When a Florida Farmer-Legislator Turned Against Immigration, the Consequences Were Severe. But Not for Him.

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Rick Roth is a staunch Republican and a conservative member of the Florida Legislature, but he’s quick to point out that he’s first and foremost a farmer. Roth grows vegetables, rice and sugar cane on the thousands of acres passed down to him from his father, in Palm Beach County south of Lake Okeechobee. And because the farm relies on a steady stream of laborers, most of them from Mexico, Roth spent substantial time over the last three decades, before and after he became a politician, trying to stop lawmakers from messing with his workforce.

A big part of that fight was against legislation that would make employers verify their workers’ immigration status. Such laws, Roth once said, would bankrupt farmers like him.

But by 2023, when Florida was once again considering such a bill, Roth’s convictions had grown shaky. In May of that year, he sat and listened as his Democratic colleagues voiced their opposition: “This bill will tank our state’s economy by directly harming Florida's agriculture, hospitality and construction industries,” one of them warned. Had this debate been unfolding even a few years earlier, Roth — who has acknowledged relying heavily on labor by undocumented immigrants in the past — likely would have nodded along.

This time, he didn’t. Several minutes later, Roth, his gray hair cut short and a cross pinned to his lapel, rose from his seat on the House floor, peered through reading glasses and delivered a statement antithetical to what the 70-year-old had long stood for: “I rise in support of SB 1718,” he announced. First among his reasons, he said, was an “invasion” of immigrants at the border. He called it a “ticking time bomb.”

The bill not only required all but the smallest employers to check the legal status of any new hires against a federal database, it also ordered hospitals to ask patients about their status. The measure added new funds to Gov. Ron DeSantis' program to transport newly arrived immigrants out of the state, while making it a felony for individuals to bring undocumented workers in. DeSantis called it “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.”

Roth knew that the legislation might hurt many farmers — not to mention landscapers and contractors and hotels and a slew of other employers in Florida. But it was good politics. Across the country, Republican politicians like himself have almost universally fallen in line with what amounts to a requirement for party membership. Even business-focused Republicans, who for many years had turned a blind eye to undocumented immigrants because they provided cheap, reliable labor, had given in to a mandate from a party whose leader has spent three presidential campaigns portraying immigration as an existential threat to the United States. In Roth’s case, the transformation from a decades-long advocate for expanding legal immigration to a Trump-style hardliner was so swift and so complete that he barely tries to explain it, other than to repeat what sound like Republican talking points about how the border has become a crisis.

The measure passed easily out of the Republican-controlled House the same day Roth stood to support it. Relieved it was over, he left Tallahassee to return to his fields outside the town of Belle Glade, where the motto is “her soil is her fortune.” He drove his Toyota Prius, a Trump 2020 sticker on the bumper, down the dirt lanes that run along his tracts of land. Birds darted around the fallow farmland. Roth felt at ease.

The calm didn’t last. Among Roth’s business owner constituents, there was a rising panic about the fate of their workers. A manager of a vegetable packing house stood by as dozens of his workers left. “We had a mass exodus here,” he later said. Undocumented immigrants and their families were loading up trucks with years of belongings and decamping to Georgia or North Carolina. “Everyone was afraid,” said a resident of a Belle Glade mobile home park. She’d watched as at least five of her neighbors, all undocumented immigrants, sold their trailers and moved. A daycare worker in the next town said several children of immigrants in her classroom were there one week, gone the next.

As workers were scrambling to protect themselves from what they saw as a coming crackdown, phone calls were flooding into Roth’s legislative office. The farmers and contractors and landscapers were complaining that this law Roth had supported was going to wreck their businesses. It was exactly the kind of fallout Roth had long warned of when he’d fought measures like the one he’d just helped to pass.

As one nursery owner who called into Roth’s office asked: “What have you done?”

Around the time of the flurry of calls, 26-year-old Salvador Garcia Espitia and his wife, Nohemí Enriquez Fonseca, were trying to figure out how they’d deal with their own crisis. The couple, who’d grown up near each other in the small ranchos of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, had become parents two years before. Their son, Isaac, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and autism. Garcia’s work in a vegetable packing facility and in the corn fields around their town barely covered his son’s therapy and medication. Enriquez hadn’t worked since the baby was born, since his care took all her time.

The family lived in Cerritos, with Garcia’s parents. It wasn’t much of a town, just a cluster of homes behind a locked gate. The gate went up after a local woman was kidnapped, presumably by gang or cartel members, though no one knows for sure. Each night, after 9:30, residents communicated by group chat if someone needed to leave for an emergency, so that whoever had the key could let them out and back in.

