MARSHALL, Mo. – Amid the loud din of workers packaging beef and pork last week at a Cargill meat processing plant, Alma Sandoval retreated from the production lines she supervised and went into the office. She grabbed a spare bag and quietly started filling it with belongings scattered on her desk.
She took down the pictures of her late mother, who fled El Salvador with a toddling Sandoval in tow to the United States decades ago and worked for years on the line at the plant. Sandoval unplugged a Millennium Falcon phone charger that other supervisors liked to congregate around, and tossed that into her bag, too.
Sandoval also packed up a penholder that one of her workers gave her. It had a coat of arms and Spanish inscription along the bottom, saying: “Orgullosamente Salvadoreño.” Translation: “Proudly Salvadoran.”
On Wednesday, the federal program allowing Salvadorans like Sandoval to live and work in the U.S. because of disaster in their native country is set to expire, leaving an estimated 170,000 immigrants and their 150,000 U.S. citizen children in limbo. Many will lose their work authorization and could be deported.
The Temporary Protected Status program for Salvadorans typically had been renewed every 18 months for decades, but this time feels different for the now-30-year-old Sandoval. Today, as the U.S. government cracks down on immigration, she is afraid because she hasn’t heard anything about another reprieve.
So she decided last week to discreetly gather her belongings.
“Even though it’s not the walk of shame, that’s kind of what it feels like,” Sandoval said. “I am not getting fired. I am not quitting. Life is changing, and it’s out of my control and my job’s control.”
Salvadorans make up the third-largest group of people who have received the Temporary Protected Status to remain in the country, behind only Venezuelans and Haitians. President Donald Trump’s efforts — started in his first term — to remove the status for hundreds of thousands of people have picked up in his second term.
In July, the Department of Homeland Security terminated the status for about 300,000 Haitians, a move permitted by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. In the weeks since then, many Haitians have been laid off, and increasing numbers are being deported to Haiti.
The administration contends that Temporary Protected Status recipients should return to their native countries — even while countries like Haiti remain on the State Department’s do not travel list. Immigrant rights advocates say kicking the recipients out of the program would have a dramatic impact across the U.S. by removing families from communities, raising labor costs for businesses and increasing prices for consumers.
Over the past 25 years, Salvadoran Temporary Protected Status recipients have helped build large communities in California, Texas, New York, Maryland and Virginia, and work in sectors such as construction, landscaping, transportation, food services and manufacturing.
But it’s the rural communities, such as Marshall and surrounding Saline County, that stand to take a more noticeable hit from losing these workers. The town’s immigrants were largely drawn to work at Cargill and other nearby agribusiness giants Conagra and Tyson, but they also hold jobs as seasonal farmworkers, custodians and bank tellers.
Officials, local leaders and residents say the immigrants often pursue work that few others want, pay taxes, and have helped rebuild neighborhoods. Now, as Wednesday’s deadline approaches, residents in this college town of roughly 14,000 people in the middle of Missouri are growing increasingly concerned.
“Everybody is worried,” said Ana Deisi Garcia, co-owner of La Paz, a Salvadoran and Mexican restaurant and grocery store that hunkers in the shadow of grain bins in downtown Marshall. “They don’t have a job after that. Where are they going to get money? Where are they going to work?”
Sandoval has been asking all of those questions, only her mother, Alma Quinteros, isn’t around to help her. She died in 2022. But some of her legacy lives on in Sandoval.
In 1998, Quinteros, a former prison guard involved in local political campaigns in El Salvador, fled with her to the United States when Sandoval was 1 and a half years old, because of threats to her safety. They ended up in Los Angeles, then, after a shooting across the street from Sandoval’s first-grade classroom, moved to Marshall.
“We thought it was beautiful,” Sandoval said. “No city traffic. No shootings. It was just calm and peaceful here.”
She grew up going to rodeos and the state fair in nearby Sedalia. She said some of her happiest memories are from playing percussion for the high school marching band. She was also a cheerleader (“Go Owls!”).
As she and her mother built a life, the town became more diverse. Salvadorans and other immigrants began to open more restaurants and grocery stores.
For a time, Salvadorans became the largest group of Temporary Protected Status holders, their population growing in the U.S. because a series of deadly earthquakes in 2001 destroyed parts of El Salvador and threw a wrench into the deportation process. In 1990, the country was the first to be designated eligible for the program, following a 12-year civil war.
As the program renewed for Salvadorans over decades, Sandoval quietly graduated high school. She didn’t want to run off to the big city. She stayed put and dug deeper.
“If I were ever to have children, I’d want to have them in Marshall,” she said. “I’ve never felt like leaving.”
At 19, she bought a house. Her mother, who lived with her, was a go-to for other immigrants. She helped them navigate confusing documents in English, for instance, to keep their Temporary Protected Status current so they could legally live and work in the area.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also has ties to Marshall. He attended what is now Missouri Valley University on a wrestling scholarship in the 1990s. In May, he spoke at the school’s commencement ceremony.
“See, we live in the greatest nation in the world,” Mullin told the crowd. “And the only limitations that holds us back is the amount of time we want to spend in dedicating to that goal … No one determines your outcome except you.”
Sandoval said she was scared to attend the event but listened closely to what he had to say live online. She was surprised by how many values they seemed to share about faith and family; however, his comments about working hard to overcome obstacles to success rang hollow.
In response, Sandoval was motivated to draft a three-page letter to Mullin:
“I am afraid of losing a life that took decades to build, not because I refused to follow the law or failed to work hard enough, but because there is no amount of hard work I can perform that changes the legal category into which I was placed as a child…
“You spoke to those graduates about confronting limitations, growing through adversity, and continuing forward. Those words mattered to me. They still do. But some limitations cannot be overcome by determination alone…
“I am not asking you to disregard the law. I am asking you to consider the people who have spent decades living within it…”
Sandoval never sent the letter. She said she wants more people to know her perspective — that she thinks too much time has passed for the protected status to still be temporary.
While the State Department has deemed El Salvador safe for travel, those who know Sandoval and others like her see their pending status expiration as wrong and that their departures could hurt the local economies where they have built their lives.
“It’s a terrible injustice for the folks who have been here as long as Alma has,” said her realtor, Ruth Cott, who grew up in the area and has lived there for decades. “She should have been a citizen a long time ago. She hasn’t gotten into trouble. She’s purchased a house. She pays her taxes. And she’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of folks in that same situation.”
Last week, after gathering her belongings from her desk at Cargill, she took a few personal days to stay home and rest, which she said her supervisors supported. She estimated that about 20 other Salvadoran Temporary Protected Status recipients face losing their jobs, mainly as senior meat cutters and other frontline workers who are loyal to the company.
Cargill, the largest private company in the United States by revenue, didn’t respond to requests for comment about the implications of losing Salvadoran workers at its plants nationwide and any alternatives the company has for them.
Worst-case scenario, Sandoval said, she will have to uproot from her beloved Marshall. If so, she plans to sell her house and find a safe place for her two dogs, Sophie and Theo. She’ll sell one vehicle and pack up the other with her mother’s ashes, documents, some personal belongings and four cats – Pantera, Enano, Mino and Maleficent.
Instead of steering south toward the tiny Central American nation where she was born and doesn’t have close ties, she’s thinking about heading north, especially if Cargill, a multinational company, has a place for her at one of its Canadian plants. There are still obstacles to overcome, but she longs for another supervisor desk where she can put up a few pictures of her mother, plug in the Star Wars phone charger and set up the pen holder.
Sandoval is proud to have been born in El Salvador, but her dreams are often in English.
