judge decided there wasn’t enough evidence to accept that she died in the Towers.
And so the judge set the date of Sneha’s death to September 10, 2004. Three years to the day after she went missing.
That’s common legal practice with missing person cases.
And by this point – the time the judge made that decision — it was already 2006. The window to apply for the first victim’s compensation fund, had long-since closed.
In court documents, the judge, Renee Roth, justified her ruling by pointing at some things in what she termed “Sneha’s lifestyle.” Sneha drank, she went out to lesbian bars, she and her husband sometimes spent nights apart. And Judge Roth wrote all of that is what must have led to her death, or could’ve done so as easily as anything else.
MARC BOGATIN
I was, like, flabbergasted.
LUKE
We tried to talk to Roth to understand how she reached that decision and how she and the staff of the surrogate court processed all those thousands of cases in the mass proceeding. She wasn’t interested. She told us over email that her written decisions spoke for themselves.
MARIA
In any case, that’s where Roth rested on Sneha: that her lifestyle was dangerous and could’ve gotten her killed.
So that’s the difficulty. Courts want as much proof as they can possibly get. Even a bit of ambiguity or an alternate explanation—could keep someone from being recognized as a victim.
Ron and Marc decided to appeal that ruling. Two years later, in 2008, they won.
LUKE
The judge in that case wrote, “the evidence shows it to be highly probable that she died that morning, and at that site, whereas only the rankest speculation leads to any other conclusion.”
The appeals court set Sneha’s death to September 11th. The family was able to get a death certificate listing the cause of death as the terror attack. Finally, her family was able to get the same chance for closure that Juan’s family got. And now, she’s on the memorial.
Her name, with her first name abbreviated to the pet name her family used for her, is read out loud every year on the anniversary of 9/11.
READER 1
Kevin J. Pfeifer
READER 2
Sne Anne Phillip
READER 1
Kenneth John Phelan Sr.
LUKE
But what about cases where the family could hardly convince a court their loved ones had ever existed in the first place?
That was the case with the last person in our story.
MARIA
The other person Judge Roth mentioned by name besides Sneha. The other case that had, as Roth wrote, the “ring of truth” but not enough evidence. That second name was Fernando Jimenez-Molinar.
Fernando Jimenez-Molinar
MARIA
Joel Magallán’s list of 900 missing people eventually came down to 67 names. Fernando Molinar’s was one of them.
Joel’s office is a small, cramped room near Times Square on West 38th street. The office is on the second floor and once you go in you can see three desks lined up in a row in front of a wall filled up with framed newspaper clippings detailing the organization’s accomplishments, including a few from the New York Times.
Joel was late for our interview. We both sat there wondering if we were going to have a chance to speak with him, or if he had changed his mind.
After twenty minutes, we see a man with gray hair and a serious expression on his face. It’s Joel. We introduce ourselves…
…and he leads us to the back of the room where a rectangular table takes over much of the space. We are surrounded by lots of boxes and a huge, shiny portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She’s hard to miss.
For Asociacion Tepeyac, she symbolizes the mission of the organization… to be a safe haven for immigrants in the city.
The name of the organization itself is also symbolic. Tepeyac is a region in Mexico with a special meaning.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
Tepeyac es el lugar donde los indígenas, los ancestros de México se sintieron dueños de su tierra otra vez considerados seres humanos.
Tepeyac was the place where the indigenous ancestors of Mexico felt like owners of their own land, once again recognized as human beings.
MARIA
Joel came to the U.S. in 1997 from Mexico. He holds a serious expression the entire time we’re there, but his voice is soft as he remembers the towers falling to the ground.
The smoke reached all the way to Asociacion Tepeyac.
He takes us back to that day… when he and volunteers took on the task of answering thousands of calls from families in Mexico looking for their missing loved ones.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
Les dije, bueno muchachos vamos a contestar llamadas. El 11 de septiembre fue así, de recibir información, anotar información y no saber que íbamos hacer.
