You're watching Southwest Florida in focus.

Coming up, Florida's battle over immigration.

Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are at odds over immigration laws.

But concerns grow over the economic impact, and the people affected by the changes.

The forecasts are getting better.

The track forecasts have gotten a lot better, but there's always going to be a little bit of uncertainty in exactly where the storms are going to go.

Predicting the storm's path.

Following three massive storms hitting Florida's Gulf Coast last year, one of the world's top hurricane forecasters shares lessons learned for future storms.

And the sugarcane grinding festival offers a glimpse into the world of old Florida.

But the land that hosts the event holds a more bygone secret.

Hello, I'm Sandra Victorova.

Thank you very much for joining us.

Well, Florida lawmakers passed a $500 million plan to beef up illegal immigration efforts in the state.

State legislators say the new measure strengthens law enforcement needed to support President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.

He pledged to deport millions of people living in the country illegally.

The state plan also creates an immigration czar for our state.

However, Governor Ron DeSantis said he will veto the bill once it reaches his desk, claiming that it would actually weaken Florida's immigration efforts.

How can I possibly sign something that that is contrary to everything I've campaigned on?

That's contrary to what President Trump campaigned on.

That makes us a de facto sanctuary state that neuters the operations we're doing already.

As the fight continues in Tallahassee, we look at the economic and personal impact in Florida.

Another foundation almost complete in Sarasota County.

For Rene Monroy and his dad, Danielle.

Business is strong.

All along the coastline, we do big houses, big mansions all the time.

Despite steady calls for these big projects, this feels like the worst of times for the Roys.

Their time together is running out.

Danielle will be deported soon.

That's going to be the hardest part.

C'mon, sister.

Be without her dad.

Danielle entered the U.S. illegally when he was 16 years old.

He had no other choice to come over here.

You know, there was no opportunity for him over there.

Danielle says he left his village in Mexico in desperation.

His father had died while working in the U.S. and his mother struggled to feed him and his four siblings.

I call me the mighty northern light.

There's no food, no money.

There's nothing.

That's what makes us leave home for 30 years.

Danielle has worked in construction.

He and his son have laid thousands of foundations from Tallahassee to Port Charlotte.

Concrete slabs for everything from stores to condos to banks.

Things we don't love for this country.

We pay a lot of money in taxes.

We do so much for him just to take it out like he's nothing to this country.

Danielle brought his wife, Santana and Rene and his older brother across the border about 20 years ago.

Rene was a toddler.

He has a work permit under the DACA policy.

The family's hard work has paid off.

They've bought several acres in rural southwest Florida, but their dream of building a home is in jeopardy.

I ordered Danielle to return to Mexico by March.

An ankle monitor tracks his whereabouts.

Ricardo Skerrit is his attorney.

He doesn't have any option.

He's going to have to leave.

And I don't know what he's going to do.

And probably he'll return illegally.

And if he gets caught, he's going to be put in jail.

While the current deportation order was under a previous U.S. administration under the Trump White House, the family worries the consequences of Danielle returning illegally would be more severe.

This isn't Danielle's first deportation.

Rene remembers his dad being deported when he was 13 years old.

My brother had to get a job where my dad worked almost like a grown adult and working everyday so he can pay the rent.

Making Danielle's case harder is his criminal record.

He was convicted of battery in 2003, what he calls a dispute with a family member and driving while intoxicated in 2001.

But he and his family say he is a changed man.

They committed a robbery.

I've made mistakes, but I haven't made them again.

Like driving drunk.

When I made that error.

I gave up alcohol forever.

He says he returned to the U.S. because of a responsibility to take care of his family.

Both of these people come from extreme poverty, and they really come to work.

And that's why we need to reform our immigration laws.

Most of the people that come here do not come for asylum.

They go for economic reasons.

And we have to recognize that.

And that's always been my complaint that the immigration laws in this country do not follow the market realities.

Skerritt says the market reality is businesses can't find enough workers.

