The Flooded Future of Disaster Labor

In the second Trump administration, which has promised mass deportations and the dismantling of the very federal agencies that coordinate disaster recovery — as well as a ​“drill, baby, drill” energy policy guaranteed to worsen climate chaos — the poor conditions of these workers may well be everyone’s problem. 

The continuing string of disasters has been a reminder that, as the climate changes, none of us is safe. Hurricane Helene’s path up the country from Florida in September 2024 ventured well inland; drought-fueled forest fires were rampaging across the Carolinas as I wrote these words this spring. Hurricane Debby, in August 2024, caused flooding and damage as far north as Vermont; late-season blizzards knocked over trees and power lines in Maine; the worst tornado season in two decades flattened homes across the center of the country; a ​“1,000-year event” saw extensive flooding in South Dakota. 

Those thousand-year storms are coming more like every couple of years. 

The efforts by those workers in Pasadena, Soto said, drew other volunteers. ​“At one point, we had a thousand volunteers a day coming in,” Soto said. ​“I think we counted over 30,000 hours of volunteer hours.”

In the aftermath of a disaster, explained Nik Theodore, a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago, ​“information doesn’t flow very well.” Communities facing destruction often don’t know exactly what to do, and so day laborers can become important sources of information. Theodore, working with NDLON, dubbed those workers ​“second responders,” the ​“very next group of people to come through” after emergency response. The work of cleanup, he noted, must begin quickly — after a fire or flood, health and safety hazards rapidly multiply, mold spreads, structures wobble. Migrant workers too often have survived disasters themselves and been rendered homeless and mobile by crisis, and all too often live in unstable conditions, their willingness to help born of necessity, experience and care. 

Those workers, particularly those from Mexico and Central America, have long been kept super-exploitable by an immigration regime that treats them as unwanted guests, constantly under threat. And with President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations in many of the places most vulnerable to climate disasters — Florida and Louisiana, among others — already-existing labor shortages in construction and repair will likely grow larger. 

In an immediate state of emergency, Theodore continued, immigration officials may back off, but only temporarily. After Katrina, he said, ​“once it became clear that folks were settling there … we started to see immigration enforcement actions ramp up.” Mary Yanik, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, confirmed this pattern: ​“When people are serving in these roles that are really important for their politically powerful employers, ICE enforcement is sort of scarce.” When workers begin to assert their rights, she noted, that’s when ICE is called in. 

The fear among immigrant worker communities is real. Maricela Torres, of the Esperanza Community Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., told me that, since Trump was elected, fewer people are willing to come to the center for its services and supports, and she sees fewer day laborers out at the normal locations where they usually wait for work. Some of her regular members have moved elsewhere. Others, who have done disaster recovery work, ask why they should risk their safety doing disaster cleanup when the country’s only offer is detention and deportation.

The Trump administration has been quite clear that its intention is to spread fear so workers will self-deport. What’s changed in Florida and elsewhere, explained Oscar Londoño of WeCount! — an immigrant worker center in South Florida— is that state governments are expanding enforcement ​“even if it creates an economic shock.” For decades, he said, industries like agriculture and construction have understood they cannot function without immigrant workers, many of them undocumented. But this moment has fractured that consensus, and the crisis will have wider ramifications, Londoño said.“Eventually, there will be a moment in which there’s a reckoning with the value or the centrality of immigrant workers and how devastating it would be to the economy if millions of undocumented workers were actually deported,” he said.

The intensity of this campaign will drive down already low labor standards in these industries, including emergency relief work. The fearmongering, Theodore said, creates ​“a real opportunity for unscrupulous employers to take advantage of workers, both in terms of wage theft, but also in health and safety conditions,” all backed up ​“with threats of immigration enforcement” — threats that carry new weight.

Yanik recalled the case of José Torres, who came from El Salvador to New Orleans after Katrina to be part of the rebuilding effort and stayed, becoming a leader in the Congress of Day Laborers, an immigrant workers group. Torres survived labor trafficking and was in the middle of a legal battle during the first Trump administration. He sought sanctuary in a church when he was threatened with deportation. Yanik and others worked on his case, which became a cause célèbre in the community, and eventually secured him a path to citizenship. 

The administration ​“wants spectacle,” Yanik said, but some of that spectacle takes time to prepare: The largest worksite raids during Trump 1.0, she noted, came in 2019. ​“They don’t need to do a hundred; they could do five, and they can still have that effect of making people stay home or even flee the country,” she said. With the declaration that churches, schools and hospitals will be stripped of sanctuary protections put in place by the Biden administration, she wondered whether we might see enforcement in shelters during emergencies.

The idea is to create a ​“hostile environment,” making conditions so unwelcoming that immigrants simply leave. In that climate, even people attempting to help by sharing information about ICE on social media, for example, sometimes contribute to the fear: ​“Information is constantly being propagated without being verified,” Londoño said. ​“That’s why it’s so central to have organizations anchored in workplaces and in communities that can verify this information, that can create community defense infrastructure, that can educate people on what their rights are and, if necessary, mobilize resources.” 

Mutual aid efforts that flower in the wake of disaster can help bring people into this kind of community defense work. In Pasadena, Soto said, organizers recognized how the fires created opportunity for ​“organizing folks and making sure people understand this is a political act, just these workers going out in the streets.” Working to rebuild the community, citizens and immigrants build stronger ties, and those who had not been involved in worker organizing might be more willing to stand up for their neighbors.

