Immigrant Workers Are Rebuilding Florida but DeSantis Doesn’t Care

At least 89 people died in Florida due to Hurricane Ian, a number that is still expected to grow. As of Thursday, 215,000 Floridians remain without power and it has been estimated that the storm caused $55 billion in damage.

After Hurricane Ian hit Florida, a growing number of immigrants, many of them undocumented, have been heading to Florida to help rebuild the state. Despite their labor being critical to Florida’s recovery, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has continued his public attacks on undocumented immigrants and is ignoring their contributions.

Saket Soni, the executive director of Resilience Force, a nonprofit that advocates for thousands of response workers, has been in Fort Myers, Florida, with hundreds of immigrants, many of whom he says are undocumented. They are rebuilding homes, cleaning debris, and helping the state return to some semblance of normalcy.

Soni says the workers travel from disaster area to disaster area, looking for work. He describes them using a metaphor a Mexican roofer once shared with him.

“What you have now is basically immigrants who are sort of traveling white blood cells of America, who congregate after hurricanes to heal a place, and then move on to heal the next place,” Soni said via CNN.

Despite their contributions to the state, DeSantis has ignored questions about immigrants rebuilding Florida after Hurricane Ian. On Tuesday, at a press conference ostensibly about the ongoing recovery effort, DeSantis opened by talking about three illegal immigrants who had been arrested in Florida on alleged looting charges.

“These are people that are foreigners, they’re illegally in our country, and not only that, they try to loot and ransack in the aftermath of a natural disaster. I mean, they should be prosecuted, but they need to be sent back to their home countries. They should not be here at all,” DeSantis told reporters.

When a CNN reporter asked DeSantis if he had any response to reports that Venezuelans in New York were being recruited to help in Florida’s recovery and if he would send them back north, DeSantis ignored the first part of the question. Instead, he focused on his controversial publicity stunt to use state funds to pay for two flights sending migrants from Florida to Texas and then Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

“First of all, our program that we did is a voluntary relocation program. I don’t have the authority to forcibly relocate people. If I could, I’d take those three looters, I’d drag them out by their collars, and I’d send them back to where they came from,” DeSantis said, drawing applause from the officials on stage with him.

The work being done in Florida by immigrants is not easy or safe either. Roofing, to take one example, is already one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and it becomes more dangerous when dealing with hurricane-damaged homes. They often do not have healthcare, are sometimes housed in unsafe conditions and many have their wages stolen by unscrupulous contractors.

Still, they come for the chance of relatively high wages as well as what could be the start of a career.

“Many are from Venezuela. Many are from Honduras and Mexico. They represent all of the different waves of migrants that have been arriving into the US and into this industry. Many of them who I’ve known since Hurricane Katrina and who have a dozen hurricanes under their belt,” Soni said.