I told them, “Well everyone, let’s answer calls.” September 11 was like that, receiving information, writing down information, and not knowing what we were going to do.
LUKE
The next day, three young men walk into Joel’s office.
JOEL MAGALLÁN:
Nos vinieron a decir que su compañero de apartamento, su roomie, no había regresado. No había dormido con ellos ya.
They came in to tell us that his roommate had not come back home. He had not slept in the apartment.
LUKE
The young men tell Joel that their roommate was named Fernando Molinar, that he was a pizza delivery man who worked near the World Trade Center and that he hadn’t been home since the attack.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
Pedimos que nos dejaran un numero de telefono de ellos y dijeron, “No nosotros regresamos porque…” Yo recuerdo que insisti. Dijeron, “Nosotros todos los que vivimos en el apartamento estamos sin papeles, no queremos ninguna investigación, no queremos que vaya nadie ni que sepan de nosotros ni nada.”
We asked them to leave a phone number and they told us, “No, we will return because…” I remember insisting. They said, “ Everyone that lives in the apartment doesn’t have papers, we do not want any investigation, we don’t want anyone to go see us, or to know anything about us.”
LUKE
That was the first and last time Joel saw them.
A week later, he gets a call from Nora Elsa Molina. She lives in Oaxaca, Mexico and she’s looking for her son, Fernando.
Nora tells Joel that on the morning of the attacks she was waiting for a weekly phone call from her son. But he never called.
And he didn’t call the next day or the day after that.
After Nora sees the towers fall on TV…
ARCHIVAL TAPE
…in desperation, she goes to the office of External Affairs in Oaxaca – that’s the office that oversees Mexico’s foreign embassies and consulates, hoping she can find a way to contact him. She knows her son worked near the towers…he often told her about going to the towers to deliver pizza. So, she fears her son was there during the attacks.
But, staff at the office tell her she is lying – lying in order to get money from charity and relief organizations.
MARIA
When she leaves the building crying, a tourist from New York notices her. She gives Nora the number for Asociacion Tepeyac. Nora immediately calls them and is able to speak with Joel. Joel remembers her saying,
JOEL MAGALLÁN
“Fui a la secretaría de relaciones exteriores, a la oficina de relaciones exteriores de méxico aquí en Oaxaca y me maltrataron mucho. Me dijeron que que estaba buscando si lo que quería era que le dieran dinero, que eso era una mentira, que podrían acusar, que no lo hiciera.
I went to the secretary of external relations, the office in Mexico here in Oaxaca and they mistreated me. They asked me what I wanted and that if I wanted money, that it was all a lie…
MARIA
She tells him that her son had arrived in the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant when he was 16 years old. The only photo his mom had of him was of when he was 14. Since then, he had changed a lot. He was now 22.
Still, Joel gives the case to one of his volunteers. He remembers telling them,
JOEL MAGALLÁN
I assign this case to you as a mission impossible.
Te asigno este caso como mission impossible.
MARIA
The volunteer went around to different pizza places near the World Trade Center, asking if anyone could confirm whether Fernando had worked there.
Employers looked at the photo of 14-year-old Fernando, with his shabby hair and his child-like face, and told them that they did not employ children.
It was a dead end.
But Joel didn’t give up just yet, and he wasn’t the only one looking for Fernando, or the other immigrant workers were reported missing.
LUKE
The Consulate of Mexico in New York had come up with their own list, which they had compiled through their own outreach to the Mexican community in the city. They had 16 names on their list.
Things were tricky for the consulate. On the one hand, people were desperate for help. But on the other, they were afraid. They also didn’t want anyone to discover they were undocumented, and not everyone trusted the Mexican government.
So Asociacion Tepeyac became the middle man between the Consulate and the community.
MARIA
And we should say as well, the consulate and Joel carefully vetted people who came to them saying they’d lost a loved one in the attack. The consulate was extremely confident in its list of 16 people.