Whenever Garcia worked overtime, which was almost always once Isaac’s medical bills stacked up, his mother would sit and wait for him to come home, even until 2 a.m. She feared for her youngest child, her only son. He was so full of promise, capable of so much with his serious disposition and vast intelligence. She worried not just about his safety, but that she hadn’t done enough for him. The best job she could find was cleaning houses, which she did for many years. Her husband was frequently out of work after a head injury he’d suffered back when Garcia was a toddler.

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Since Garcia was a child, he had watched countless relatives and friends make the decision for their own families’ futures to go find work in the north. The men departed, crossing into the United States without papers. To have a home, to afford a car, to provide for a child who would struggle to walk or speak, going north was the only way.

But Garcia was clear: He would not cross the border that way. He could not risk being harmed or killed and leaving his wife and son with nothing.

Not long after the severity of Isaac’s condition came to light, Garcia began to listen more closely to other young men in the towns near his: There was a way to travel back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico for work, a way to do it that seemed safe.

The solution for Garcia was a visa program that promised to benefit both migrating workers in desperate need of livable wages and U.S. farms in desperate need of affordable labor. But in many ways, the benefits to workers have remained a gamble while for farmers they're guaranteed.

Roth is a special case, a farmer and also a politician. For him, the program has served a dual purpose. It’s ensured the success of his business by providing a steady stream of workers. And it’s made it easier for him to adopt a harsher political stance on immigration at a time when he feels his party demands it.

Roth didn’t mention it on the House floor or broadcast it to his constituents, but the visa program made his farm mostly impervious to the provisions he’d rallied against in the past. As anxiety gripped communities of undocumented people and many of their employers, Roth Farms was going to be just fine.

The visa program turned out to be a lifeline for Roth. When Garcia reached for that same lifeline, it failed him.

Roth Farms dates back four generations to the late 1940s, but Rick Roth didn’t grow up thinking the family business would be his future. When he went off to Emory University in 1970 to study math, he figured he’d find himself working an office job, somewhere far from any fields.

“I thought, ‘Man, I'm too smart to be a farmer.’” But Roth said a mix of marijuana and malaise sent him off track. After he was placed on academic probation, he came home and asked his father to put him to work on the farm. To Roth’s surprise, he liked it. He was assigned easy jobs, like driving truckloads of radishes to the packing house. Though he’d often mess up basic tasks or show up late and hungover, his father’s workers knew that he could be the boss someday, and they treated him accordingly. Roth knew it, too. He also knew that if he went to work at some company, he’d start at the bottom, and there was no guarantee how far up he’d make it. Here, he had a clear path to the top.

Roth returned to Emory, finished his degree, and then came back to Roth Farms. His father gave him more responsibility, and within a few years he was overseeing harvest operations. With his crew leaders’ guidance, he’d earned his father’s respect and sensed that this might be permanent, that the farm could actually be his.

Sooner than he expected, it was. In 1984, his father had a heart attack. Two years later, he died. Roth still tears up, 40 years later, recalling his loss.

For a decade, the farm grew and prospered. Then, Roth faced his first major challenge. Back then, almost all of the farm’s workers were Black. But as the workers began aging out of farm labor, it was becoming harder to find new people to take their place. Though Roth had found reason to continue his father’s lucrative profession, he realized with some consternation that the people he employed in low-wage field jobs didn’t raise their own children to follow them: “No farmworker raises their kids to be farmworkers.”

Other Belle Glade farms were responding to the worker shortage by hiring newly arrived Mexican immigrants. Roth Farms hired a new Latino crew leader to help bring them in. By the end of the 1990s, “half of our employees working in seasonal jobs probably were illegal,” Roth said. “Everybody knew that.”

The immigrant workers Roth hired were young, strong and plentiful, and they were willing, he has said, to work for less money than Americans. That assumption brought trouble. By the late 1990s, nearly all of his workers were Latino, and in 1999, a group of nine of them filed a class action lawsuit against Roth for racial and national origin discrimination. They alleged that they earned up to $1.50 less per hour than the small remaining Black crew of a dozen or so workers. Roth at the time denied that any wage disparities were based on race.

The two sides reached a settlement, with Roth Farms agreeing to pay $124,000 to cover the additional wages the workers alleged they were owed. Roth declined to comment on the lawsuit.

As the farm continued to benefit from a fairly steady stream of workers from Mexico, Roth became convinced that those workers should be entitled to legal status. He felt that farms like his couldn’t just keep on hiring undocumented immigrants forever, or at least they shouldn’t have to. He began making treks to Washington, D.C., to advocate for an easier path for undocumented workers to become legal ones.

