LOS ANGELES (AP) — While firefighters battled blazes in the Los Angeles area this week, Alejandro, a 55-year-old from Mexico, was one of several day laborers leading cleanups near scorched neighborhoods in Pasadena and Altadena.
Donning a yellow safety vest, a mask and glasses, he helped pick up branches and fallen trees and direct traffic while others worked.
“The country would fall into crisis” without workers like him, said Alejandro, who spoke in Spanish and requested his last name not be used because he is in the country illegally.
“It wasn’t just one (home),” added Alejandro. “There were thousands.”
When President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House next week, he has said he plans to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally. Immigrant advocates say that could impact America’s ability to quickly rebuild after major 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 of laborers, many of them without legal status. Some crisscross the country following extreme weather events, helping to put back together entire communities. Many are highly skilled electricians, plumbers and masons. Others do manual labor, like cutting up and hauling away fallen trees and branches.
“The fact is that the people who rebuild those areas — from Palisades to Malibu to Altadena — it’s immigrant construction crews,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “They’re the ones who are the second responders.”
In 2023, the U.S. was hit with 28 climate disasters that each exceeded $1 billion in damages, the most ever, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While it is too early to know the toll of L.A.’s wildfires, an early estimate by AccuWeather put the damage and economic loss at $250 billion to $275 billion.
Trump has called climate change “a hoax” and during his campaign accused immigrants of taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” Data show that immigrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for U.S.-born workers.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, told The Associated Press in a statement that Trump “will enlist every federal power and coordinate with state authorities” to deport “illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers… while simultaneously lowering costs for families and strengthening our workforce.”
The disaster restoration industry boomed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which transformed the Gulf Coast into one of the largest construction sites in the world. Many mom-and-pop construction businesses got bigger and consolidated. Some were eventually bought by private equity companies that saw a highly profitable industry with money coming in from insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Mario Mendoza has worked in disaster restoration since Katrina. Within days after the storm, Mendoza was cleaning up mud-caked homes and businesses, removing debris, demolishing walls and ripping up floors, some with asbestos.
Mendoza, a 54-year-old worker from Honduras in the country without legal status, remembered seeing dead bodies in homes he was hired to clean. Some bosses refused to pay him. In the years since Katrina, he has helped Louisiana communities rebuild after tornadoes and hurricanes.
“We’ve been the line of support for cities after disasters,” he said, speaking in Spanish.
After disasters, workers are hired by residents, contractors or subcontractors to tear down moldy walls damaged by flooding, or tarp and repair roofs and windows blown off by powerful winds. They remove debris and felled trees from people’s homes, clogged streets and roadways. Then they rebuild. Those without legal status are vulnerable to exploitation and wage theft. They sleep in pickup trucks or tents, sometimes on parking lot floors or the destroyed houses they’re reassembling. They are roofers, carpenters, tile installers and laborers.
Day laborers hired to clean up homes often don’t have protective equipment or safety training, exposing them to “severe hazardous materials” and dangerous environments, said Jessica Martinez, executive director for the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a network of labor organizations that has trained workers in post-hurricane recovery. She added that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric also discourages workers from asking for basic resources because they fear being targeted and deported.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 10.8 million people were working in the construction industry in 2020. The Center for American Progress estimates that nearly 1.6 million immigrants working in 2021 in construction — a workforce in which Latinos are overrepresented — were in the country illegally. The numbers are higher in states like Texas and California.
In addition to workers already in the U.S., every year tens of thousands of people legally acquire H-2B visas, which allow them to temporarily enter the country to do non-agricultural work. Construction is one of the industries with a high prevalence of H-2B workers.
Stan Marek, CEO of the construction company Marek Brothers, said mass deportations would significantly hinder efforts to clean up and rebuild after disasters, and contractors would struggle to complete existing and future projects.
“If you don’t have the people, you can’t fix it,” said Marek, a Republican. “We still haven’t fixed everything from (Hurricane) Harvey, which was years ago. Some people’s ceilings are still sagging, falling in.”
The U.S. also has a housing shortage, raising questions about how the Trump administration will address that with fewer construction workers. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Vice President-elect JD Vance said construction workers without legal status could be replaced by the millions of “prime age” men and women who have dropped out of the labor force. He also said they could be convinced to join the trade by paying them higher wages.
Florida provides a glimpse of the possible effect of any upcoming large deportations. In the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia that struck the Big Bend region in August 2023, some workers without legal status were too fearful to finish recovery jobs they had started because of a Florida immigration law that had taken effect in July. One of the strictest in the nation, it requires businesses employing 25 or more people to verify their workers’ legal status, among other things.
“A lot of the workers that 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 restoration laborers. “They wanted to finish the work, but they couldn’t risk deportation. So they put their tools down and left.”
Sergio Chávez, sociology professor at Rice University who is writing a book about the disaster recovery industry, sees a few alternatives for filling a potential construction labor shortage: either Trump will have to expand the H-2B worker program, or hire Americans who will do the job for higher pay.
But Marek isn’t convinced. “Everybody says pay them more. We’ve tried paying them more,” he said. “Our starting wages are higher than they’ve ever been. And they would rather go work at Buc-ee’s,” referring to the travel store chain.
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