LUKE
The Consulate took on the job of communicating with family members back in Mexico, writing down any information they could about the missing. But that was complicated, because back in Mexico, families weren’t sure if their loved ones even lived in New York and some hadn’t spoken to them in years.
For the most part, those families would never get answers.
Of the consulate’s list, only 5 names would end up in the official 9/11 death count. Fernando was one of the people left out.
Joel Magallan tells us that he invited Nora Elsa Molina to New York City every year. He remembers she would always say,
JOEL MAGALLÁN
Yo no quiero dinero, no quiero ayuda en nada. Lo unico que quiero es un recuerdo de mi hijo. No quiero sus cosas, quiero si alguien tiene una camiseta, algo que haya dejado mi hijo, una foto o algo. Quiero tener una memoria de mi hijo.
“I don’t want money, I don’t want any kind of help. The only thing I want is an item, if anyone has a shirt, something my son had left, a picture or something. I want to have a memory of my son”
LUKE
She eventually stopped coming. Joel says he hasn’t spoken to her in many years. We couldn’t find her for this story.
In 2011, though, the Mexican Consulate organized their own ceremony in honor of Mexican victims. They read out 16 names, including Fernando’s.
Why did Magallán and Tepeyac struggle so much?
ALEXANDRA DÉLANO ALONSO
They had organized a small ceremony [in] a waiting room. It’s not a very big space.
MARIA
That’s Alexandra Délano Alonso, a professor at the New School, a small university in downtown Manhattan. Among other things, she studies migration and the U.S.-Mexico border.
ALEXANDRA DÉLANO ALONSO
There were black plastic chairs laid out for people to sit in front of a Mexican flag that was found among the remains of the World Trade Center. And some of the family members spoke. It was a, it was a somber ceremony but it also felt like a very important moment where, where people were gathering to commemorate the, the victims of 9/11, and particularly the Mexican victims, with a deep awareness that maybe, there were many who could not be there.
But then I compared that list of 16 names with the list of Mexican victims that are on the 911 Memorial and only five of those names were on the memorial.
MARIA
Naturally, that made Alexandra wonder… if the Mexican consulate is honoring 16 victims, why are there only five Mexican names on the official memorial?
That question led Alexandra to a colleague.
BENJAMIN NIENASS
I am Benjamin Nienass and I am an associate professor in the department of political science and law at Montclair State University.
LUKE
He studies memory—not the brain science of it, but the big issues about how communities choose to remember the past.
BENJAMIN NIENASS
Yes, Alexandra approached me with this question [cut] and so the two of us began to look into it together and basically through a framework of the politics of memory.
LUKE
This was totally in Ben’s wheelhouse.
BENJAMIN NIENASS
It immediately intrigued me to basically look into this together with Alexandra because we came at it from slightly different angles and different disciplines.
LUKE
Armed with their expertise, they dug into the question of why some Mexican names didn’t make it onto the memorial. Months later, they published their research as an academic paper. The title was Invisible Victims: Undocumented Migrants and the Aftermath of September 11th.
Based on that title and what you’ve heard about Joel work, their findings probably won’t surprise you too much: they found that a number of victims — at least 10, but maybe as many as a few dozen — weren’t included on the official victims list because they were undocumented.
MARIA
And, on the surface, the reasons they didn’t get counted seem pretty straightforward:
The first thing the government looked at for recognizing victims was records of who worked at the Towers – naturally, not many undocumented immigrants appear on pay sheets and when they do, it’s usually not their real names.
ALEXANDRA DÉLANO ALONSO
They would have forged identification cards or have been using a borrowed social security number if they had had any identification at all.
MARIA
There was also the complicating factor that many of the families themselves were undocumented. And that also meant they lived with this constant fear.
ALEXANDRA DÉLANO ALONSO
Fear that any encounter with a public institution could lead to an encounter with the police or with immigration authorities that could lead to deportation, detention, family separation.
MARIA
And that, in turn, made them less likely to talk to relief workers–even sympathetic ones. Remember what Fernando’s roommates told Joel Magallán? that they were afraid about going to the authorities?
