This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

In early October, a worker posted a video of a building under construction that looked like it was about to collapse. It was slated to be a Hard Rock Hotel, just off the French Quarter, its temporary beams bent under the weight of the floors above.

“It’s the best engineering,” the worker said sarcastically in Spanish.

A few days later, parts of the upper floors of the building crumbled, killing three workers and injuring more than 20 people. One of those injured was Delmer Joel Ramírez Palma, a metal worker who had repeatedly reported safety issues to supervisors.

But after talking to the media about the shoddy work conditions; filing a lawsuit with other workers seeking damages; and becoming a witness in a federal workplace safety investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him to Honduras on Friday. This has become a pattern in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as well as across the country: I.C.E. is used as a tool to insulate private development projects from labor and safety regulations.

After the hurricane, much of New Orleans’s black population, historically the bulk of the city’s working class, was forced out of the city in part by failed policies like the Road Home program. So Latinx migrants, a majority of whom were undocumented, filled this void. They made up nearly half of the rebuilding work force and performed risky tasks in toxic conditions like gutting houses, repairing roofs and collecting trash.