Hurricane Milton is expected to bring its greatest force to bear on hundreds of thousands of non-English-speaking immigrants, most of them Latin Americans who harvest oranges and tomatoes in the fields along Florida’s I-4 corridor, wash dishes in restaurants, They clean hotel rooms and work in construction.
For Spanish speakers and a smaller number of African refugees, new lives in the US were already a daily struggle due to the language barrier and lack of resources.
Milton has turned those obstacles into a matter of life and death.
Migrants in the eye of the hurricane
According to the Pew Research Center, Florida is home to at least 4.8 million immigrants. Orlando and Tampa are the metropolitan areas with the highest number of immigrants after Miami, most of them from Latin American countries such as Mexico and Venezuela.
In Central Florida, most immigrants work in hospitality, construction, and picking strawberries, berries, tomatoes, and oranges. Many new arrivals do not have access to television, computers or the Internet and do not know where to find information about Milton, a powerful storm that forced state and local authorities to order evacuations in the areas where most of these immigrants live.
Around 250,000 Mexicans live in the area where Hurricane Milton could hit hard and many fear abandoning their mobile homes or facing deportation.
“There is resistance to going to a shelter,” Juan Sabines Guerrero, consul general of Mexico in Orlando. There is no time to think about that,” he exhorted his compatriots in Florida. “They have to do it.”
Sabines said local authorities have assured consular officials “that they will not ask about immigration status.”
Fight fear of deportation to save lives
Guerrero and his team have done several interviews with Spanish-language radio stations in the area and shared an interactive map of the area’s shelters on social media platforms. They also have WhatsApp channels and an emergency hotline that people can call.
Immigrant advocates and consulate officials have been contacting residents of Tampa, Orlando and other central Florida cities 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 places to pick up sandbags, food, water, shelters and gasoline.
“In situations like a hurricane that are emergencies, it is not easy to find information in Spanish,” 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, Florida Immigrant Coalition and Hope Community Center have been translating information from state and local authorities and sharing it in Spanish through WhatsApp groups, Facebook and social media channels.
Like other organizations serving 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.
“The problem is that people are afraid to call the authorities, that’s why they call us,” said Felipe Souza-Lazaballet, executive director of Hope Community Center. “That’s why we’re basically coordinating all this information.”
Lack of financial resources
The defenders told the AP that other challenges they see are the lack of economic resources to buy food, water or supplies and fear among the undocumented population.
State policies generate fear and put the lives of migrants at risk
In 2023, Florida passed one of the strictest immigration laws in the country. It criminalized entry into the state for people without permanent legal status, invalidated any U.S. government identification they might have and blocked local governments from providing them with identification cards.
Florida hospitals that receive Medicaid must ask patients about their immigration status, and businesses that employ 25 or more people must verify the legal status of their workers.
Some advocates told The Associated Press Wednesday that immigrants fear that if they go to a shelter they could be deported. They have the same fear if they ask for food or sandbags to protect their homes, even when the authorities and the defenders themselves say that they will not ask them for any identification.
They also fear that if they evacuate and move to another state, they will not be able to return because of Florida law that imposes penalties for transporting immigrants without legal authorization.
“There is a lot of fear of deportation or worse that people experience every day, so these fears are heightened in times of disasters, when vulnerability increases,” said Dominique O’Connor, climate justice organizer at the Workers’ Association. Florida Agricultural.
O’Connor said some shelters and sites that provide sandbags ask for some form of identification and there are some well-intentioned military or police officers handing out water, which is “very intimidating” for migrants.
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