MIAMI – 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.
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Milton has turned those obstacles into matters of life and death.
Migrants in the eye of the storm
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 highest number of immigrants after Miami, the majority from Latin American countries such as Mexico and Venezuela.
In Central Florida, most migrants work in hospitality, construction and agriculture, picking strawberries, other berries, tomatoes and oranges. Many new arrivals don’t have access to TV or internet access and don't know the best way to find information about Milton, a powerful storm that pushed 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 would hit hard and many fear leaving their trailer homes, or facing deportation.
“There is resistance to going to a shelter,” Juan Sabines Guerrero, Mexican consul general in Orlando.
“There is no time to think about it," he urged compatriots in Florida. "They have to do it.”
Sabines said that local authorities have assured consular officials "that they will not ask about immigration status."
Fighting fear about deportation to save lives
Guerrero and his staff have done several interviews with Spanish-language radio stations in the area and shared an interactive map about shelters in the area on social media platforms. They also have WhatsApp channels and an emergency hotline people can call.
Immigration advocates and consulate officials have been reaching out 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.
A Mexican mom with a son who needs a respirator
Lupita Lara lives close to Orlando with her family and 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 came from Mexico, speaks mainly Spanish and needed an English-speaker 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.
State policies spark fear that puts migrant lives at risk
In 2023 Florida approved one of the strictest immigration laws in the nation. It criminalized bringing people without permanent legal status into the state, invalidated any U.S. government identification they might have and blocked local governments from providing them with ID cards. Florida hospitals that receive Medicaid must ask patients about immigration status and businesses employing 25 or more people must verify their workers’ legal status.
Some advocates told The Associated Press Wednesday that immigrants fear that if they went to a shelter they could be deported. They have the same fear if they request food or sandbags to protect their houses, even when authorities and the same advocates say that they will not ask for any identification.
They also fear that if they evacuate and move to another state, they will not be able to come back because of the Florida law imposing penalties for 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 are asking for a form of identification, and there are some well-meaning military personnel or police officers giving out water, which is “very intimidating” for immigrants.
African migrants with legal status but higher language barriers
Agencies that work with the federal government to settle refugees placed about 200 families from Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries in the Tampa 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 another of the languages the refugees speak.
Many of those living in affordable apartments in Tampa, Sarasota and Saint Petersburg do not have transportation and do not know where to go.
“They are the most vulnerable,” said Pierre Uwimana, a refugee organizer at the Florida Immigrant Coalition, which has been working with some of the refugee leaders to translate information about the storm and evacuations.
The few families with cars have been taking others to the shelters. Some have called police to transport them, Uwimana said.
“They are evacuating. This is something that they are not used to,” he said. “They are really scared.”
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Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.