Many Hispanics are facing "widespread hostility, discrimination and exploitation" in the South, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Hispanic workers in the South face "rampant abuse" by bosses in the work place and racial profiling by police on the streets, the report said. Hispanic women suffer through sexual abuse, fearful of fighting back because they might be deported, the report said.
And while the report — titled "Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South" — did not look specifically at Florida, the problems "probably don’t stop at the state border," Mary Bauer, director of immigrant justice for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in a phone interview.
"In some of these issues, in terms of the larger picture, people being vilified and being treated as guilty and being subject to racial profiling, those are complaints that immigrant advocates hear everywhere in the country," Bauer said.
One of those advocates is Marcos Crisanto, coordinator of the Farmworker Association of Florida’s Pierson office. Crisanto said he hears complaints about Hispanics being targeted by police and cheated by subcontractors in construction.
"We are hard-working people, we are supporting this country’s economy, and I think they should stop that discrimination," Crisanto said in his Pierson office.
Crisanto said he has heard complaints from Hispanics who worked construction or in roofing and then were not paid. If Hispanic workers complain about not being paid, their bosses threaten to report them to police or immigration, Crisanto said.
"People are afraid to report anything, because they are afraid the police will arrest them, deport them," Crisanto said. "There is no confidence."
Crisanto said he has heard complaints from Hispanics stopped by deputies in West Volusia in some trailer parks off Highway 11.
Pilar Valtierra, a member of the farmworker committee in Pierson, has also heard complaints from Hispanics who live in trailer parks off Highway 11 and Highway 17.
"At the moment, the biggest problem is with police and the second is that they don’t pay the workers," she said.
The traffic stops often are uncalled for, she said.
"There is no reason," Valtierra said. "They will say something about the car or the license plate or the tinting is too dark. But in the end the ticket is only for not having a driver’s license."
Hispanic construction workers have been cheated out of their wages, she said. Sometimes, they are told to come back next week to work some more and then they will be paid for what’s owed as well as for the new work and they end up getting nothing, she said. The bosses don’t care, she said.
"They know that a lot of them can’t fight and they just wash their hands of it," Valtierra said.
DeLand Police Sgt. John Anderson said the department does not target any specific group in the diverse city, which has Hispanics from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba and other countries and draws a variety of people to Stetson University and Skydive DeLand. Anderson added that DeLand officers do not check immigration status.
"That’s not one of the things we look for," Anderson said. "We don’t ask someone if they have, if you want to call them, ‘papers’. We don’t do that."
He said language is not a barrier for his agency.
"I’m pretty sure that on each one of our shifts we have a Spanish-speaking officer," Anderson said. "If we don’t, we usually try to contact the Sheriff’s Office to see if they have a Spanish-speaking deputy that can assist us."
Diego Handel, a Daytona Beach lawyer and expert on immigration law, agrees that the problems faced by immigrants don’t stop at the state line.
"It’s only logical because particularly when we are talking about the undocumented or illegal workers, they are extremely vulnerable because they are scared, obviously, to come out and complain when they are mistreated or exploited," Handel said.