One of the Trump administration’s big ideas for ​“reforming” disaster relief is to put more of the responsibility on the states. Of course, this idea presents a problem for those same Southern states that are storm-prone, with right-wing governments often unwilling to fund relief. As Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.) told reporters: ​“States, while capable of responding to some immediate needs, do not have the resources, infrastructure, or capacity to provide the widespread, coordinated relief that FEMA can offer.” 

FEMA was created after those same Southern states demanded coordinated disaster recovery in the 1970s. Today, the landscape is very different. 

More than a decade ago, Londoño noted, Florida abolished its state Department of Labor, and it does not have a state Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). It’s part of ​“systematic deregulation,” he said, combined with attacks on labor unions, which has resulted in worse conditions for workers whether or not they are legal residents. WeCount! has been behind a campaign, for example, to try to win heat protections for outdoor workers. ​“We came within a vote of passing the first of its kind — a municipal heat standard for outdoor workers in Miami-Dade — and were then preempted by the state government.”

Those Southern states have relied on federal labor agencies for what protections they can get. ​“If either from inaction or action, the federal Department of Labor is considered unsafe for immigrant workers to report to, that means they’re all on their own and vulnerable,” Yanik said. ​“It means that the employers will do whatever they want with no restraint at all.” 

Even under the Biden administration, which wanted to be seen as pro-worker, offices like OSHA were desperately understaffed. OSHA had one inspector for every 80,014 workers, or enough to inspect every workplace once every 186 years, according to a 2024 report from the AFL-CIO. 

Without the agencies to help, workers have had to look after themselves. In the wake of the fires, Soto said, NDLON and the Pasadena center have embarked on a massive training effort to put workers through OSHA’s new disaster worker certification course. ​“We were able to train 174 day laborers and domestic workers in that course, that does fit testing, what kind of masks you need, how to work in wildfire,” he said. After that, they move to smoke abatement and then hazardous waste training. ​“We know these workers are going to be the first line going into the sites,” so they’re proactively helping workers gain skills. 

As Soto explained: ​“Coming out of these trainings, what you see is workers, a lot of times, are indignant. ​‘Why didn’t I get this? Why didn’t I have this before?’ Because it’s basic stuff, but it’s stuff that is life-changing in terms of the health outcomes.”

Communities are reshaped in many ways following a disaster. The New Orleans I live in now looks very different from the one I moved away from in 2002, before Katrina. Some Californians are discovering this right now in the aftermath of the fires. Insurance costs have skyrocketed in disaster-prone areas (thanks to climate change-transformed estimates), and payouts often don’t cover the cost of rebuilding. Then, developers swoop in to buy damaged homes.

In these moments, the claims of eliminating red tape don’t help working-class residents. The idea of ​“we’re just going to lift regulations so that we can rebuild faster,” according to Soto, only makes it easier for unscrupulous developers and contractors to take advantage of desperate homeowners and workers. In places like New Orleans, he continued, health and safety violations skyrocketed when regulations were lifted. ​“And so when you say, ​‘we’re going to suspend [rules] to make it easier to rebuild,’ that’s what we hear. We hear, ​‘you’re going to make it easier to put people’s lives at risk, to screw over people who are most affected.’”

In particular areas, like the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas, ​“Communities are ahead of the government,” said Jeffrey Jacoby of the Texas Campaign for the Environment. Every year, he sees hurricane preparedness mutual aid events into the summer. ​“From the government officials, it’s total crickets.” The gap between awareness and the resources provided has been huge, and so community organizations step into that gap as best they can. 

“What’s twisted about the system is, with proper resources, with enough funding, then I think communities could do a pretty good job of getting ready,” he continued. Recently, Jacoby added, after a tropical storm knocked out power in Freeport, Texas, one church was able to provide a few generators for the community, ensuring that about a dozen families could keep food from spoiling and be sheltered from the summer heat. ​“You just imagine something like that with a different scale, and you could have a lot less suffering in the face of a disaster.” 

Workers can push for standards in contracts and attempt to hold big employers accountable if states and localities won’t provide them, Londoño said. Miami-Dade has a campaign around the annual heat season, but still a lack of labor regulations around heat. And yet, he noted, employers are well aware that climate change is a reality — agricultural firms ​“are constantly adapting to changes in climate.” Production is going to have to change, he said, so ​“you should also account for the impact of extreme heat on your workforce.” Immigrant workers like WeCount!’s members will be leading the charge on heat standards once again this year, in yet another campaign that will help the rest of their communities adapt to the crisis. 

The work of disaster relief is the work of salvage, as I wrote in my 2024 book, From the Ashes. It is the work of sifting through rubble to make something livable again, and it is mostly done by people who have already lost so much. Surviving the Trump administration, too, will be a form of salvage, and it will require new solidarities built from destruction.

Cal Soto saw hope in the rubble in Pasadena. ​“Many of those volunteers — the most dedicated ones who are showing up every single day — they’re not leaving, and they’re figuring out how to plug in with rapid response efforts to monitor if there is ICE presence in the community,” he said. ​“That group of folks, who maybe had never been to the center before, are now getting to take a little bit more of a political step.” 

Safety in this moment will come from our neighbors, rather than attempts to protect our individual selves from harm, whether harm from a hurricane or from an ICE raid. ​“In places that are climate vulnerable, like Florida, where hurricanes are going to intensify, they’re going to accelerate in frequency,” Londoño said. ​“And it’s in that moment, I think, when huge swaths of the population will understand how valuable immigrant workers are to that process of rebuilding.”