by Seth Freed Wessler, photography by Zaydee Sanchez and Kathleen Flynn, with additional reporting by Zaydee Sanchez

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Rick Roth is a staunch Republican and a conservative member of the Florida Legislature, but he’s quick to point out that he’s first and foremost a farmer. Roth grows vegetables, rice and sugar cane on the thousands of acres passed down to him from his father, in Palm Beach County south of Lake Okeechobee. And because the farm relies on a steady stream of laborers, most of them from Mexico, Roth spent substantial time over the last three decades, before and after he became a politician, trying to stop lawmakers from messing with his workforce.

A big part of that fight was against legislation that would make employers verify their workers’ immigration status. Such laws, Roth once said, would bankrupt farmers like him.

But by 2023, when Florida was once again considering such a bill, Roth’s convictions had grown shaky. In May of that year, he sat and listened as his Democratic colleagues voiced their opposition: “This bill will tank our state’s economy by directly harming Florida's agriculture, hospitality and construction industries,” one of them warned. Had this debate been unfolding even a few years earlier, Roth — who has acknowledged relying heavily on labor by undocumented immigrants in the past — likely would have nodded along.

This time, he didn’t. Several minutes later, Roth, his gray hair cut short and a cross pinned to his lapel, rose from his seat on the House floor, peered through reading glasses and delivered a statement antithetical to what the 70-year-old had long stood for: “I rise in support of SB 1718,” he announced. First among his reasons, he said, was an “invasion” of immigrants at the border. He called it a “ticking time bomb.”

The bill not only required all but the smallest employers to check the legal status of any new hires against a federal database, it also ordered hospitals to ask patients about their status. The measure added new funds to Gov. Ron DeSantis' program to transport newly arrived immigrants out of the state, while making it a felony for individuals to bring undocumented workers in. DeSantis called it “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.”

Roth knew that the legislation might hurt many farmers — not to mention landscapers and contractors and hotels and a slew of other employers in Florida. But it was good politics. Across the country, Republican politicians like himself have almost universally fallen in line with what amounts to a requirement for party membership. Even business-focused Republicans, who for many years had turned a blind eye to undocumented immigrants because they provided cheap, reliable labor, had given in to a mandate from a party whose leader has spent three presidential campaigns portraying immigration as an existential threat to the United States. In Roth’s case, the transformation from a decades-long advocate for expanding legal immigration to a Trump-style hardliner was so swift and so complete that he barely tries to explain it, other than to repeat what sound like Republican talking points about how the border has become a crisis.

The measure passed easily out of the Republican-controlled House the same day Roth stood to support it. Relieved it was over, he left Tallahassee to return to his fields outside the town of Belle Glade, where the motto is “her soil is her fortune.” He drove his Toyota Prius, a Trump 2020 sticker on the bumper, down the dirt lanes that run along his tracts of land. Birds darted around the fallow farmland. Roth felt at ease.

The calm didn’t last. Among Roth’s business owner constituents, there was a rising panic about the fate of their workers. A manager of a vegetable packing house stood by as dozens of his workers left. “We had a mass exodus here,” he later said. Undocumented immigrants and their families were loading up trucks with years of belongings and decamping to Georgia or North Carolina. “Everyone was afraid,” said a resident of a Belle Glade mobile home park. She’d watched as at least five of her neighbors, all undocumented immigrants, sold their trailers and moved. A daycare worker in the next town said several children of immigrants in her classroom were there one week, gone the next.

As workers were scrambling to protect themselves from what they saw as a coming crackdown, phone calls were flooding into Roth’s legislative office. The farmers and contractors and landscapers were complaining that this law Roth had supported was going to wreck their businesses. It was exactly the kind of fallout Roth had long warned of when he’d fought measures like the one he’d just helped to pass.

As one nursery owner who called into Roth’s office asked: “What have you done?”

Around the time of the flurry of calls, 26-year-old Salvador Garcia Espitia and his wife, Nohemí Enriquez Fonseca, were trying to figure out how they’d deal with their own crisis. The couple, who’d grown up near each other in the small ranchos of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, had become parents two years before. Their son, Isaac, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and autism. Garcia’s work in a vegetable packing facility and in the corn fields around their town barely covered his son’s therapy and medication. Enriquez hadn’t worked since the baby was born, since his care took all her time.

The family lived in Cerritos, with Garcia’s parents. It wasn’t much of a town, just a cluster of homes behind a locked gate. The gate went up after a local woman was kidnapped, presumably by gang or cartel members, though no one knows for sure. Each night, after 9:30, residents communicated by group chat if someone needed to leave for an emergency, so that whoever had the key could let them out and back in.

Whenever Garcia worked overtime, which was almost always once Isaac’s medical bills stacked up, his mother would sit and wait for him to come home, even until 2 a.m. She feared for her youngest child, her only son. He was so full of promise, capable of so much with his serious disposition and vast intelligence. She worried not just about his safety, but that she hadn’t done enough for him. The best job she could find was cleaning houses, which she did for many years. Her husband was frequently out of work after a head injury he’d suffered back when Garcia was a toddler.

Since Garcia was a child, he had watched countless relatives and friends make the decision for their own families’ futures to go find work in the north. The men departed, crossing into the United States without papers. To have a home, to afford a car, to provide for a child who would struggle to walk or speak, going north was the only way.

But Garcia was clear: He would not cross the border that way. He could not risk being harmed or killed and leaving his wife and son with nothing.

Not long after the severity of Isaac’s condition came to light, Garcia began to listen more closely to other young men in the towns near his: There was a way to travel back and........

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