Illegal or not, it is so cumbersome for an employer to have to employ a foreign worker in this country that I can't blame them for hiring illegal workers, undocumented workers.

Rene says all the construction sites he's worked at rely heavily on undocumented workers.

Do most of these construction business owners know that the majority of the folks working in the industry are undocumented?

Yes.

Everybody knows.

Renee worries how he'll make the family budget work in his dad's absence.

It's also a worry for his 17 year old sister, Jenny, the only U.S. citizen in the family.

I worry what?

My mom can't work, so she can't go work and provide for me and her.

So without my dad, we wouldn't have.

Much things that we do now.

The family is finding the decision of what to do next.

Impossible.

Danielle.

Living alone in Mexico or Santana joining her husband and leaving the family as well.

He's changed as a person and doesn't do the things he once did before.

Do they deserve this thing?

What?

Be.

Joining us now to discuss the state's efforts to support the federal crackdown on immigration is Tom Hudson, the senior economics editor with our sister station in Miami.

Tom, welcome.

Thank you.

Great to be with you.

So let's start with this.

State lawmakers defied Governor Ron DeSantis by passing their own immigration bill, called Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy, or Trump Act.

What do you expect this will mean for Floridians?

Well, it does mean that there is going to be potentially more law enforcement assistance for federal immigration enforcement officials, but certainly far from what governor DeSantis had hoped for.

This is kind of continuing along the lines that we've seen with local law enforcement working with federal immigration officials, particularly when individuals are already in local custody in a local county jail, that if there is a detainer request, the local county jail will continue to hold that individual awaiting for federal immigration officials.

It also allows the state to monitor local law enforcement to ensure compliance with federal immigration enforcement.

It pays local law enforcement to keep those individuals in those local jails awaiting for transfer to federal custody.

But it does not manage date that local law enforcement fully comply with immigration officials or face big penalties.

That's something that governor DeSantis wanted in his own immigration bill.

And I think also key it ends in-state tuition discounts for students in Florida without legal status.

So, Tom, you regularly talk to business leaders, from agriculture to hospitality to construction.

What are you hearing from them?

Well, business leaders are not going to come out and support breaking any law and certainly not breaking federal immigration law.

They recognize that illegal immigration is a problem, and they also recognize that there are no simple, fast solutions to it.

People without legal status, we have to remember, are workers.

They do contribute certainly to our community when they are working.

They're consumers.

They're buying goods.

They're paying sales taxes, for instance, and they're business owners themselves.

Right.

And they're hiring individuals.

So a lot of business leaders that I speak with here in South Florida would like to see immigration reforms go after those, without legal status, committing serious crimes.

And that has been something that the Trump administration has been pretty clear on.

Do we have any sense how dependent the Florida economy is on folks who are not here legally?

We do have a pretty good sense of it.

Florida, obviously, is the third largest state by population, so it has a sizable non-citizen population.

And that includes, by the way, you know, folks that have legal status but are not citizens, but also includes those without legal status.

Non-citizen immigrants are about 12% of the overall workforce.

So it's significant.

That's about one out of every eight workers in Florida are not U.S. citizens.

Now, not all of them.

Are without legal status.

We should point out.

But it is concentrated in certain industries.

We've highlighted the construction industry in Florida.

Real estate and building real estate development is such a key part of the state, economy for decades.

Construction has a significant representation of non-citizen workers.

Almost half of those working in the agriculture industry and in the fishing industry are those with, are those people who are non-citizens.

And then also 1 in 6 transportation workers.

And I might add, as a side, a lot of health care workers, particularly home health care workers that may be part of the gray economy, are those that may not have legal status.

Tom Hudson, we thank you for your reporting and we thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Getting a better perspective on Florida's hurricane season.

Coming up, we talked to one of the leading atmospheric researchers on what the busy storm season last year says about what Southwest Floridians can expect this year.

Last year, Hurricanes Debbie, Helene and Milton devastated Florida's Gulf Coast, causing billions of dollars in damage and upending the lives of thousands of Floridians.