LUKE
One of the things that Alexandra and Ben found though is that the authorities were aware of these challenges facing migrant families as they tried to get their loved ones recognized.
BENJAMIN NIENASS
Generally speaking, both on the city, state and federal government level, offices were actually pretty open of acknowledging how hard it was for undocumented workers and undocumented migrants to fulfill those conditions. But that didn’t necessarily translate into easing any of these conditions of establishing your identity.
When bodies couldn’t be found, DNA matches couldn’t be established, when it was so clear that a death certificate was often impossible to to get for some of the undocumented workers. [cut] Why not be a little more, a little more flexible when it comes to that?
LUKE
Ben wonders: if you couldn’t do that for the compensation fund, then why not at least for the memorial?
BENJAMIN NIENASS
Why would the memorial necessarily have to apply similarly stringent logics of evidence?
Alexandra’s been wondering about that, too, ever since the ceremony she went to at the consulate 11 years ago.
ALEXANDRA DÉLANO ALONSO
They read out loud these names of these 16 victims and the consul very emphatically said, “And many others, that we may not know of.”
And for me that made sense. It was clear that we wouldn’t know.
That we could never know.
LUKE
The National 9/11 Memorial has a precise number of names carved in bronze.
There’s no inscription that says “and others” or “the unknown.”
And so,
BENJAMIN NIENASS
Undocumented workers [cut] were made doubly absent if you will, once during their lives and then once in the memorial.
LUKE
Ben says that just as the state that failed to recognize their existence, it failed to recognize their deaths.
The Aftermath…
LUKE
Remember, there was hope in the days just before 9/11 that some kind of immigration reform could actually happen. But after 9/11…
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
This government is taking unprecedented measures to protect our people and defend our homeland. We’ve intensified security at the borders and ports of entry.
LUKE
The U.S. government had new priorities.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 takes the next critical steps in defending our country.
LUKE
Vowing to never let a tragedy like 9/11 happen again, the government created the Department of Homeland Security–and ICE–the immigration enforcement agency.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
We have a responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility seriously.
LUKE
The focus turned to protecting–and locking down–America’s borders
MARIA
María: And so … that hope for immigration reform ended after 9/11. My mom remembers it.
Maria’s Mom
Y ya después pues en los primeros meses creo que hubo como un silencio de parte del gobierno. Ya jamás se volvió a hablar de la como si no hubieran hablado nunca de la reforma migratoria.
And later in the first months I think there was silence from the government. They never talked about it again as if they had never talked about immigration reform before.
MARIA
And as for Joel, that march he’d spent so much time organizing … never happened.
JOEL MAGALLÁN
I told myself from the beginning, I’m going to stay in New York until we get immigration reform because I always had hope… Now I don’t have the hope that we’ll ever get immigration reform.
Yo dije desde el principio, me vou a quedar en Nuva York hasta que ganemos la reforma migratoria porque siempre tuve la esperanza…Ahora ya no tengo la esperanza de que haiga una reforma migratoria.
————————–
—fin—
OUTRO and CREDITS
Shoe Leather is a production of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. This episode was reported, written, and produced by, me, María Fernanda Erives and, me, Luke Cregan.
Joanne Faryon is our executive producer and professor. Rachel Quester and Peter Leonard are our co-professors. Special thanks to Columbia Digital Librarian Michelle Wilson, Professor Dale Maharidge, Jon Walczak, Mark Desire, Hugo Kugiya, Kenneth Feinberg, Camille Biros, Judge David Saxe, Kenneth Womack, Kim Sulik, Julie Bolcer, Grant Kinsaul, and Jack Talty.
Shoe Leather’s theme music – ‘SqueeJees’ – is by Ben Lewis, Doron Zounes, and Camille Miller, remixed by Peter Leonard.
Other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Our Season three graphic was created by me, Maria Fernanda Erives.
To learn more about Shoe Leather and this episode go to our website shoeleather.org.