Mega-farmer Francis Alfred “Alfie” Oakes III addresses the camera as massive watermelons come rolling down a conveyor belt at one of his farms in Collier County. Behind him are workers, all of them Hispanic, rapidly picking up the melons and putting them in large bins.
“We’re loading as quickly as we can,” Oakes explains in a video he uploaded to Facebook on April 28. “We couldn’t do that without the help of this amazing team here.”
He continues his praise of immigrant workers, whom he says are superior to the American labor force that used to work his family’s farms.
“They really do so much more of an amazing job than what we call the ‘domestic’ workers that we used to get 30 years ago when I started in this business,” Oakes says. “That’s why we can grow a 500 or 600-acre field and load 40 or 50 semi loads a day because these guys really know how to get it done. They’re true masters of their trade.”
It might be surprising to hear such pro-immigrant talk from Oakes, who is well-known as an ultra-conservative, pro-Donald Trump activist and local Republican kingpin. Trump, after all, has relentlessly attacked immigrants over the past decade, claiming they come from prisons and insane asylums, and has made deporting them en masse a cornerstone of his second term in the White House.
In the video, Oakes, who owns the Seed to Table supermarket in Naples, seems to be telegraphing a plea to Trump and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to leave his business alone in those deportation efforts. He says all the migrants who work for him are documented, but that hasn’t always been the case — in 2014, more than 100 of his employees were arrested for possessing false immigration papers.
Clearly Trump heard the pleas of farmers like Oakes who rely on immigrant labor, as earlier this month he did an abrupt about-face on his mass deportation plans.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote June 12 on social media.
After so many years of relentless demonization, Trump was suddenly acknowledging that immigrants — including undocumented workers — have economic value in America. Shortly thereafter he announced the deportation effort would be aimed primarily at America’s cities, the “Democrat Power Center,” as he called it.
Trump’s admission only echoed what many economists and immigration experts have been saying all along: Migrant labor, rather than hindering the economy, is actually vital to it.
But there’s been no such concession by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and no sign his mission to make Florida the national leader in rounding up immigrants has lost any steam. “We’re leading,” DeSantis said during a May 12 press conference in Tampa. “I think others really need to do more.”
Florida already has the country’s largest number of local agreements to assist federal deportation, according to ICE, and the governor has even bigger plans. At that same presser DeSantis unveiled his “Immigration Enforcement Operations Plan” detailing his administration’s vision of a new state-run immigration enforcement system to “circumvent federal agency bureaucracy” and essentially operate on its own rules.
The 37-page plan paints a vision of immigrant holding camps where thousands of arrested immigrants would be detained in jails as well as tents and other makeshift facilities (“soft-side detention”) that it specifically notes may be built and run by for-profit prison companies. And it’s all part of the state’s effort to assist “President Trump’s fight against the ‘deep state’ within federal agencies,” according to the plan.
And DeSantis, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has a pot of taxpayer money at his disposal for the effort. In February, he signed a bill into law allocating $298 million in state funds toward the effort, with the money going toward the hiring of 50 law enforcement officers and detention facilities, among other things.
A very dramatic early implementation of the plan is so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” — a detention camp of large tents and trailers in a little-used airport facility located in the inhospitable and environmentally protected Everglades of eastern Collier County expected to hold up to 5,000 immigrants. The prison is estimated to cost some $450 million annually to run, with funding expected from the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
“There’s not much waiting for [immigrant detainees] but alligators and pythons,” said Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier in a June 19 X post. “There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
The controversial project is moving at lightning speed. Its opening is expected today, with a visit to the site from Trump to mark the occasion, but a lawsuit filed against DeSantis by environmental groups on Friday aims to block its opening. “This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, which filed the lawsuit along with the Center for Biological Diversity.
At the same time, the Trump Administration has systematically removed legal status for well over a million formerly documented immigrants – from countries including Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – that will provide human fodder for camps like “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Humanitarian and environmental concerns aside, multiple economic and immigration experts interviewed by the Florida Trident warn that mass sweeps, detentions, and deportations would do to the state’s economy precisely what Oakes fears it would do to his own massive farm operation.
Bring it to ruin.
The need for immigrants
Michael Collins has spent his life in the hospitality industry, doing everything from making beds to running hotels for Hyatt and Wyndham. He’s also interim director of resort and hospitality management at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Lutgert College of Business — and he told the Trident that a major sweep of immigrants in the state would be financially catastrophic.
“Bottom line, our business could not work at full capacity without foreign workers,” he said. “Next time you’re in a restaurant you might have a two hour wait to be seated, if not for them.”
Temporary workers in the hospitality industry are covered under H2B visas for non-agricultural workers, giving them permission to work up to three years in the United States. When it comes to Collier County as an example, Collins has a precise count: 661 H2B workers were admitted to the county for the first half of the federal fiscal year, which began in October. Of those, 85 percent were in the food preparation and serving business, while others worked in hotels, personal healthcare, and spas.
