Hurricane ‘Milton’ puts thousands of migrant day laborers in check in Florida

Miami. Hurricane ‘Milton’, what heading to Florida already as category 3, it could affect to hundreds of thousands of non-English-speaking migrants, most of them Latin Americans, who are dedicated to harvesting oranges and tomatoes in the fields along the state’s I-4 highway corridor, washing dishes in restaurants, cleaning hotel rooms and the construction.

For Spanish speakers and a small number of African refugees, their new lives in the United States were already a daily struggle due to the language barrier and lack of resources.

Now, Milton has turned those obstacles into matters of life and death.

Florida is home to at least 4.8 million immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center. Orlando and Tampa are the metropolitan areas with the largest number of migrants after Miami, most of them from Latin American countries such as Mexico and Venezuela.

In central Florida, most migrants work in hospitality, construction and agriculture, picking strawberries and blackberries, as well as tomatoes and oranges. Many of the new arrivals do not have access to a television or the Internet and do not know the best way to find information about Miltonthe powerful hurricane that caused state and local authorities to order evacuations in the areas where the majority of these migrants live.

Approximately 250,000 Mexicans live in the region predicted to be hit by Hurricane Milton, and many fear abandoning their mobile homes or being deported.

“There is resistance to moving” to a shelter, said Juan Sabines Guerrero, consul general of Mexico in Orlando. “There is no time to think about it,” he added.

Sabines commented that local authorities have guaranteed consular staff that “they are not going to ask about immigration status.”

Guerrero and his staff have done several interviews with Spanish-speaking radio stations in the region and published an interactive map on social media about shelters in the area. They also have WhatsApp channels and an emergency phone line.

Immigrant advocates and consular officials have tried to reach out to Tampa, Orlando and central Florida to help with evacuation plans and other preparations. They are sharing information in Spanish, French and African languages, and making calls, sending text messages and sharing posts on social media with information about shelters, evacuations and sites to pick up sandbags, food, water and gasoline.

Difficult to find information in Spanish

“In situations like a hurricane that are emergencies, it is not easy to find information in Spanish either,” said Jessica Ramírez, general coordinator of the Agricultural Workers Association, which serves more than 10,000 immigrants.

Nongovernmental organizations such as the Florida Farm Workers Association, the Florida Immigrant Coalition, and the Hope CommUnity Center have been translating information from state and local authorities and sharing it in Spanish on WhatsApp groups, Facebook, and social media channels. .

Like other organizations that work with low-income Latino families in the area, they have received hundreds of calls from Spanish-speaking immigrants who cannot find information in their language and do not understand English, asking for details about the storm.

Lupita Lara lives near Orlando with her family and has a 23-year-old son with special needs who requires a respirator to sleep at night. She tried to submit an online application for space at the special needs shelter, but ran into technical difficulties and after three hours decided to call the Farm Workers Association.

“I needed help,” said Lara, 47, who came to the United States from Mexico and speaks primarily Spanish and needed an English speaker to call the shelter office. “They don’t have people who speak Spanish when you call,” he said, speaking about some of the Orange County offices.

An activist from the Farm Workers Association placed a three-way call and helped translate the conversation. The shelter office confirmed they had received his application, but told him he has no guaranteed space, Lara said. Now you need to go to one of the shelters and see if they have space.

Fear of the authorities

“The problem is that people are afraid to call the authorities, so they call us,” said Felipe Souza-Lazaballet, executive director of the Hope CommUnity Center. “That is why we are coordinating all this information.”

Migrant advocates told the AP that other problems they see are the lack of economic resources to buy food, water or supplies and fear among the population that lacks documentation to legally reside in the country.

In 2023, Florida passed one of the strictest immigration laws in the United States. It criminalizes entry into the state by people without permanent legal status, invalidates any U.S. government identification they may have, and prevents local governments from providing them with identification cards. Florida hospitals that receive Medicaid must ask patients about their immigration status, and companies that employ 25 or more people must verify the immigration status of their workers.

Some migrant advocates told the AP on Wednesday that immigrants fear that if they go to a shelter they could be deported. They are equally afraid if they ask for food or sandbags to protect their homes, even when the authorities and the defenders themselves have said they will not ask them for any identification.

They also fear that if they evacuate and go to another state, they will not be able to return because of Florida’s law that imposes penalties for transporting immigrants without legal authorization.

“People live every day in great fear of deportation or worse, so these fears are accentuated in times of disasters, when vulnerability increases,” said Dominique O’Connor, climate justice organizer at the Farm Workers Association of Florida.

O’Connor said some shelters and places that provide sandbags are asking for ID, and there are some well-meaning military or police officers handing out water, which is “very intimidating” to migrants.

Agencies working with the federal government to accommodate refugees placed about 200 families from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries in the Tampa metropolitan area. It has been almost impossible for them to find information without the help of someone to translate it into French, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Arabic or other languages ​​spoken by refugees.

Many who live in affordable apartments in Tampa, Sarasota and St. Petersburg don’t have transportation and don’t know where to go.

“They are the most vulnerable,” said Pierre Uwimana, a refugee organizer at the Florida Immigrant Coalition, who has been working with some of the refugee leaders to translate information about the storm and evacuations.

The few families with cars have taken others to shelters. Some have called the police to take them away, Uwimana said.

“They are evacuating. “It is something they are not used to,” he commented. “They are very scared.”