Migrants key to disaster repair

Crews follow hurricane damage, struggle with exploitation

CALLAWAY, Fla. — They arrived by the hundreds last year after Hurricane Michael sliced through the Florida panhandle, packing 160 mph winds that snapped pine trees in half, mangled steel posts, ripped off roofs and upended people’s lives. Without electricity, potable water or reliable accommodation, a rapid-response labor force got to work carting away the wreckage.

In the ensuing months, the workers — nearly all of them from Central America, Mexico and Venezuela — toiled day and night across Bay County in Florida’s panhandle to reopen Panama City’s City Hall, repair the local campus of Florida State University and fix damaged roofs on several churches. In towns like Callaway, which saw 90% of its housing stock damaged by the Category 5 storm last October, they are still working.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 1.2 million Americans live in coastal areas at risk of significant damage from hurricanes. The increased frequency and severity of such disasters have given rise to a new recovery-and-reconstruction workforce.

It is overwhelmingly made up of migrants.

Like the migrant farmworkers of yesteryear who followed the crops, the hurricane workers move from disaster to disaster. They descended on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Houston after Harvey; North Carolina after Florence; Florida after Irma and Michael. And as the United States confronts more extreme weather, theirs has become a growth industry.

Lorenzo, a 67-year-old from Mexico, is adept at elevating and moving houses to higher ground, and keeps pictures on his cellphone to prove it — mansions he rescued in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Houston.

But since arriving in Bay County during the chaotic weeks after Hurricane Michael, many of the migrant workers have been exploited by employers who do not always pay what the workers are owed, or landlords who charge exorbitant rent for their temporary quarters. Some have been stopped by sheriff’s deputies and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Sometimes we work and work, we trust people, and then we don’t get paid,” said Will, a 44-year-old Honduran migrant who has worked successive hurricanes since Katrina in 2005. Like others, he asked to be identified only by his first name out of concern that he could be targeted for deportation, which he said was a constant worry.

A Florida law passed this year requires localities to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. In 2018, 24 migrants were transferred from the Bay County sheriff to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that oversees deportations. In the first three months of this year, the most recent period for which data was available, 42 people were transferred.

Last month, a group of migrants who cleaned up two resorts in the Florida Keys after Hurricane Irma in 2017 filed suit in federal court in Miami against a disaster-restoration company called Cotton Holdings and Daniel Paz, owner of a staffing firm, alleging that they were not paid minimum wage or overtime for hours worked. Among other tasks, they had removed debris, downed trees and rotten drywall, according to the complaint.

Bellaliz Gonzalez, a Venezuelan plaintiff who entered the United States on a tourist visa, said in an interview that her boss threatened to turn her and other workers over to immigration authorities when they complained that their paychecks had bounced.

“I felt powerless. They were abusing immigrants who came to work honorably,” said Gonzalez, 53, who estimates that she is owed $2,000 and has since applied for asylum.

In Bay County, a nonprofit called Resilience Force has been meeting with migrant workers, trying to organize them and lobby to improve conditions.

“Since Katrina, we have a new workforce,” Saket Soni, the group’s executive director, told a large group at a recent gathering. “You are that workforce, rebuilding city after city in the wake of hurricanes.”

At a meeting of Bay County commissioners in mid-September, Soni asked them to consider an ordinance that would make it a violation of county law to underpay or retaliate against workers. Most workers are promised between $15 and $20 an hour.

“Wage theft is a tremendous hindrance to the rebuilding of this part of the country, and we’d like you to take this up at the anniversary of the hurricane,” he said.

During a May campaign rally in Panama City Beach, along the coast of Bay County, President Donald Trump did not specifically mention the itinerant workforce carrying out much of the region’s hurricane repairs in a speech that highlighted migrants in the country illegally.

But in a county where 7 out of 10 voters supported the president in 2016, there has been little political opposition to the hurricane workers.

“We’ve had a lot of Spanish-speaking workers. I say, ‘Thank heaven for them.’ We’d be a lot further from recovering if it weren’t for them,” said Pamn Henderson, mayor of Callaway, who like many homeowners is living in a trailer in her front yard until repairs on her house can be completed.