Don’t be afraid. God will protect you.
Standing in the aisle of a soaring evangelical church in Waltham, Claudia Pacheco clutched a box of tissues one night in December as the pastor repeated the words. Nearby, a man trembled. Others bowed their heads. Some wept.
The diminutive house cleaner has everything to fear, and the last few weeks have tested her faith in unimaginable ways. Masked gunmen killed her brother, Selvin, in Honduras and lit his body on fire, weeks after he sent his teenage son to Claudia to protect. And Claudia is in America on the thinnest of threads, a work permit that expires 10 days before Donald Trump takes office.
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Hers is one of millions of lives that will hang in the balance when Trump becomes president on Jan. 20, after a campaign in which he threatened to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, including 210,000 in Massachusetts. He also vowed to stop granting work permits to undocumented immigrants brought here when they were children.
For Trump and his supporters, the issue was black and white: Either you’re here legally, or you aren’t.
But families like Claudia’s don’t fit neatly inside those boundaries. Many came legally but with only temporary permission to stay; they built a life, and now fear losing it. Many are US citizens, but worry about family and friends at risk because they are not. Others have put down deep roots in America, working hard and well and earning respect, but have no permission to be here at all.
Claudia, who has devoted herself to holding her family together, has a work permit but nothing to permanently bind her to the United States after nearly 14 years in this country. Her daughter is a US citizen, her nephew from Honduras is seeking asylum, and her aunt is undocumented, so anxious that she is afraid to go outside.
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After his election, Trump acknowledged families like hers, otherwise law-abiding immigrants who work hard and would apply for US citizenship if given the chance. He called them “terrific people” and said he would decide what to do with them after first deporting immigrants with criminal records.
Now Claudia and others are left to wonder: Will the next United States president see her with the eyes of her clients in Boston and Wellesley, who trust her with the keys to their houses? Or will he force her to leave the country she loves?
“I’m 100 percent sure that being here is a gift from God,” Claudia, 30, said sitting on her couch one recent night ticking off her blessings — her home, her family, her cleaning business. In Honduras, she said, “I was nobody. I know it’s nothing for most people, but for me, it’s a triumph. It’s the greatest thing.”
Claudia, her husband, Eriberto, and their family live in a weathered blue house in an alley hard by the Massachusetts Turnpike in a Boston neighborhood barely visible to the drivers rushing by. The air throbs with the roar of tires hitting pavement. The drivers are heading west, toward the well-tended suburbs of Wayland and Newton. Soon Claudia will join them in her SUV.
C&B Fabulous Cleaning is always ready to work.
The C stands for Claudia and the B is in honor of Brittany, her only child, a sharp 10-year-old girl who loves tiaras, reading, and making cinnamon tea. She has already declared that she wants a trip to Paris instead of a quinceañera when she turns 15. She is in the fourth grade.
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Claudia never made it that far in school. When she was a toddler in Honduras, her mother left Claudia with her grandparents. They sent her to work in the fields after second grade and beat her if she disobeyed them. At 11, Claudia went to live with a cousin who cleaned houses in the city.
At 14, she and her best friend left for Mexico with dreams of working in the United States.
Claudia has many frightening stories she will never tell her daughter, but friends say Claudia has always been fearless. She hitched a ride on a train in Mexico, charging aboard as her friend froze. She cleaned houses in Mexico for two years while her friend raised the money to pay a smuggler to bring her to the United States. Later she applied for, and received, a work permit in hopes of one day getting permanent residency, but the status of her case is unclear.
“I was never afraid. I knew I had to defend myself,” she said. “I’ve been through terrible things.”
On a typical day, the lights flicker on before dawn in the blue house in the alley in Allston.
Claudia, wearing exercise clothes, drops off Brittany at a Boston elementary school and makes sure she is safely inside. Then she swings by the Nice Life Nutrition Center, a tiny green shake shop in Allston decorated with Christmas trees and colored lights. “Jingle Bells” plays on the sound system. Everyone kisses hello.
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The owner, Nilda Aguilar, tired of low pay, started her own business selling nutritional supplements. Some question their food value, but she rolls her eyes and whips out fliers in English featuring testimonials from American doctors. And she points to the wall, where Claudia and others are pictured under “Healthy Results.”
Claudia fears scams, but she is also worried about her weight. And in the past few months she has lost 20 pounds drinking tea and “cookies ’n cream” shakes. In the photo she is wearing too-big shorts after losing the weight.
“You get very fat in this country,” Nilda says from behind the counter.
The tea gives Claudia energy for the long days and nights.
She spends days wiping dust from picture frames, fluffing sofa cushions, mopping and folding, and vacuuming until the house smells like fresh sheets. She folds the toilet paper as if she were at a hotel.
“You need to make sure everything is perfect,” she said. “Because they pay so that it is perfect.”
