In the first few weeks of May, Yesica Ramirez’s phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.
Florida’s state legislature had just approved SB 1718, a wide-ranging anti-immigrant law that requires businesses to verify the citizenship status of their employees and increases penalties for transporting undocumented immigrants across Florida’s border, among other restrictions.
Her Orlando-area farmworker organizing group was suddenly fielding what felt like an overwhelming number of calls and texts from concerned neighbors, confused farmworkers, and fearful families. Rumors of immigration raids, of an increased police presence on highways and roads, and hypothetical worst-case scenarios were spreading through chat text chains, word of mouth, and social media.
“There aren’t even words to describe the fear the community had,” Ramirez told me recently. “There was one week where we had an extreme volume of phone calls of people warning that they had seen [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers at very specific spots, at a specific store, for example.”
Ramirez, who works with the Farmworkers Association of Florida, a labor and immigrant rights organization, and her team of about 20 volunteers jumped into action. Their rapid-response group spent much of late May and June individually checking out various reports of immigration officers at different locations around central Florida and talking to fearful folks who had flagged those sightings.
Those reports ended up being false — but for Ramirez, they demonstrated just how anxious and scared the immigrant and mixed-status communities she works with were, and continue to be, as this law takes effect over the weekend.
The mood has steadied since that initial panic. Families, lawyers, and advocates are now in a wait-and-see mode — unsure of what the implementation of this law will look like, how seriously police and other state agencies will enforce new guidelines, and whether businesses will be punished.
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