“Are you documented?”
Felicia, a nanny in New York City, hasn’t gotten the question in 20 years of work. But since President Donald Trump took office, potential employers now want to know.
She never tells them she lacks permanent legal status. “I am not going to disclose that information. I don’t feel comfortable doing this,” she offers. But each time, it rattles her.
The past year has reshaped what it means to be a domestic worker in the United States. Few sectors of the workforce have a higher concentration of people living in the country without authorization, and almost all of them are women of color.
From inside their employers’ homes, these workers — nannies, home cleaners and health aides — have watched attitudes on immigration shift to the right. They know some of the people who employ them may be the very people who want them out of the country.
And their employers know these jobs are among the only ones this group of workers can rely on to stay afloat.
Felicia, whose name The 19th changed to protect her identity, said workers live in fear of going out, of their employers, of each other, even. In this climate, who can you trust?
“None of us know which party people support. When you come to work in the household of someone, you don’t know that,” she said. “Because of what’s going on right now I choose what to say and what not to say to people. I do not give too much information because I don’t know. Even a casual question could be a set-up.”
The explosion in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations has led to a rise in wage theft, abuse and disrespect, domestic workers across the country told The 19th under condition of anonymity to speak openly about their work. Employers are lowering pay, and they’re asking workers to do more for less. Jobs, they say, are take it or leave it.
It’s now common for a worker to ask for a raise and be told they’re just lucky to have a job, said Rosa Lozano, director of immigration campaigns at the National Domestic Workers Alliance. But legally, employers can’t ask directly about immigration status as a condition of employment.
“Employers use immigration status to threaten workers,” Lozano said, but workers tend to keep quiet about the abuses for fear of being deported.
In the alliance’s biweekly surveys — which have been conducted since 2020 and include thousands of Spanish-speaking domestic workers, most of them cleaners — there is evidence of this shift since Trump returned to office. At the start of 2025, the alliance began asking workers specifically whether they were treated disrespectfully at work. At the start of last year, about 32 percent of workers said they sometimes or regularly were. By the end of the year the figure was 38 percent.
As employer relationships came under strain, so did the economy, making workers’ lives even more reliant on keeping their jobs. The share of underemployed workers — those working fewer hours than they wanted — rose from 64 percent at the start of 2025 to 72 percent by the end of it, while the share of workers who said they couldn’t pay their rent or mortgage on time rose to 62 percent toward the end of 2025 — the highest level since the alliance began tracking worker conditions. Food insecurity among domestic workers hit 88 percent in the third quarter of 2025. And though some of those measures improved at the start of 2026, they all remain high. About 50 percent of domestic workers are still reporting poor psychological well-being — the same rate as early 2025.
“We have made a lot of strides in raising standards and elevating the dignity of this work for the people that do it. [Now] it feels like a lot of that is rolling backwards,” Lozano said. “In the immigrant rights movement there was this big coming out of the shadows piece, and folks are now coming back into the shadows and trying to hide.”
Felicia’s work has shifted drastically in the past year. She used to pack lunchboxes to the brim for a full day out at parks and bookstores. Now she packs a couple snacks for quick trips out with the kids she cares for, always looking over her shoulder. She has a plan if ICE shows up: turn the stroller away so the baby doesn’t see her taken; call the parents right away. “Make sure you don’t try to make it look like you’re running,” she said.
Since the pandemic, Felicia had already been doing less full-time nannying work during the day. But in the past year, she has shifted to predominantly overnight newborn care in part to avoid being out during the day as much as she can. She takes on even fewer part-time nanny gigs now. Bills are piling up.
It’s not that Felicia is unqualified for work; rather, it’s a risk assessment.
“I’m pretty sure if I look for a full-time position, I will get it because I’m experienced, certified. But do I want to put myself in that situation, take that risk? No,” she said.
Not only do nanny jobs require her to put her trust in a new set of strangers, but parents also often want her to be out in the city with kids.
“Before ICE came about … we nannies, we used to work comfortably. There are nannies that are leaving their jobs altogether,” she said. “Being in a job that you love for such a long time, and having fear make you feel so uncomfortable where you just leave — it’s sad.”
This year, as their employers became less flexible or outright exploitative, domestic workers also grew increasingly fearful that they could be detained at a traffic stop or that their family could get snatched up while shopping. Keeping work and life separate became impossible when one started to impact the other.