Are so many storms in one season a fluke for our region, or do we need to be prepared for more hurricane seasons like this?

Today, we are joined by one of the leading hurricane forecasters in the country, Doctor Phil Klotzbach, senior research scientist for the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.

Thank you, Doctor Klotzbach, for joining us.

And you gave me permission to say, Phil.

So I appreciate that.

So welcome.

Thanks so much for having me.

So let's begin with this.

You know, just last season we were hit by three hurricanes.

A lot of Southwest Floridians are concerned about that and wondering, is this just like a blip in the screen or something we need to anticipate on a regular basis?

Yeah, obviously it has been extremely active in Southwest Florida the last few years.

Obviously Hurricane Ian in 2022 and then obviously 2023, we had to die out, which didn't necessarily cost too much impacts all the way down in Southwest Florida.

But did bring impacts to the Big Bend.

And then obviously 2024 with, as you mentioned, rainfall from Debbie and then the wells in Melbourne causing significant impacts in southwest Florida.

Certainly it has been busy recently.

I mean, Florida tends to go through periods where it can be very busy and then goes very quiet.

I think a really good example of that is 2004 and 2005, 2004.

We had four hurricanes significantly impact the state of Florida or Charlie, which obviously brought very significant impacts.

Southwest Florida.

Then you had Francis and and Jean that made landfall in pretty much almost exact same spot near Stuart on the East coast.

Then you had Ivan, which officially made landfall in Alabama, brought very significant impacts of the pano.

We had three more hurricanes hit the state of Florida in 2005.

And so we had seven basically impacts in two years.

And then we went ten years, 2006, 2015, not one hurricane hit the state of Florida since then, starting with our mean in 2016, it's obviously been a lot busier for the state of Florida.

So the Florida does tend to go through periods where it's busier and then quieter.

Probably the busiest time was actually 1945 to 1955.

Category 4 or 5 hurricanes hit South Florida in six years.

Wow.

So it can get really, really busy.

But then there's other periods where Florida just tends to be quieter.

So, you know, it's been busy lately.

But that's not a guarantee that, you know, 2025, 2026, we're going to see more significant impacts in this region.

Are there lessons to be learned?

I'm thinking, of course, the busy season.

And of course, we were all impacted so much by by Hurricane Ian.

Are there lessons to be learned by these storms, the most recent ones, on how we need to prepare and and respond to storms?

Yeah.

So I think so.

Our group at CSU does a lot with seasonal hurricane prediction.

So we try to predict how busy a hurricane season is going to be in both 2022 and Ian hit in 2024.

Had a couple had some kind of unique characteristics.

So 2022 we went through August and August of 2022, which typically is a pretty busy month for storm.

We had not one storm in the entire Atlantic being month, and so a lot of people were like, oh, this season's a dud.

It's nothing's going to happen.

And obviously Hurricane Ian hit in late September.

Obviously extremely impactful 2024 similarly got off to a very busy start and we went through this really pronounced lull for about five weeks where we had very little storm activity in the Atlantic.

Unfortunately, that lull, which came during the peak of the season, was broken by Hurricane Helene.

And then we had Hurricane Milton follow up just a few just a couple of weeks later.

So kind of highlights how, you know, while we have kind of these rules of thumb about how seasons perform and how they behave, you can have seasons that are very unusual.

Say, for example, last year we ended up a hyper active season, but we had a very quiet middle of the season, an extremely busy start and a very, very busy end.

We had seven hurricanes after September 25th onwards last year, which was the most on record for the Atlantic that late in the season.

So before I was asking if this was just sort of a blip and as you mentioned, a storm numbers can go up and down.

But people have been talking a lot about intensity.

Do we need is is that indisputable that, yes, we are going to see more intense storms because of a warming climate?

Yeah.

So there's a lot of research that's going into that topic right now.

And so one of the challenges that when we look at our historical hurricane data sets, you know, it may go back 100, 150 years, but there's a lot of kind of noise that can be in those trends because you have improvements in technology.

