Flanked by her late husband’s work uniforms hanging beside her podium, Carmen Luna called for an end to the exploitation and endangerment of migrant workers. She spoke at a press conference on September 17th announcing a lawsuit against Grace Ocean Private Ltd, the owner of the cargo ship that crashed into Baltimore’s Key Bridge in March. The collision killed her husband, Miguel Luna, and five other migrant workers. “We search for justice,” she said, “not for ourselves, but for all of the immigrant essential workers and their families.”
The announcement was accompanied by lawsuits from small business owners and the port of Baltimore as well as city, state and federal governments, all seeking to hold Grace Ocean Private accountable for the tragedy. The lawsuit on behalf of the victims’ families, however, stands as a call for more than economic compensation, Luna said. It also calls for protection to ensure that such tragedies don’t happen again.
Luna set the focus on a dangerous job that had put her husband at risk for years before the crash. She detailed the physical toll that her husband’s long night shifts as a welder had taken, leading him to hand surgery a few months before his death, and pointed out burn marks and holes in his work uniforms beside her. “We shouldn’t live with fear for our security while we provide for our families,” she said.
Early on the morning of March 26th, the DALI, a Singaporean-owned cargo ship crashed into the Key Bridge, a key point of transportation stretching across the port of Baltimore. Within a week of the accident, Grace Ocean Private filed a petition to limit their legal liability to $43.67 million. At the September press conference, Gustavo Torres, the director of CASA de Maryland, a migrant legal services organization, decried the petition as a quest to “erase accountability they owe to these families, to these men, whose lives were stolen.”
“This was an entirely avoidable catastrophe resulting from a series of eminently foreseeable errors made by the owner and operator of the DALI,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton in a DOJ press release. The Department of Justice joined local and state actors in filing a lawsuit as the September deadline to contest the petition approached.
Work-place injury among migrants happens “all the time,” says Dr. Barbara Cook. Dr. Cook founded the Access Partnership at Johns Hopkins University, providing free medical care to immigrants who don’t qualify for health insurance. She explained that employers in dangerous fields (roofing, tree cutting, construction) hire insured contractors, but actively seek out migrant workers who don’t qualify for insurance to do the “scut work.” In doing so, she said, employers bypass workers compensation requirements that come with a risky job.
“What an unbelievable tragedy that the very people who are most unseen are the ones who lost their lives,” says Matt Dolamore, Program Director for the Esperanza Center, which has provided social services for the families of the crash victims. “What it does show in a super clear, nationally — internationally prominent way is the hidden labor that migrants do every day that we completely fail to acknowledge,” he said.
Matt Dolamore and the Esperanza Center played a key role in the network of support that unfolded around the families of the victims. The morning the bridge collapsed, Baltimore City and County, each of whom had lost workers, asked the Esperanza Center to “play a case management role for the surviving family members,” Dolamore said. The city and county, he said, understood the mistrust between immigrant communities and the government, and relied on grassroots organizations like the Esperanza Center.
The Esperanza Center protected these traumatized families from media attention, distributed the hundreds of thousands fundraised for them, and coordinated complicated, international funeral processes, Dolamore said. Daniel Zawodny of The Baltimore Banner described how relatives living outside of the U.S. were granted “humanitarian parole,” that allowed them to come to the U.S. for the funerals. Likewise, Dolamore said, Maryland-based families were allowed to travel to their home countries for memorials.
The Esperanza Center and CASA de Maryland both applauded the government’s coordinated response. But the families deserve more than family funerals, says Gustavo Torres of CASA de Maryland, which organized the legal support of the families. “Justice means immigration reform including federal immigration relief, to ensure that immigrant workers are not vulnerable to dangerous worker conditions, work permits immediately, and citizenship now,” Torres said.