Lisa, a domestic worker in Austin, Texas, lived it.
In August 2025, her 25-year-old son — who was studying criminology at the University of North Texas and had lived in the United States since he was 5 — was deported to Honduras, a country he has no memory of. With no family there, he is alone navigating a nation plagued by violence.
“He has highs and lows,” she said in Spanish. “Sometimes he tells me, ‘I’m sorry but I no longer want to live.’”
Lisa — whose name has been changed for this story — cleans homes, cares for children and works as a home health aide, work that requires her to travel often. But she must now take extra care to stay safe for her other children who are still in the country. She never puts gas in her car in the morning for example, or goes to stores between 7 and 10 a.m., when there are more reports of ICE raids. Recently she took on a new cleaning job and asked the employer to let her neighbors know she was the cleaner in case they got worried seeing her enter the home and called the police.
The increasingly precarious nature of her work is present in most interactions with employers now, both new ones and ones she’s worked with for years. At a cleaning job recently, Lisa asked a longtime employer to move her new pitbull into a room while she cleaned for her safety. They had never had a particularly close relationship, but also never an adversarial one. That’s why she was shocked when the employer said, “You have two options: Or you clean it with him there or don’t come,” Lisa recalled. She didn’t return.
From employers, the attitude is now: “If you don’t do it for that salary, someone else will do it for that lower salary,” she said. “We are at the point where they set the price, not us. We are losing the power to set our own prices.”
Domestic work has long been difficult to organize because it takes place inside private homes. That also meant that workers have been left out of key labor protections, such as health, safety and workplace discrimination laws, for decades. Over the past two decades, workers have been increasingly organizing, but they remain one of the most exploited workforces in America.
Other than the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has held numerous “Know Your Rights” trainings in the past year, other organizations like Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network are organizing on the employer side to educate people about fair pay and benefit practices. This year, the organization created the Sanctuary Homes project to address some of the strains brought on by increased immigration enforcement. Employers are trained to offer workers paid time off if they need it to handle their affairs, or to offer rides or cover the cost of transportation to ensure safe passage for their workers. They’re also trained to not ask about immigration status.
It’s about “moving more employers to be conscious and aware of this political moment [and] the kind of terror it is creating for immigrant domestic workers and their families,” said Stacy Kono, Hand in Hand’s executive director.
Kono said the organization has been “really moved” by how many employers wanted to stand in solidarity with domestic workers and participated in the effort. Of course, that work may not reach employers who are actively trying to cut pay or benefits, but it is giving support to the ones who do want to help and may not know how to start.
When it’s done right, it might look like it does for Roxana, a nanny in Houston who has a good working relationship with her employers, two doctors with three young children.
After a scare where Roxana was pulled over by the police on the highway on her way to work, she and her employer talked about cutting back on school dropoff and pickup to protect her from any ICE raids even though she has permanent legal status. Now, Roxana, whose name The 19th has changed, lets her employer know when she leaves for work and when she leaves for home. Her boss is set as her emergency contact should anything happen.
At her church and among her community of domestic workers, she leads trainings about how to negotiate fair contracts with employers, as well as possible changes to work duties for safety. It’s there she hears from other domestic workers who say their employers are taking advantage of them. One nanny, for example, told her that when she asked to no longer do school runs, the employer pushed her to become a live-in nanny with no increase in pay.
“Some employers do not even want to have that conversation” about changing schedules due to immigration fears, Roxana said. “It’s: ‘If you can’t meet my needs, then I let you go.’”
That’s been so much of Lisa’s reality in Austin.
Over the past year, she’s had to reckon much more with her place in the work she’s done for 20 years. Employers continue to expect more from her. If she’s hired for a nanny job, they might also now expect her to clean, cook and do laundry. Never had she seen employers bargain so much.
“They think that paying us $14 an hour is a great salary because it’s over the minimum wage,” Lisa said. “When they say, ‘I can only give you $15 an hour,’ I tell them, ‘Would you survive on $14 an hour?’”
What it comes down to, she said, is “unfortunately the work at home has never been valued even though they need us. Even though they know for an attorney, a judge, a doctor, to do their work, there is a domestic worker behind him pushing him so he can earn his salary. We are behind them caring for their kids, their parents, their houses, making their lives easier.”
At times this year, she said it felt like living in a horror movie. And it may take years for her to heal from this, she said, “to feel secure again.”