“That’s in one county,” Collins pointed out. “Double it up in Lee, Sarasota, and go to the east coast.”
Florida’s iconic citrus industry provides another example of the state’s reliance on immigrant workers, according to Florida Immigrant Coalition spokesman Thomas Kennedy.
“Florida in the 1990s produced 240 million boxes of oranges each year,” said Kennedy, whose coalition represents 83 groups that advocate for immigrants. “This year it’s 12 million. There are issues of land use, a lot of growers leaving the industry, citrus greening disease, hurricanes, the occasional drought, the willingness to make some money by selling land to developers—that’s all happening. But it’s silly to pretend that there isn’t a labor issue. [The growers] talk about the impact of tariffs but they also talk about it being increasingly difficult to find workers that are economically viable for them.”
He noted Florida’s slowing population growth, with more young people moving out of the state and birth rates in decline. “Legal or not legal, any population boost will be from immigration,” Kennedy said.
The response by state lawmakers to the need for more of these workers has been a flurry of proposals to drop restrictions on child labor and expand the hours that school-enrolled students can work part-time jobs. Even though these measures failed in the legislative session, Kennedy said they reflect the strains of an economy in need of workers.
The DeSantis Administration has “no feasible alternative if they went through with their mass deportation effort,” Kennedy said. “The thing they will never do is admit that they need more immigrants in the state.”
When it comes to the broader agricultural sector, Social Security data shows the stereotypical perception that most of the workforce is undocumented is erroneous, according to Fritz Roka, director of FGCU’s Center for Agribusiness. Most migrant agricultural workers are authorized to come into the United States under the H2A visa program, which produced what Roka calls “a radical shift” in the number of documented workers versus undocumented workers after its launch in 1986 under President Ronald Reagan.
Oakes, the Collier County farmer, made the same point in his video.
“All the workers here are H2A workers that come over here on a work visa from Mexico over here for maybe five months,” he said.
Oakes is especially sensitive to this after 105 of his workers were arrested in a 2014 raid by Florida Division of Insurance Fraud. The workers were charged with multiple crimes, including fraudulent documentation, use of personal identification, identity theft and workers’ compensation fraud.
While most of those charged were released on their own recognizance and given probation, he has said that ever since he’s been compliant with H2A and E-Verify, the federal database that tracks worker legal status.
But in the Trump sweeps, holders of legitimate visas and green cards are not immune from arrest, said Fort Myers immigration attorney Indera DeMine. People are being detained when they report for what were once routine meetings with authorities, or at traffic stops, or for lapsed drivers’ licenses, she said, and then transferred from facility to facility so that family and counsel can’t contact them.
“What will we be left with?”
Evidence of an aggressive targeting of workers in Florida is mounting. In Brevard County, ICE agents have raided construction and landscaping crews, according to Fox 35. In the Florida Keys, a roofing company owner (and Trump supporter) wept on camera during an NBC6-Miami interview after ICE took six of his workers, five of whom he said had valid work permits.
Like the Keys roofing company case, DeMine said she’s seen instances where documented immigrants are being targeted.
“What we’re seeing is an out-of-control targeting of immigrants, not just the undocumented,” DeMine related. “We’re certainly seeing an uptick in removals and detentions. … If [her clients] didn’t have a criminal history they would be released on their own recognizance, or given probation. Now there’s less discretion.”
While documented workers aren’t being targeted en masse, the Trump Administration has moved the goalposts in its deportation effort by stripping documented status from more than one million immigrants who previously had legal status. The U.S. Supreme Court in May allowed the administration to move more than half a million immigrants here on humanitarian parole from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua – many of them living in Florida – into the undocumented ranks, making them fair game to be swept up. Just this past Friday, the Trump Administration announced it was stripping temporary protective status for some 500,000 Haitian immigrants, setting them up for round-ups, detention, and deportation back to their home country rife with hunger, crime, and chaos.
Combined with the federal effort, DeMine said she finds the prospect of the governor’s immigration enforcement plan – with its vision of mass roundups and camps run by a largely unregulated state force – nothing short of horrifying both in terms of constitutional rights and the state economy.
“It threatens to strip people of their dignity, due process, and protections afforded under the U.S. Constitution,” she said. “It disregards international human rights standards and puts Florida at risk of becoming a state known for hostility and intolerance.
“What will we be left with? … Healthcare, agriculture, landscaping, hospitality and so many other businesses are so reliant on the immigrant workforce and no one in our government seems to be thinking of that.”
About the author: David Silverberg is a veteran reporter who covered Congress, defense, and homeland security during a 30-year journalism career in Washington D.C. As a freelance writer, his work has been published by Mother Jones, Gulfshore Business, and the Naples Press. The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a non-profit organization that facilitates local investigative reporting across the state.