So when we look at things like rapid intensification and we look say it kind of the typical definition that we use, which is a storm intensifies by 35mph or more in a day.

So you can think of it as basically a storm that goes from a weak tropical storm to a hurricane.

And one day we don't see much of a trend in that.

But if we look at a higher intensity threshold about 60mph or more in a day, we do see a significant increasing trend in that.

I think that is probably what we expect to see with climate change as the waters are warmer.

It just basically provides more fuel for storms.

So to be able to undergo these kind of more rapid intensification now hurricanes respond to a lot of other things as well.

You can have extremely warm waters.

As we saw the peak of hurricane season, the waters were extremely warm.

We had very little in the way of storm activity.

So you need to have things like wind shear, that change in wind speed and direction with height in the atmosphere, it has to be low.

You need to have enough moisture.

You don't want it to be very dry.

If you're looking for hurricanes.

And also you need to have basically systems coming off Africa at the right latitudes that they can develop and intensify.

And so during the peak of the season last year, we didn't have that those ingredients come together.

So that's one of the reasons why despite extremely warm waters, we didn't see storms.

But then once all those other things that were kind of holding things back kind of rectified themselves, the extremely warm water certainly helped fuel the rapid intensification events that we saw and the very busy late season overall.

Terrific doctor Phil Klotzbach, thank you so much for what you do.

We appreciate your time today.

Thank you.

All those hurricanes delivered a severe blow to sand dunes here in southwest Florida.

These natural barriers provide a first line of defense against approaching weather.

But storm surges have reduced some areas dramatically.

WGCUs Amanda Inscore Whittamore caught up with several groups who united to bring noninvasive plant life back to the shores?

Going out to the beach a key way.

An island.

It's part of Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

And we are collecting plant material that's part of the beach dune ecosystem.

This is an important ecosystem that in Southwest Florida was almost entirely lost in some areas, especially the urban areas, during Hurricane Ian.

And it was impacted by storm surge.

And as we go forward, Naples Botanical Garden plays an important role in ensuring that we restore beach dunes in southwest Florida with plant biodiversity that should be there and the genetic diversity of plant material that should be there.

I know that we're going out in the field to collect seeds and cuttings of native beach dune plants, and those plants to be brought back to the garden, where we'll process them and we'll grow those plants on with the idea that those become the foundational collection that we use to restore beach dunes across southwest Florida.

We've partnered with Florida Gulf Coast University as our research partner and with Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve to make it more available for future restoration of our beach dune ecosystem.

And I hope you guys to be investing in a project that was really going to shore up our coastline and ensure that it protects our citizens, our beaches, our economy, while returning it to its natural environment.

And then an added bonus was the involvement of all of the agencies coming together.

So that really became a true project that was influencing not just Collier County and not just our coastline, but others.

And even further, it was taking it a step and saying, hey, city of Naples, hey, Collier County, let's rethink what we're requiring of our Jones.

And it started to influence change.

And I think that piece of it, the influencing of change, was really interesting.

For this to be a project for us to invest in beach dunes, that mound of sand that is trapped by those plants, that's really our first line of defense against day to day storms and against large storms like hurricanes that we've had over the past couple of years.

This beach dune restoration project is not just an environmental project.

It's an economic project.

And it's a social project has significant impacts across the board.

With over 13,000 acres of strawberry fields, Florida is the second largest producer of the fruit in the country.

And during the winter months, no other state harvests more of the berries than the Sunshine State.

But strawberries face a plethora of hurdles going from the farm to the produce section, from a barrage of storms and other factors.

That's why experts are working on new varieties of the fruit to keep it part of a healthy diet.

Joining us now is Doctor Vance Whitaker, a University of Florida professor of horticultural sciences and a strawberry breeder.

Doctor Whitaker, thanks for your time.

Thank you for having me.

So we can start with the big picture of, gosh, this storm season.

How difficult has it been for strawberry growers with these back to back punches of Hurricanes Milton and Helene?

It has been difficult.