The bills that would have done that didn’t pass. But Roth kept up his advocacy efforts, reiterating that U.S. citizens would never return to farm work, even with higher wages, and that without immigrant workers, the U.S. would need to begin importing more food.

In 2011, Florida lawmakers began deliberating a series of bills modeled after a recent Arizona law that would make it a crime to be undocumented in Florida, allow police to check people’s immigration status and crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers. The Arizona law, and similar ones in Alabama and Georgia, played out as anticipated. Workers left. Fields of vegetables rotted.

One of the Florida bills also would have required private employers to run all hires through E-Verify, the system for checking legal work status, and imposed fines on companies that employ undocumented immigrants. In response, Roth intensified his public opposition. Those bills failed.

When Congress later that year considered the Legal Workforce Act, including an E-Verify requirement, Roth again spoke against it, telling the Palm Beach Post: “This is a repetitive job for people who don't speak the language. These people pick the crops for other people who have air-conditioned jobs.”

Generations of Garcia’s family members had worked on farms, but he didn’t grow up thinking it was an inevitability. He wanted to go to college, maybe even become a doctor.

He was in high school when he met Enriquez, who was 15 at the time and a guest at his cousin’s wedding. She was struck by how serious he was, and how smart. No matter her question he had an answer.

Enriquez’s parents were strict. She liked to go out, much more than Garcia did, but she could only meet him in public with her parents in tow, at community gatherings or the annual festival celebrating the town’s patron saint. Otherwise, he could come to the family’s house.

By the time Garcia moved in with Enriquez and her parents, when she was 18 and he was 20, he’d had to give up on going to college. There was no money for that. He went to work in a local dairy, then to the fields and the vegetable packing houses.

A year after he moved in, Garcia and Enriquez married. He didn’t want to start a family too soon, though. He wanted to save up for a house of their own. They made it three years. A house was still a distant possibility, but Garcia took the pregnancy as the best news.

The baby was 6 months old when Enriquez became convinced that something wasn’t right. Isaac was not developing the way he should. She started to look for help. Eventually, she brought Isaac to a private doctor, who said the baby needed to see a neurologist.

That one appointment was nearly a week’s salary. The neurologist scheduled a scan of the child’s brain. Enriquez and Garcia cobbled together what they could, figuring that it was just enough to pay for the scan and cover the bus fare to the facility for her, Isaac and his godmother, who wanted to come along. But when they got there, the scan was more than they were expecting, and more than they had. Isaac’s godmother came up with the remainder, but they were left with no money to get home. They found a bus willing to let them pay the fare at the destination. On the way, Enriquez called a friend to meet the bus and lend her the fare.

The more stressed her husband got, the quieter he became. And in the weeks after the scan, he said very little. He was also working constantly. The neurologist had explained that Isaac had cerebral palsy, which meant he would need a speech therapist, physical therapy and a nutritionist. The rehab facility was an hour and a half away by bus. The therapy sessions cost 1,200 pesos, or about $60, every week. The most Garcia could bring home each week, working as much overtime as he could, was 2,000 pesos. Typically it was more like 1,500.

Just as they got help covering the cost of Isaac’s treatment, he was diagnosed with a second condition, autism. The new medication cost more than what they’d been spending to manage his cerebral palsy.

The need for Garcia to go north was no longer merely important. It was urgent. He turned to his wife and said: “I have to find another solution.” And that’s when the H-2A visa came up.

After years of lobbying against various laws, Roth began to wonder if he could do more for farmers by joining the Legislature rather than fighting it. In 2016, he announced his run for a Florida house seat.

Not long after Roth won his race, Donald Trump entered the White House. Roth wholeheartedly supported Trump, but he would soon find that the president’s immigration agenda created a new problem for his farm. “With Donald Trump, there were not a lot of illegals coming to America,” Roth acknowledged, which aligns with the low numbers of immigrants who crossed the border during much of the former president’s first year in office. “We started to have to say, ‘Well, now what are we going to do?’”

For a time, he did what he’d always done: He fought actions that would harm undocumented workers and their employers. He voted against a 2019 E-Verify bill pushed by DeSantis. But he was more quiet about his opposition, he said, refraining from the strong language he’d previously used. The bill died in committee.

It was around that time that Roth, along with his son, who’d taken over the day-to-day operations of the farm, found a fix. It was available to only a sliver of the state’s employers: an agricultural visa program called H-2A.

