The government’s new goal of achieving three thousand daily deportations has led authorities to detain over 100 foreign workers employed in construction sites across Florida
Recent immigration raids on construction sites in regions like Florida and Louisiana threaten the U.S. construction industry, where one in four workers nationwide is an immigrant—a proportion that rises to 75% in major cities like Miami.
Alarms have grown following the detention of over 100 migrants from Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras at a construction site in Tallahassee, Florida’s capital, last week. This comes just two weeks after a similar raid in The Villages, in the same state, resulted in over two dozen arrests.
These operations, replicated in states like Louisiana and New York, have instilled fear among migrant construction workers, who now prefer to skip work rather than risk deportation.
Migrants Build the United States
The Trump administration’s new target of three thousand daily deportations endangers the construction sector, where 25.7% of workers are immigrants and only 14.1% of the total workforce is undocumented nationwide, according to the American Migration Council.
In major cities, up to three out of every four construction workers are immigrants, noted Ned Murray, associate director of the Metropolitan Center at Florida International University (FIU).
Across the state, there are 432,100 migrants in this industry, making up two-thirds of Florida’s total construction workforce, Murray added.
“It is well-documented that construction is perhaps the industry that would be most harmed by deportations or any disruption to this critical labor market, which depends on migrants,” the housing market and economics expert told EFE in an interview.
A Housing Crisis
The deportation of migrant construction workers would worsen Florida’s housing crisis, which has been ongoing since 2018 and accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic as people from other U.S. regions began relocating to the state, Murray said.
The U.S. faces a deficit of 3.7 million homes, driving rents and sale prices to record highs, according to a report by the Urban Institute.
If Trump “fulfilled” his deportation pledge, the country could lose up to 1.8 million construction workers, while the sector is projected to need 454,000 new workers in 2025 to meet housing demand, the research by Jorge González-Hermoso, Christina Plerhoples Stacy, and Hamutal Bernstein found.
In this context, the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC) has condemned these raids for creating “a climate of persecution” and “fear,” arguing that even major real estate developers and construction firms acknowledge the labor shortage.
“If we scare away the people willing to do this work under the Florida sun and who have the skills to labor in these construction spaces, I don’t know how ‘we’re’ going to keep up with the much-needed construction projects,” FLIC consultant and analyst Thomas Kennedy told EFE.
However, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and state Attorney General James Uthmeier have “touted” the results of the raids and the involvement of local forces, such as the Florida Highway Patrol.
“In Florida, we are leading the effort to help the Trump administration enforce federal immigration law,” Attorney General Uthmeier posted after the Tallahassee operation.
