Late-night texts, secret jobs, constant fear: Inside an undocumented worker’s life in the shadows and a new federal program that could change her life

With a black garbage bag wrapped around her waist and shower caps on her shoes, Jane readies herself for a day of cleaning. The assignment is a small room in a west Toronto seniors home; inside, a dusty aquarium sits empty in a corner and a painting of a burnt-orange forest hangs upside down on the wall. Amid the chaos is a mattress that has been stood on its side, its seams black with blood and bedbug refuse.

Today, for $15 cash — just below minimum wage — Jane will wrap these items in plastic and dump them in the trash.

This relatively well-kept, city-run facility is one of the best places she’s sent to work, says Jane. Two weeks prior, at a different building, she was groped by a resident as she cleaned his room.

Jane’s temp agency gig as a cleaner is a survival job. Her dream is to be a caregiver; she is qualified as a personal support worker. But while she sees this as her calling, her status as an undocumented worker has stifled her ability to pursue it as a career.

That could soon change.

On Parliament Hill, a new measure is under development that may offer permanent residency to an as-yet unknown number of the country’s estimated 500,000 undocumented residents.

It could be one of the broadest initiatives in Canada’s history — granting status to those often staffing low-wage, front-line jobs in caregiving, farming and factories.

Undocumented workers and their families are at greater risk of exploitation and poor health, research shows. While they perform essential work that keeps cities running, most people rarely get a glimpse into the isolation and chronic stress endemic to these roles.

That is precisely why Jane feels it’s important to provide a window into her world.

The Star is not using Jane’s full name because she is currently at risk of deportation. Whether she is a beneficiary of Ottawa’s regularization program will depend on the scale and scope of what is ultimately implemented. A spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada said those details are not yet available.

The ways in which people like Jane end up trapped in the so-called underground economy are complex.

The seeds of their journeys are often sown in faraway places years, if not decades, before workers and their families ever arrive here. In thousands of cases every year, Canadian authorities ultimately rule there are no credible grounds to allow them to stay.

Many, like Jane, make the decision to stay anyway. After that, life moves into the shadows. The Star cannot independently verify some elements of Jane’s story but has spent hours interviewing her, reviewing her immigration files, and spending time with her on the job.

“I may be undocumented,” says Jane. “But I am able and willing.”

Jane arrived in Toronto in March 2017. Her first stop was a Holiday Inn, the recommendation of a friendly airport taxi driver. The stay burned up her money in four days. Jane remembers checking out in tears.

Growing up in a family of 12 siblings in rural Uganda, Jane describes her childhood, for the most part, as a “lovely” one. But when she was 26, her father died — forcing her to move to the capital city, Kampala, to live with relatives. There, her family became frustrated that she was still unmarried.

They didn’t know she had covertly begun a relationship with a woman named Maureen, who she’d met at a YMCA study group. Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda, and can be punished by life imprisonment and in some cases the death penalty.

In 2010, when she was around 30, Jane says her uncle forced her into an arranged marriage. The relationship was toxic. She began missing work due to physical and sexual abuse at home and says she eventually lost her job at a small publishing company. She kept much of her domestic life from her family.

“In my culture … you don’t disclose everything to everyone,” she says.

Nonetheless, Jane’s close relationship with Maureen aroused suspicion. In 2014, Maureen’s father, a member of the Ugandan army, sent men to threaten Jane. Her husband also grew increasingly abusive, she says, culminating in him throwing her down the stairs.

“You need to run away from him,” she remembers Maureen telling her.

In late 2016, Maureen gave Jane money to put toward a plane ticket to Toronto and helped her fill out an application for a tourist visa to visit a distant relative.

As her partner drove her to the international airport just south of Kampala, Jane remembers feeling overwhelmed with worry. The trip meant a glimpse at freedom. But its outcome was far from certain.

“I was scared,” she says. “I didn’t know what to expect.”

Checking out of the Holiday Inn left Jane at loose ends. Her distant family member in Toronto knew nothing of her struggles back home, and Jane says she felt she’d violated the relative’s trust by accepting their invitation to visit Canada. In the coming months, rather than return to Kampala, she would seek refugee status here.