The program, which allows the U.S. farming industry to bring in foreign laborers on a temporary basis, had been around in some form since the 1940s. But until recently Roth had little need for it – his workers, documented and not, came back every year. Plus, he had considered the program’s requirements to pay more than the minimum wage and cover the cost of transportation from Mexico and housing in Belle Glade too expensive. But, like many other farmers who’d struggled with labor shortages, he came around to it. The program could dependably deliver legal workers. H-2A visa certifications have increased fourfold in the last decade, and nowhere are there more of these workers than in Florida.

“H-2A,” Roth said, “was really the only choice.”

When Florida’s anti-immigration SB 1718 came around in 2023, Roth had an almost entirely H-2A workforce — which made it easier for him to support legislation that purported to push out undocumented workers. As for how to explain his change of heart to constituents: “Given the border crossing that’s going on, we did need to send a strong message,” he said. “If you're illegal, don't come to Florida. We're gonna make it tough on you.”

But some of his constituents couldn’t help but get a different message: “We’re going to make it tough on your workers.” They told Roth that the law itself, not the far-away border crossings, posed the immediate threat to their livelihoods.

Eventually, the potential for the law’s harm began to sink in. Weeks after his vote for SB 1718, in the summer of 2023, Roth showed up at meetings across his district on a campaign of damage control. “I apologize to you for this bad bill,” he told a group gathered at a local church, with the help of a Spanish interpreter.

Roth made numerous statements in public and private meetings that the law is predominantly political, intended “to help a governor run for president.” He said it had been laced with “purposeful loopholes” to protect employers from too much harm. For one, it doesn’t apply to small businesses with fewer than 25 workers. But chief among the loopholes, Roth said, is that the E-Verify requirement doesn’t extend to undocumented immigrants who already have jobs. “If you like your job, keep your job,” he’s become fond of saying.

Roth admits that, even today, he may have longtime workers who are undocumented. When workers in his own packing house started asking questions about the law, he said he “instructed all my management what to say, and I just told them very clearly, ‘This new bill that you're hearing all this talk about does not apply to workers that already have a job.’”

The full impact of SB 1718 is still not clear. Its E-Verify provisions did not take full effect until July. For some employers, it’s made life more difficult. “I can’t grow,” said Mark Baker, who owns a 40-year-old landscape and plant nursery in Delray Beach. He lamented that he can’t use the H-2A program, since his workers aren’t temporary. “I want to open another office, but I can’t because I can’t even staff the office I have.”

Despite having voted to crack down on immigrants in Florida, Roth maintains he still supports broader immigration legalization and insists it’s up to Washington to take action. He also admits he thinks such a fix is far off. What he knows for sure is that for farms like his, H-2A is working, that it incentivizes workers to come here the right way — with the assurance that worker and farmer alike will be protected.

That September 2023 morning started like so many others. Enriquez caught the bus to take Isaac to physical therapy. This time her husband came along. They stopped to eat something on the way back home, then Garcia collected the bags he had packed.

If he was nervous or frustrated or scared, he didn’t show it.

Garcia’s parents picked up the three of them to drive Garcia to the bus station. It would be tortuous for him to be away from his family, but the consolation was that the job would only last five months. It was dusk when they got to the bus stop, and they couldn’t linger. It was unsafe to be out in the dark. They hugged him tight. “Take care of our boy,” he said.

Garcia spent the following days sorting out paperwork with a labor subcontractor who specializes in recruiting Mexicans to work on U.S. farms. He knew a little about where he was headed: Belle Glade. His wife’s aunt had immigrated to a nearby town years earlier. Once he arrived, he visited with her before settling into his barracks-style lodging near the sugar cane fields, which happened to be just a few miles from Roth’s fields. Garcia texted his wife that he would try his best to get some rest that night, since he would start work in the morning.

The following afternoon, Sept. 13, 2023, Enriquez was just getting back from taking Isaac to therapy when someone called from Florida. It was a woman from the company that had hired Garcia. Her husband was fine, the woman said. He had fainted in the fields, she explained, which was something that happened from time to time, because of heat nearing 90 degrees. But no, he couldn’t talk to her right then. He was still unconscious. The woman gave Enriquez the name of the hospital where he was recovering.

As soon as they hung up, Enriquez called her aunt, who headed to the hospital. But when she arrived, she was told that Garcia had been transferred, to Palms West Hospital in Loxahatchee.

In the hours that followed, the calls to Enriquez accelerated. Amid all the ringing and buzzing, someone arranged that night for a video call so she could see her husband. He still hadn’t woken up. She spoke softly to him, trying to hold back her panic over the cables and tubes that crisscrossed his body, including one helping him breathe.

It was very early the next morning when the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez’s permission to resuscitate her husband. The words instinctively came to her — yes, save him — and she sprang into action. She realized she would need to somehow quickly cross the border to get to her husband. It seemed as if one minute, she was handing off Isaac to her mother and the next she was 900 miles away at the border crossing at Matamoros, Garcia’s mother by her side.

