Maria has been cleaning the same high rise office building on the west side of Houston for nearly 30 years — not long after she first came to Texas from El Salvador. She’s 70 years old now and comes into work when most people are headed home, during the evening rush hour.

(Marketplace isn’t using any of the cleaners’ real names, because they are afraid of being targeted by the Trump administration.)

Maria goes cubicle by cubicle, cleaning up trash. She earns about $13 an hour at her cleaning job. “I like the work. I like it in part because I get to exercise,” she said in Spanish.

But she does come home tired. And she’s been working extra lately, because roughly a third of her coworkers have had to quit since President Donald Trump’s administration started rolling back work permits.

“It’s a shame that they’ve taken away (permits) from so many colleagues,” she said. “It’s us, Hispanic immigrants, that are doing this (work). Without us, there isn’t anybody else.”

And some have left more than just the office.

“Some say that they’re better off heading back to their home country. Many have already left,” she said.

But Maria is still here and able to work for now.

She has Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian protection that includes permission to work. The Trump administration has removed TPS from individuals from several countries — but Salvadorans are still protected.

For now, she and her colleagues with work authorization keep showing up to the office.

“We’re still there, but we’re afraid,” she said. And even though she has kids and grandkids living in Houston, she’s prepared for the worst.

“When they say, ‘There’s no more TPS,’ I’m going back to El Salvador,” she said.

While the Trump administration’s immigration raids have generated a lot of fear and media coverage, Dallas Federal Reserve economist Pia Orrenius said other policy changes are playing a larger role when it comes to the workforce.

“Hundreds of thousands, in some cases, maybe even millions, of work permits are being canceled. And so that's really what's affecting employers most directly,” she said.

It’s not just people with TPS who are losing their work permits — it’s other humanitarian migrants, too, many of whom came recently under programs like CHNV, which protected Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. And now border crossings, which usually offer a steady inflow of labor, have also been reduced to a trickle.

“Employers who rely on that, they don't have that either. So they're kind of getting squeezed on all sides,” Orrenius said.

Across the Texas workforce, 20% of firms surveyed by the Dallas Fed said that immigration policy has already hampered or they predict it will hamper both the hiring and retention of immigrant workers this year.

At Houston City Hall, Alexandra — who came to Texas as a teen from El Salvador — has finally become a citizen. After the ceremony, she said, she’s looking forward to voting, taking college classes, and maybe getting a better job.

Alexandra is a supervisor of a team of around fifty professional cleaners that was gutted earlier this year when work permissions were revoked.

“We lost almost 20 people,” she said in Spanish. “There were a lot of Cubans who were removed from the company.”

They haven’t found replacements, so she’s picked up some of the slack, she said. She actually studied for the citizenship exam while picking up trash.

Alexandra’s mom, Yanet, also cleans office buildings. She works almost exclusively with Latin American immigrants from countries including Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Mexico.

“Good workers, good friends and good colleagues have left,” Yanet said in Spanish. “Some have opted to go to their countries and take with them their few belongings instead of getting left with nothing.”

She estimated her team lost around 20% of its cleaning staff. She’s also working more because of the vacancies.

Her company, which pays her $12.50 an hour, has tried to replace those workers. But it’s not easy.

“It’s a lot of work and little money. They last one, two weeks and they leave,” she said.