Instead of contacting the relative, Jane decided to hover outside College Station, praying a stranger would help. She’d never taken a train before. When she noticed a passerby offer up a smile, instinct said: approach them.

The stranger accompanied her onto the subway, and took her somewhere that could at least provide a roof over her head. It was the start of a year in Toronto’s shelter system — where nearly a third of residents are refugee claimants, according to city data.

The environment was often chaotic. Jane’s roommates were sometimes battling substance abuse; other times, they’d hurl racial slurs at her. Nonetheless, she threw herself into establishing a routine: volunteering in the kitchen, serving food, and cleaning.

“They’re giving you a roof over your head,” she says. “You either embrace it, or you walk away.”

Her plan was to claim asylum based on her sexual orientation and violent marriage, and by May 2017, she had put together an application. She was, she believed, on a path to stay permanently in Canada. She was granted a temporary work permit. She landed a six-month gig as a procurement officer at an organic food company, and after that, took up a role at a non-profit providing support to isolated children and seniors.

She also enrolled in a medical administration program, which she hoped would propel a career in the care sector.

But her refugee claim would ultimately leave her thousands of dollars in debt — and place her future in limbo.

Jane tossed and turned in the shelter room she shared with five others. It was the night before her first refugee hearing in July 2017, and her appearance coincided with distressing news from back home: one of Jane’s siblings had died, sending her into a tailspin of sadness and anxiety.

The hearing venue had the officious air of a courtroom, and Jane was going in with mixed odds. Typically, just over 60 per cent of refugee claims in Canada are successful. But the outcomes can vary significantly, data shows, based on who is presiding over the case, what kind of documentation claimants can muster and the quality of their representation amid strained Legal Aid resources.

Jane did not opt for an interpreter, which she would later regret. She remembers struggling to keep up with proceedings, disoriented by what felt like an onslaught of questions from the board.

“Give her a breather,” she remembers her lawyer pleading. “Let her think, let her talk.”

The immigration board’s decision was scathing. The ruling said Jane’s evidence was not credible, and said the documentation she had provided — including her marriage certificate — was fraudulent. There were also large gaps in her communication with Maureen, the decision noted, and Jane had struggled to answer key questions about her former partner’s father, though he was allegedly one of the “main agents” in their persecution.

Jane felt stunned. She had already provided a letter of support from the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, as well as medical records from 2016, when she says her husband threw her down the stairs, detailing bruises, soft tissue injuries and a “deep cut” wound.

But compiling evidence from Uganda had been a struggle. She says when an aunt asked her husband to hand over original marriage documents, he flew into a rage. Maureen had provided an affidavit attesting to her past relationship with Jane, but communication had been difficult to maintain: the partnership had floundered under family pressures and, eventually, physical distance, says Jane.

She borrowed money to appeal. The decision came back in 2018. Like three-quarters of appeals that year, Jane’s was denied. A judicial review of the decision was also unsuccessful. By the end of the process, Jane had spent around $30,000 to fund her efforts to stay in Canada. Now she was at risk of deportation.

With her failed bid for residency in Canada, Jane had lost her ability to work legally. She would no longer have access to formal jobs or health care; using any kind of social service now came with the fear of apprehension.

She also felt she had nothing to go back to in Uganda. Most of her family there had stopped talking to her. If she returned, she says, she feared her husband would kill her.

There was only one place left to go: underground.

Jane sits in Square One’s bustling food court, a pit stop on her way back from a cleaning job. Around her, happy deal hunters are out in droves. Jane is struggling to feel festive.

Two days before Christmas, a man threatened her with a knife as she cleaned his apartment. It’s not the first time she’s encountered hostility on the job. But she says the incident forced her and her temp agency co-workers to flee the building, leaving her deeply shaken.

“Something came over me and I saw my life has come to an end,” she says. “I was in a dark, dark place.”

Jane has never sought help for these workplace risks; officially reporting violence, she feels, would bring her in too close contact with government authorities.

While Jane makes use of community health clinics that provide free care to the uninsured, those services are stretched. Two years ago, Jane suddenly began experiencing painful heart palpitations. She wanted to call an ambulance, but the cost — and fear of subsequent expenses — were prohibitive. She took Advil instead.