It hit right during the middle of our planting.

And so crop that was already in was damaged.

And then, the beds that were formed to get ready for planting, many of them were destroyed.

And so it took a lot of blood, sweat and tears for strawberry growers to get the crop in the ground.

This year.

So my understanding is, is one of the big issues when you have flooding and so much just sitting water after storms like this, there's the risk of root rot.

My understanding is you, you, your team, farmers have been working hard to create a new breed of plants to be more resistant to this problem.

That's right.

We just released in its first commercial this year, a couple of new varieties, and one of them is called Ember.

And the Ember strawberry variety is, more resistant to a couple of different diseases that are spread by water, either you know, on the leaves or in the soil.

And, you know, we feel it's good timing that this variety is out in the industry for the first time this year, and we really hope that it will perform well even in cases where there was flooding, and, a lot of water that impacted the plants.

For folks who don't know what it will end on this, how significant or, you know, how important is our strawberries to the state of Florida?

And do you see that, you know, increasing growing, improving.

So the strawberry industry actually in the last four years has grown by, nearly 40% in Florida.

And that's due to a lot of factors.

But one of them is that strawberry consumption and berry consumption in general in the United States continues to increase.

And Florida is basically the local source for Floridians and for the East Coast in the middle of the winter.

And so that's very important.

Doctor Whitaker, we thank you for your time.

Thank you for sharing all your knowledge with us.

We truly appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

After the break.

Finding sweetness in the history of Florida.

The little known secret about the land used for an annual tradition celebrating sugar cane.

Or Tona Indian Mound Park in Glades County, is a hidden gem and a living connection to Florida's deep past.

From a celebration of 19th century sugar cane traditions to engineering fees from the First Peoples of Florida, WGCUs Tara Calligan reveals the significance of this park.

As the community prepares for the 46th annual Cane Grinding Festival this weekend.

Each year in Glades County, the cane grinding festival takes visitors back to the late 1800s, when Florida settlers cultivated and processed sugar cane.

It's a vibrant celebration of traditions with contests, live music and historical demonstrations.

Sugar is as important today as it was then.

About half of the cane sugar produced in the U.S. comes from Florida.

Towering canes of sugar are grown on acres and acres of land along the southern half of Lake Okeechobee.

Kimberly Clement attended the 2023 festival with her son, cane.

She's lived in Glades County for more than three decades.

It's very important that people in the area realize how important these farmers are.

Everything you eat has sugar in it.

Where does that come from?

The sugar cane here goes worldwide.

This often forgotten park has a significance that reaches far beyond its sugar cane heritage, revealing an ancient world of innovation and connection.

In 1988, archeologist Bob Carr and his team uncovered large mounds and intricate canals dating back to 8300, likely created by a tribe related to the Calusa.

This ancient site once served as a vital hub for communication, trade, and travel between Lake Okeechobee and the Gulf of Mexico.

We are tiny canal canals, I should say, is one of the most ambitious and energetic and effective canal systems in North America that have been done by prehistoric people.

The canals were hand dug using wooden and shell tools.

The waterways were 20ft wide and 3 to 4ft deep, stretching over seven miles.

Though many of the mounds have been leveled due to road construction, some still remain within the park.

Carr says the mounds were a solution to living in an area prone to flooding by the Caloosahatchee River, where they are torn, is so complex is certainly one of the most significant sites in Florida, and it's worthy of preservation and continuing for what's left of the site and for creating the narrative that site by interpreting it in a proper way.

Visitors to this weekend's cane grinding festival can not only celebrate Florida's sugar cane traditions, but also explore the park's remaining indigenous earthworks for a unique chance to experience both history and heritage in one place.

For WGCU News, Im Tara Calligan Coming up next week on Southwest Florida in Focus.

The need for mental health care continues to rise, especially for seniors.

How?

Accessing mental health care has become tougher in our state.

And what's being done to get therapy to struggling seniors in our community.

Be sure to join us for that story and much more on WGCU next week.

Until then, have a great week!