‘A matter of life and death’: How disaster response endangers US farmworkers

When Hurricane Idalia struck Florida last summer, a tree fell straight through a trailer occupied by a migrant-farmworker family in Hamilton County. They couldn’t afford to move, even temporarily, so the family of six just picked up the things they could salvage and continued to live around the rotting tree. 

“It was indescribable,” said Victoria Gómez de la Torre.

When Gómez de la Torre, who is a program supervisor at the Alachua Multi-County Migrant Education Program, visited...