Hurricane Milton is expected to unleash its greatest force over hundreds of thousands of immigrants who don't speak English, most of them Latin Americans harvesting oranges and tomatoes in the fields along Florida's I-4 corridor, washing dishes in restaurants, cleaning hotel rooms and working construction.
For the Spanish speakers and a smaller number of African refugees , new lives in the U.S. were already a daily struggle because of the language barrier and lack of resources.
Milton has turned those obstacles into a matter of life and death.
Florida is home to at least 4.8 million immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center. After Miami, Orlando and Tampa are the metropolitan areas with the highest number of immigrants, the majority coming from Latin American countries such as Mexico and Venezuela.
In Central Florida, most of migrants work in the hospitality industry, construction and in fields of strawberries, berries, tomatoes and oranges. Some new arrivals don't have access to TV, others don't have computers or internet access. There were people who do not know where to find information about Milton, a powerful storm that pushed state and local authorities to order evacuation in the areas where most of these immigrants live.