Jane eventually recovered. When uninsured Ontarians do show up at hospital, they are three times more likely than other residents to be suffering from mental health issues, research shows. They are 39 per cent more likely to need urgent triaging. They are also more likely to die.

In the six years since Jane’s refugee claim was first denied, she’s relied on friends and “Good Samaritans” to connect to a stream of under-the-table jobs. Her work depends on her employers asking for little in the way of personal information.

At first, Jane landed a stint as a live-in caregiver to an elderly Hamilton resident, the type of work she aspires to do. But these roles are hard to get, since she can’t formally apply.

The Hamilton job ended when her client was admitted to a nursing home. Jane signed up with a temp agency that sent her to clean ritzy Toronto homes. When that work dried up, she signed on with an agency to clean non-profit or city-administered care homes, community housing, retirement residences — the places where COVID struck hardest.

Each night, Jane waits for a 10 p.m. text message from her temp agency telling her where to deploy the next day. Some days, the commute will take nearly two hours each way.

There have been many times since losing status that Jane has felt almost incapable of going on. No one would choose this life, she says, except out of extreme necessity.

Her fractured familial relationships mean in moments of crisis, like the knife threat, she has not confided in her mother. That “really broke my heart,” says Jane. Undocumented workers are more likely to “present signs of trauma, chronic stress and depression from family separation,” according to a Toronto Public Health report.

Jane has a sibling who followed her to Canada. Her sister’s refugee claim was accepted, setting the two women on vastly different trajectories. Though her sister is a source of comfort, Jane can’t participate in activities such as family trips. Her sister has built a life Jane can, for now, only dream of.

One thing, Jane feels, has helped: connecting with others like her.

That is why, on a grey January day, she is back in Hamilton bundled in a dark brown puffy coat. A crowd has gathered for a rally and white flags emblazoned with the logo of the city’s local steel union, once North America’s largest, flutter in the wind.

On the mic are a different set of workers: a caregiver, who could soon be removed from the country, even though his wife and children are Canadian citizens. A chef facing imminent deportation to Kenya, and his compatriot, an HVAC technician. A cleaner who lost status when her study permit was rejected.

“These people gave me courage,” says Jane.

Workers like those gathered in Hamilton typically come to Canada legally, research suggests. A survey by the Migrant Rights Network found most undocumented residents initially arrived as asylum seekers, like Jane, or migrant workers. They fall through the cracks when refugee claims fail or temporary work permits are terminated.

“People being undocumented is a historic failure of immigration policy itself,” says Syed Hussan, executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change. “Regularization is about fixing those mistakes.”

Standing outside downtown Hamilton’s hulking Sheraton hotel, Jane knows Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet ministers are within, on a three-day retreat. The aim is to tackle the growing affordability crisis and “seize new opportunities for Canadian workers and businesses.”

Those demonstrating here say regularizing undocumented workers speaks directly to those issues. They say it will push up wages, improve economic productivity and increase tax revenues. South of the border, where an amnesty program is also under debate, modelling shows the move would increase U.S. GDP by up to $1.7 trillion over the next decade.

In Canada, jobs — particularly working class jobs — are going unfilled. While the undocumented population here is much smaller, advocates believe an expansive regularization initiative could help address that issue, resulting in an extra $1 billion remitted in income tax and mandatory contributions like employment insurance.

If done right, advocates add, an amnesty program could lift hundreds of thousands of people out of chronic fear, ill health, and poverty — practically overnight.

Past amnesty measures have been too narrow and their eligibility criteria too restrictive, critics feel. In 2021, Jane applied for one such initiative – the “Guardian Angel” program, which granted status to some refugee claimants and failed asylum seekers who worked in health care during the pandemic. Jane’s application was denied.

After the rejection, her lawyer wrote to the immigration ministry in protest, noting that Jane had worked “tirelessly during COVID-19” supporting someone’s elderly mother. She had changed diapers, cooked, cleaned, done laundry and ensured weekly hospital appointments were met.

“This lady would have died alone in that house if Jane had not provided good care to her.”

One month later came the ministry response.

“Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be added to the information that was provided to your client,” it said. “Their application did not meet the requirements.”

This time, Jane hopes, will be different.

Sara Mojtehedzadeh is a Toronto-based reporter covering work and wealth on the Star’s investigations team. Follow her on Twitter: @saramojtehedz