Zoila Guerra Sandoval remembers the frijoles blancos she made the day before the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore, and the way José Mynor López joked that she should bring him some beans. He went to work his overnight road maintenance shift before the bridge was struck by a cargo vessel and came down in 2024, killing six construction workers.
Her account carries the weight of what followed. López’s body was not found until two months later, the last of the six workers recovered from the water. Guerra Sandoval, 48, met him in the U.S. in 2016, and they shared a 7-year-old U.S. citizen daughter who now lives with her. “I ask her if she remembers her father. She says ‘Yes, but my dad died in the water,’” Guerra Sandoval said.
The day the bridge fell, she had already talked with López about when their daughter should be picked up from school. “That is how we left it. In the morning my brothers were calling me,” she said, recalling the moment she learned what had happened. “He died in the accident,” one brother told her. “It’s all over the news. A boat took out the bridge.”
That loss is now colliding with a separate fight. Guerra Sandoval is in the country without legal status, and this week the Department of Homeland Security started deportation proceedings against her. After the bridge collapse, Biden administration officials approached dozens of family members and loved ones of the victims and urged them to apply for programs offering limited protection from deportation. Guerra Sandoval qualified for that relief because her daughter is now her sole caretaker.
A former Biden-era U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official said the bridge disaster fit the category for emergency or unforeseen circumstances, and that the agency reviewed expedited requests from survivors and their families case by case. Rachel Girod, whose name was associated with that account, said: “And when everybody is a priority, the person convicted of some of the most heinous crimes that a person can be convicted of — is just as much a priority as the mother of a child who lost her father in a national tragedy.” USCIS did not respond to a request for comment this week on Guerra Sandoval’s case.
The collapse drew attention to immigrant and unauthorized labor in construction, and the protections the Biden administration tried to extend to about 30 people with immediate connections to the dead are now being undone by the Trump administration. For Guerra Sandoval, the question is no longer only what the bridge took from her family, but whether the government will make her leave the child who still carries that loss in a few plain words: her father died in the water.