After work, Claudia spends two to three hours a night at church or in GED class puzzling over words like “arachnophobia.”
She is determined to earn a high school diploma, though it could take years. She speaks English, but reads at a grammar school level.
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When she first came to America, she cleaned five houses a day for a total of $80. Trying to strike out on her own, in 2009 Claudia paid thousands to a cleaner to take over her business. But the cleaner never told her clients that Claudia was the new owner, and Claudia lost their business and all of her money.
Even now, with a steady list of clients, Claudia Pacheco is vulnerable.
Over the summer, a notorious landlord in Boston hired her to clean dozens of apartments being vacated by college students. She and a team of cleaners wiped vomit from sinks, mopped dirt-caked floors, and filled garbage bags with debris. Then he refused to pay, until Claudia asked the Globe to investigate. She recovered $7,000.
Also last summer, Claudia got a phone call from Honduras. Her brother, Selvin Rivera, was sending his 16-year-old son, Elvin, to Boston.
Selvin was older, a half brother, but he and Claudia grew close after she moved to America. He had worked in Seattle and sent her money when she had nothing. Selvin was born with a deformed foot but had made the dangerous trip across the border to America, to work and send money home to his family.
When people tried to take advantage of him, Selvin would say that he had a problem with his foot, not his brain.
Still, he was always loaning people money or tools; often, he didn’t get them back.
In 2013, he returned home to his small picturesque village along the blue waters of Lake Yojoa, Honduras’s largest lake. He was tired of worrying about his legal status and missed his family. He wanted to start his own businesses in farming and real estate, and try to make his country better.
Residents often complained that the Honduran government ignored the village’s potential as a tourist destination. Instead, gangs were overrunning the place. Honduras is now a major corridor for running cocaine from South America to the United States, according to the secretary of state’s office, and it has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Most homicide cases are never solved.
Selvin feared the gang members, but he tried to be friendly. He smiled and waved at them on the street. When they asked him for money, he paid.
But then they asked for thousands of dollars, and Selvin refused.
On Nov. 10, Selvin and a small crew of workers had just set off in his truck from his home when masked gang members ambushed them, according to accounts of the attack from police, media, and family in Honduras. They shot and killed Selvin and an assistant, and then set Selvin’s body and truck on fire. Relatives sent Claudia a video of the truck in flames. A woman can be heard screaming.
Selvin’s death shattered Claudia, but she was determined not let it destroy her family; she wanted them to pull together in spite of it all.
Life would continue: Elvin would go to school. The family would go to church. There would be Thanksgiving dinner and a Christmas tree and her daughter Brittany’s birthday party.
Some thought she would cancel the party, but after her brother’s death, it seemed more necessary than ever. She prodded Elvin to attend.
But he was not there that chilly night when her family and friends came together to transform a drab conference room in Brighton into a Parisian wonderland, with black and pink balloons, frilly tablecloths, and Eiffel Tower figurines.
Children wore masks and posed for photos behind a frame in the corner, with pink cake frosting on their fingers.
Despite the festive decorations, the fact of Trump’s victory weighed heavily on the guests.
“This is not God’s fault,” a construction worker from Guatemala said of the election results and Trump’s threat to deport immigrants. “That’s our fault. We haven’t had the courage to stand up for ourselves like children of God. We’ve been hiding. We haven’t shown them who we are.”
Claudia barely stopped to say a word. She raced around in a red dress and four-inch heels, making sure everyone had something to eat, while Eriberto, a construction worker, snapped pictures.
At the children’s table, Brittany chatted with her friends in English and twirled in a pink gauzy dress. Her friends from church have suggested that Claudia have more children, but she wants to focus on being a good mother to the one she has — taking the time and taking her to dance classes, swimming, and gymnastics.
“It’s a great responsibility,” she says.
Elvin finally arrived as they were taking down the decorations. He popped a few balloons to help clean up and teased Brittany. But his heart was not in it. The day before, police had arrested two men in his father’s murder.
Claudia’s Aunt Janet wrapped Elvin in a long hug.
“I miss my dad so much,” he wailed.
A few weeks later, Claudia rushed to a lawyer’s office in Boston. She had enrolled Elvin in school, helped his mother and younger brother go into hiding in Honduras, and pressed police there to investigate the case.
But deadlines loom: Elvin has a year to apply for asylum and Claudia has to renew her work permit before it expires on Jan. 10. That permit was good for a year.
“Do it now,” lawyer Talia Barrales said.
For years, Claudia Pacheco’s life had seemed full of possibilities. She fills her Facebook page with Bible verses and inspirational phrases like, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” and “Do you want to be successful? Get up and go to work.”
But, with the inauguration just weeks away, everything suddenly seems endangered.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“I’m afraid of what is going to happen,” she said.
Maria Sacchetti can be reached at maria.sacchetti@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @mariasacchetti.