John Marshall Mantel/The New York Times

MATERIAL COMFORT, CONTINUING UNCERTAINTY

At home with relatives of a World Trade Center victim. Fearing betrayal and deportation, they keep a low profile.

ONE widow has more than $2 million but walks or rides the bus everywhere, terrified of drawing attention. Another millionaire widow stopped going to 9/11 support groups because she feared that families of police officers and firefighters might betray her. A widower has enough money to start a business building houses, but cannot buy himself a home.

All three lost a husband or a wife when the World Trade Center collapsed. Like thousands of others, they were beneficiaries of the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which awarded millions of dollars to families whose loved ones died in the attacks.

But a secret sets these three apart. Like their spouses who died, each is in the country illegally. Even though the government compensated them richly for their losses, making them wealthier than they ever dreamed, the money did not change their immigration status. They fear they could be deported any day.

Five years after the terrorist attacks, these people are living with extraordinary contradictions.

Long accustomed to stashing dollar bills in coffee cans, they became millionaires overnight. But because they do not have Social Security numbers or work visas, they cannot get mortgages or driver’s licenses. They say they have spent little of the money, afraid of attracting notice.

Their spouses were labeled heroes, their names emblazoned on placards ringing ground zero. But none of these three, still living in or near New York City, feel they can publicly identify themselves.

“I can’t dream very high, because I have no papers,” said one widow from Ecuador, who, like the others, agreed to be interviewed on the condition that she not be named. “You’re always afraid of exposure. It’s a horrible feeling. But I don’t want to go back to my country. I know my husband’s spirit is here.”

After Congress created the victims’ fund, promising payouts in return for an agreement not to sue the airlines or other interests, the officials who drafted the fund’s rules explicitly stated that foreigners and illegal immigrants would be eligible. And immigration authorities announced that they would not use information provided to the fund to track people down.

But the families who received money could still face deportation if their identities come to light in some other way, their lawyers say.

A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York, Mark Thorn, said the agency could not comment on specific cases, but confirmed it was not focusing on the families. Still, he added, “generally speaking, anyone who is in this country illegally is vulnerable to removal.”

Legislation before Congress would grant green cards to the illegal immigrants who received money. But the measure, attached to the Senate’s immigration bill, is deadlocked with the entire package.

From the start, many immigrants were suspicious of the fund.

“They were these modest, poor, fearful people,” said Kenneth R. Feinberg, the fund’s special master, who determined the awards. “They were afraid they’d be punished.”

In the end, 11 awards went to the survivors of illegal immigrants. All those victims had worked at the restaurant Windows on the World. Although they had earned modest wages, many were upwardly mobile and supported relatives back home, factors that increased the payouts. Their awards ranged from $875,000 to $4.1 million.

But their lawyers still worried: That their clients would become marks for hustlers. That relatives, sustained by wire transfers and living in unstable countries, would be kidnapped for ransom.

Details about the 11 families are sketchy. At least three lived abroad at the time of the attack and remain there. At least three were here in New York on 9/11 and still live here with their children in modest apartments.

They could return to their native lands with their money, but feel tethered here, unwilling to leave the country where their spouses worked and died, and determined to give their children a chance to grow up here.

“I have half my life here,” one widow said. “And my husband is here.”

When the widow from Ecuador first heard about the fund, she thought it might be a trap to catch immigrants like her.

She and her husband moved to Queens in 1992, paying smugglers $11,000 to help them cross the border. But now her husband, a supply-room manager, was dead and she was alone with their son, who had joined them later. She could no longer afford the rent on their cramped basement apartment, where sewage leached through floors, or her son’s asthma spray.

The union at Windows on the World arranged for families to meet with pro-bono lawyers. One lawyer, Debra Steinberg, convinced her that Mr. Feinberg, the fund’s administrator, was sincere.

But the woman was petrified. Mr. Feinberg worked for the government, after all. When she told him her story at a hearing in April 2003, her voice quavered. 

“How could he understand how I was feeling, how I was screaming from the inside?” she said she wondered. “That we need help, and we’re alone. That we don’t belong here, but that I don’t want to go back to my country. That I’m already part of this one, because my husband is here.” Skip to next paragraph Go to Complete Coverage »

Mr. Feinberg awarded her roughly $1.6 million.

The sum frightened her. She had grown up in a mountain town where dinner often consisted of rice and half an egg. “I was praying, ‘Please, God, don’t let me change, let me stay myself,’ ” she said.

