LOS ANGELES (AP) — As firefighters battled blazes in the Los Angeles area this week, Alejandro, a 55-year-old Mexican, was one of several day laborers conducting cleanup operations near burned neighborhoods in Pasadena and Altadena.
Wearing a yellow safety vest, mask and glasses, he helped pick up branches and fallen trees and direct traffic while others worked.
“The country would go into crisis” without workers like him, said Alejandro, who spoke in Spanish and requested that his last name not be used because he is in the country illegally.
“It wasn’t just a home,” Alejandro added. “There were thousands.”
As President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House next week, he has announced he plans to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally. Immigration advocates say this could harm America’s ability to quickly rebuild after widespread damage from floods, hurricanes, fires and other disasters.
As the number of extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change increases, there is a growing workforce, many of whom lack legal status. Some crisscross the country after extreme weather events, helping to put entire communities back together. Many are highly skilled electricians, plumbers and bricklayers. Others do manual labor such as cutting up and removing fallen trees and branches.
“The fact is that the people rebuilding these areas — from the Palisades to Malibu to Altadena — are immigrant construction crews,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “They are the first responders.”
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. was hit by 28 climate disasters in 2023, each causing more than $1 billion in damage, the most ever before. While it is still too early to determine the number of wildfires in LA, AccuWeather’s initial estimate puts the damage and economic loss at $250 billion to $275 billion.
Trump called climate change a “hoax” and during the campaign accused immigrants of taking “black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” Data shows that immigrant workers contribute to economic growth and provide advancement opportunities for U.S.-born workers.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, told The Associated Press in a statement that Trump would “engage every federal force and coordinate with state authorities” to “deport illegal criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers … while reducing costs.” . for families and to strengthen our workforce.”
The disaster restoration industry boomed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which turned the Gulf Coast into one of the largest construction sites in the world. Many miniature construction companies grew larger and consolidated. Some were eventually bought up by private equity firms, which saw a highly profitable industry with money from insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Mario Mendoza has been working in disaster recovery since Katrina. A few days after the storm, Mendoza cleaned up mud-caked homes and businesses, removing debris, tearing down walls and tearing up floors, some containing asbestos.
Mendoza, a 54-year-old worker from Honduras, an undocumented country, recalled seeing corpses in homes he was tasked with cleaning. Some bosses refused to pay him. In the years since Katrina, he has helped communities in Louisiana rebuild after tornadoes and hurricanes.
“We are the point of contact for cities after disasters,” he said in Spanish.
After disasters, workers are hired by residents, contractors or subcontractors to tear down moldy walls damaged by floods or to cover and repair roofs and windows blown away by robust winds. They remove debris and felled trees from people’s homes and from clogged streets and paths. Then they rebuild. Those without legal status are vulnerable to exploitation and wage theft. They sleep in pickup trucks or tents, sometimes in parking lots or in the destroyed homes they rebuild. They are roofers, carpenters, tilers and unskilled workers.
Day laborers hired to spotless up homes often lack protective equipment or safety training, exposing them to “severe hazardous materials” and hazardous environments, said Jessica Martinez, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a workers’ network, she added adding that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric also discourages workers from asking for basic resources because they fear being targeted and deported.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 10.8 million people worked in construction in 2020. The Center for American Progress estimates that in 2021, nearly 1.6 million immigrants worked in construction — a workforce in which Latinos are overrepresented. The numbers are higher in states like Texas and California.
In addition to workers already living in the U.S., tens of thousands of people legally obtain H-2B visas each year, allowing them to enter the country temporarily to perform nonagricultural work. Construction is one of the industries with a high proportion of H-2B workers.
Stan Marek, CEO of construction company Marek Brothers, said mass deportations would significantly hamper cleanup and reconstruction efforts after disasters and contractors would have difficulty completing existing and future projects.
“If you don’t have the people, you can’t fix it,” said Marek, a Republican. “We still haven’t repaired everything from (Hurricane) Harvey, which was years ago. Some people’s ceilings are still sagging and falling in.”
There is also a housing shortage in the United States, raising questions about how the Trump administration will address this problem with fewer construction workers. In an interview with The New York Times last year, Vice President-elect JD Vance said that construction workers without legal status could be replaced by the millions of “first age” men and women who have dropped out of the workforce. He also said they could be persuaded to enter the trade by paying higher wages.
Florida offers a glimpse into the potential impact of upcoming large-scale deportations. After Hurricane Idalia hit the Big Bend region in August 2023, some undocumented workers were too afraid to finish the recovery work they had begun under a Florida immigration law that took effect in July. It is one of the strictest in the country and, among other things, requires companies with 25 or more employees to check the legal status of their workers.
“Many of the workers I know didn’t want to risk staying there,” said Saket Soni, executive director of the nonprofit Resilience Force, which advocates for the growing group of disaster recovery workers. “They wanted to finish the job but couldn’t risk deportation. So they laid down their tools and left.
Sergio Chávez, a sociology professor at Rice University who is writing a book about the disaster recovery industry, sees several alternatives to address a potential construction labor shortage: either Trump must expand the H-2B worker program or he must hire Americans Those who do this do the job for higher pay.
But Marek is not convinced. “Everyone says pay them more. We tried to pay them more,” he said. “Our starting salary is higher than ever before. And they would rather work at Buc-ee’s,” he means, referring to the travel chain.
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