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Hurricane Milton is expected to unleash its greatest force over hundreds of thousands of immigrants who don’t speak English, most of them Latin Americans harvesting oranges and tomatoes in the fields along Florida’s I-4 corridor, washing dishes in restaurants, cleaning hotel rooms and working construction.
For the Spanish speakers and a smaller number of African refugees , new lives in the U.S. were already a daily struggle because of the language barrier and lack of resources.
Milton has turned those obstacles into a matter of life and death.
Florida is home to at least 4.8 million immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center. After Miami, Orlando and Tampa are the metropolitan areas with the highest number of immigrants, the majority coming from Latin American countries such as Mexico and Venezuela.
In Central Florida, most of migrants work in the hospitality industry, construction and in fields of strawberries, berries, tomatoes and oranges. Some new arrivals don’t have access to TV, others don’t have computers or internet access. There were people who do not know where to find information about Milton, a powerful storm that pushed state and local authorities to order evacuation in the areas where most of these immigrants live.
Immigration advocates and consulate officials have been reaching out to them in Tampa, Orlando and central Florida towns to help with evacuation plans and otherwise prepare. They are sharing information in Spanish, French and African languages and making calls, sending text messages and sharing social media posts 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 Ramirez, general coordinator at the Farmworker Association, which serves more than 10,000 immigrants.
Nongovernmental organizations such as the Farmworker Association of Florida, the 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 that serve 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 don’t understand English, asking for details about the storm.
Lupita Lara, a Mexican mother that lives close to Orlando with her family, has a 23-year-old son with special needs who needs a respirator to sleep every night. She tried to submit an online application to request space at a special-needs shelter, but she had technical difficulties and after three hours she decided to call the Farmworker Association.
“I needed their help,” said Lara, 47, who speaks mainly Spanish and needed someone who spoke English to call the shelter’s office. “They don’t have people who speak Spanish when we call,” she said, talking about some of the offices in Orange County.
An advocate from the Farmworker Association made a three-way call and helped translate the conversation. The shelter’s office confirmed that they had received her request but told her that she does not have any space guaranteed, said Lara. She now needs to go to one of the shelters and see if they have space.
“The problem is that people are afraid to call the authorities, so they call us,” said Felipe Souza-Lazaballet, executive director at Hope CommUnity Center. "That’s why we are essentially coordinating all of this information.”
Advocates told the AP that other challenges that they see are lack of economic resources to buy food, water or supplies and fear among the undocumented population.
Some said that many immigrants in the area fear deportation and think that if they go to a shelter or request sandbags, they might be asked to show an ID. They also fear that if they evacuate and move to another state, they will not be able to come back because a new Florida immigration law imposed penalties for those transporting immigrants without legal authorization.
“There is a lot of fear of deportation or worse that people live daily so these fears are highlighted in times of disasters when vulnerability is increased," said Dominique O’Connor, a climate-justice organizer at the Farmworker Association of Florida.
O’Connor said that some shelters and sites that provide sandbags ask for a form of identification and the military personnel or police officers giving out water are “very intimidating” for immigrants who do not have legal authorization in Florida, which has one of the strictest immigration laws in the country.