The woman, 38, tried to make peace with the windfall by thinking of the money as her husband’s gift to their son. With help, she put it into conservative investments that she could tap if forced back to Ecuador. She has lived off the interest, she says.

And she has continued to live modestly, renting a two-bedroom apartment in East Elmhurst, Queens, for $1,200 a month. Her splurge was a bedroom set for her son.

But the money did change her life. She is still a warm woman with laughing brown eyes, but she has grown withdrawn.

She is afraid to tell neighbors she is a 9/11 widow, fearing questions about her immigration status. She yearns for work to fill her days, but has no visa. She stopped seeing old friends who made snide remarks about her sudden wealth. Even 9/11 support groups made her feel unsafe, because they were filled with spouses of dead police officers.

“I’d rather be alone,” she said softly.

Her son, 17, is a senior at a private school in Manhattan, his tuition paid by a private foundation. A gifted photographer, he dreams of studying design, but the colleges he is interested in require Social Security numbers.

He says he cannot imagine moving to Ecuador, which he left at age 5.

“I have no idea what I’ll do,” he said, as a trailer for the movie “World Trade Center” flashed across their television screen. He took a shaky breath and said, “My history is here.”

For the second widow, school days are the hardest. The Mexican woman with the soulful eyes and a sweep of dark hair tightens her fingers around her 9-year-old son’s hand and boards the public bus. Only 4-foot-7, she almost disappears into the seat. But she feels like a beacon sending off warning signals.

Her son was 4 when his father, a grill cook, died on 9/11. The Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund, which helps families of the restaurant workers, pays the boy’s tuition at a private elementary school in Manhattan. But this woman lives outside Newark and has no car. So she takes her son to and from school, a daily commute totaling six hours.

She finds the journey harrowing. Security is tighter now at bridges and tunnels. “I never know if they’re going to get me,” said the woman, 30, who recently had a baby girl with her new companion.

John Marshall Mantel/The New York Times

DREAMING, BUT CAUTIOUSLY

One of the 9/11 widows in the office of her lawyer. "I can't dream very high, because I have no papers," one says.

It is hard to fathom that this woman has about $2.2 million, trusted financial advisers and a lawyer, Ms. Steinberg. Yet there are things that a fortune cannot buy. She has the cash to buy a house outright, but fears that if deported, she could lose any property here. She struggled to find an apartment, because most landlords demand a Social Security number. She cannot get a driver’s license, so she carries groceries and laundry for blocks, her baby in tow.

Immigration officials have caught her before. In 2000, she says, she and her husband were intercepted as they were returning from their wedding in Mexico. Deportation hearings were scheduled for May 2002, but by then her husband had been killed.

As a lawyer asked an immigration judge to grant the woman mercy as a 9/11 victim, a memorial service was under way at ground zero. The judge let her go, and she applied to the fund the following year.

If she has to return to Mexico, the money will still be hers, government officials said. But she will have to make a wrenching decision. Her son is a United States citizen, born in Queens. He has relatives he adores nearby, and she feels his future is more assured here. Yet she cannot imagine leaving him behind.

The third spouse, a widower, faces a similar dilemma. He could move back to Ecuador and start the construction business he has always dreamed of. But he is torn — and amazed to find himself in a country where he is not supposed to even work or drive.

“Why am I staying here?” he says he asks himself.

The answer is his 5-year-old daughter, his last link to his wife. The girl has just started prekindergarten. If he can endure staying one more year, her English will improve, he says. And maybe the legislation allowing him a green card will pass.

Yet waiting is not easy for this stocky 35-year-old, caught between his fierce independence and a deep concern for his daughter.

A construction worker, he was always proudly self-sufficient, though his wife earned more as a prep cook. After her death, he threw himself into raising — and coddling — the child, then 8 months old. He filled her bedroom with plush animals and bought her the frilliest dresses he could find.

Yet when his lawyer, Saralyn Cohen, told him about the fund, he balked, offended by charity. But when she gently noted that the money would help his daughter, he softened.

She said he invested the money, about $2.2 million, only occasionally tapping into the interest. Seemingly indifferent about the windfall, he kept the same small apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn. “Money cannot buy my daughter’s mother back,” he said.

Though resolved to stay another year, he aches for Ecuador and wants the girl to meet her grandparents. Yet if he traveled home, he could not return.

And so he ticks off the days until his life can begin again.

“It’s all for her, so she does something better,” he said as his daughter wrapped her arms around his neck. “That she becomes a doctor, a lawyer. That she’s not the same as me.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, New York Region, of Sunday, September 3, 2006.