About a hundred workers in Immokalee were charged with workers’ compensation and ID fraud several days ago. Officials arrested employees at a fruit-packing plant after a state agency got a tip undocumented immigrants were hired there, but activists and others say the workers were unfairly targeted.
Immigration advocates said Florida’s Department of Financial Services improperly went after a group of workers in Collier County.
A former employee alerted state officials that he and a lot of his former coworkers would be unable to get workers’ compensation benefits if they were injured on the job.
The agency said that’s because they had gotten work at a packinghouse owned by Oakes Farms under false identities.
Maria Rodriguez, with the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said state officials improperly went after the employees instead of investigating the company.
“This is being promoted as workers’ comp fraud--where indeed they are going after Florida’s hardest working families that are so essential to our state’s economy and they are basically doing an immigration raid under the ruse or the guise of it being a workman’s fraud case,” she said.
Rodriguez said most undocumented workers rely on false identities for employment. She also argues it’s not the job of the state’s financial agency to take on immigration matters.
But, Chris Cate, a spokesman for the state agency, said in a statement, “this investigation was never about citizenship, but rather our responsibility to follow a tip about workers’ compensation fraud in the interest of protecting Florida workers injured on the job as well as victims of identity theft.”
Rodriguez said a similar situation happened two years ago at Waste Pro USA in St. Lucie County.
At the time, more than a dozen workers were arrested. She says the charges for workers’ compensation fraud were eventually dropped.
Rodriguez is urging Florida’s CFO, Jeff Atwater, to drop these recent charges against the Collier County workers, too. They are scheduled to go before a judge on August 11.