The two women had to wait on the Mexican side of the bridge for several hours. As they sat outside in the middle of the night, the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez to agree to resuscitate her husband. Again she said yes.

The nurses ventured one more question. In the event of a third resuscitation, would Enriquez have the same answer? Her husband was no longer well, they said. He was suffering. Enriquez weighed the pain in her soul. No, she said. Not a third time.

The border crossing took all day. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had to ask so many questions to approve the two women for the humanitarian permit. Hours passed. Enriquez was aware that authorities kept trying to reach people at the hospital to confirm her husband’s condition.

Finally, the permits were approved. As the two women left the CBP building in Brownsville, Texas, an official saw them out, holding open the door. It would be the first time either woman had crossed into the United States. All the man said was, “I’m very sorry.”

Roth had heard about the death of a worker on a nearby farm. He said it was sad. He also said one of his first thoughts was one of worry, about what state or federal agencies would do in response. “It's a big deal that somebody died,” Roth added. But “the government tends to overreact.”

In late 2023, Roth returned to Tallahassee to serve his final session in the Florida House before he termed out. He has plans to run for state Senate in 2026. Among the last bills he co-sponsored as a member of the House was one that would prevent local governments in Florida from implementing workplace heat protections.

It was introduced in reaction to a proposal in Miami-Dade County that would have required water, breaks and shade for outdoor workers. Roth had joined a chorus of business groups pushing forcefully to ban the local labor ordinance. “I’m a little bit insulted that some government bureaucrat thinks they need to help me take care of my employees,” he told a local Fox affiliate.

Roth had supported a bill four years earlier to require heat protections for student athletes, but he rejected the idea that Florida should impose protections for workers. He told ProPublica that employers don’t need state or local government to require safeguards, since employers already have every incentive to protect their workers. Given the shortage of workers across the state, he said, “do you really think they're not taking care of their employees?”

He also pointed out that the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration already regulates workplaces, including fining those that don’t offer heat protections. And ultimately, he said, it’s the responsibility of workers and their crew leaders to make sure they’re not putting themselves at risk. On his own farm, he said, workers know when they need to take breaks.

On March 12, 2024, days after the Florida Legislature passed the anti-heat protection bill, OSHA revealed the findings of its investigation into Garcia’s death. It determined that the Belle Glade company that hired Garcia and other H-2A workers to local farms had failed to adequately protect workers from the heat.

“This young man’s life ended on his first day on the job because his employer did not fulfill its duty to protect employees from heat exposure,” the OSHA area director said in a statement. “Had McNeill Labor Management made sure its workers were given time to acclimate to working in brutally high temperatures with required rest breaks, the worker might not have suffered a fatal injury.”

For McNeill Labor Management Inc.’s failures to protect Garcia and to report his death to the government, OSHA issued the company a fine of less than $28,000.

Owner Shannon McNeill told ProPublica that his company, which employs 700 mostly H-2A workers at the height of operations, provides workers with all of the protections that safety advocates call for, including water, shade and breaks. He also said that the company is now easing new hires more slowly into full-day shifts, a practice that OSHA already recommended. But he is contesting OSHA’s determination that the company is responsible for Garcia’s death.

McNeill Labor Management had paid for Garcia’s body to be returned to Mexico and his funeral expenses. On a morning in July, before a heavy rain set in, Nohemí Enriquez left her son with her mother near the church in the town of Pueblo Nuevo and drove out of the town center to visit her husband’s grave in a small, orderly cemetery. The flowers she placed there on her last visit had become dried and shriveled. She took them from the vase and threw them away, angry at herself for not bringing fresh ones. And then she prayed. “For those I love and who loved me,” his gravestone read.

One week earlier, on July 19, Roth was in the audience as Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee about “a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.” He promised to deliver on a commitment to carry out “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Roth, a party delegate from Florida, had spent the day before dancing and laughing on the floor with other delegates, as well as shedding a few tears. “It was very emotional for me when Trump came out,” he said.

Asked a week later if the mass deportations would do harm to the agricultural industry in Florida, he responded with confidence that Trump would not actually engage in an indiscriminate mass deportation program. But even if that did happen, he said, there will always be a supply of H-2A workers waiting. “We'll figure it out,” he said. “We'll get more.”

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Translations by Wendy Pérez, Jesús Jank Curbelo and Greta Díaz González Vázquez.

Translations by Wendy Pérez, Jesús Jank Curbelo and Greta Díaz González Vázquez.