Thread: Camp Owner Houses Workers

http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll ... 70426/1075

Camp owner houses workers
Migrants left homeless after facilities closed

By ALISON KEPNER, AKEPNER@NEWS-PRESS.COM
DAVID PLAZAS, DPLAZAS@NEWS-PRESS.COM
Published by news-press.com on July 7, 2005

Beatriz Salas-Robledo left her impoverished Mexican village to live in a Fort Myers migrant camp, where she shared a cabin with her husband and another couple as they labored to support their teenage children in Mexico.

After city code officers closed the camp Monday, she found herself homeless. Her only option was to move into a tent at Bread of Life Mission in Punta Gorda. With little privacy, constant mosquitoes and only three toilets and two showers to share with up to 200 people, the shelter seemed worse than the condemned Antonia Longoria Migrant Farm Labor Camp.

On Tuesday, her former landlord came to her rescue. Antonia Longoria welcomed six former tenants living at the mission into her Punta Gorda home. They have free shelter while they look for housing.

"I felt sad," Salas-Robledo said about having to leave the camp. "I got used to it."

Longoria said she took in the workers because they felt uncomfortable at the mission.

"They didn't like it there, they weren't accustomed," she said. "I don't want to sound ungrateful ... but it's different."

Fort Myers code officers shut down her camp off State Road 82 in east Fort Myers because of unsafe living conditions. They closed the adjacent Tomas Longoria Migrant Camp last week. The family plans to sell both properties after the city finishes rezoning them for commercial use, likely in January.

Longoria said she felt irked that some people reacted with hostility toward the camp residents because of their legal status.

"We are all descended from immigrants," she said.

"The people who lived in the camp didn't come here to be a government charge. They came here to work and earn a living.

"They portrayed me like I was making myself rich from the poor," she added.

Longoria said she never had to evict any resident and worked with them if they needed time to pay rent.

"At the end of the year, I don't make a profit," she said.

The camp residents now are struggling to find affordable housing. The camp rate was $35 per week for a person to share a home with up to five others. A farm worker's median annual salary is $7,500; for families, it's $10,000.

Permits allowed the two camps to house 180 people, but because crops aren't in season, fewer people were staying there â€â€

WHERE IS ICE? Why haven't they rounded them up and deported them?

This woman.....knows not what she does. She is aiding a problem the community is trying to solve.

She needs to call ICE and have them deported, not take them in while they "search" for new housing HERE.

I'm so sick of this crap....it makes my blood boil.