Florida's disposable workers: Companies profit from undocumented laborers, and dump them after injury

After Abednego de la Cruz sliced his finger to the bone cutting concrete blocks while building a fire station in Tallahassee, his boss fired him and refused continued medical care for his injury.

De la Cruz, a 37-year-old father whose dominant hand remains damaged, thought he could rely on the workers’ compensation system, which requires employers to cover medical care and lost wages for injured employees.

Instead, his employer had him arrested. The undocumented immigrant now faces almost certain deportation and fears he won’t be able to raise his 1-year-old, U.S.-born daughter.

Some Florida businesses profit from the labor of unauthorized immigrants after accepting phony identification when hiring them, and then the employers or their insurers report them after a work injury for using false documents, a yearlong Naples Daily News investigation found.

Workers’ compensation fraud laws are meant to punish those who try to abuse the system, such as employees who fake injuries or employers who leave workers unprotected. But a 2003 change in the Florida law is punishing immigrants who were legitimately injured if they use Social Security numbers not assigned to them or fake IDs to obtain a job or injury benefits.

Most of the injured immigrants reported under the law in recent years work for a few companies that provide labor and personnel services to high-risk industries such as construction and landscaping, promising cheaper workers’ compensation costs to their client businesses, the Daily News found.

Some companies or their insurers legally avoid paying injury claims, while their injured undocumented workers lose their jobs, get arrested, face jail and deportation, and must pay their own medical bills.

SouthEast Personnel Leasing, based in Holiday, hired de la Cruz in 2013 and leased him to a construction business. Because it's not required, no one verified his Social Security number until he was injured a year later. Lion Insurance, owned by one of SouthEast’s owners, reported de la Cruz to state investigators.

De la Cruz was charged with a felony for using a fake Social Security number and was denied workers’ compensation benefits.

The same thing happened to Erik Martinez after a nail ricocheted into his left eye while he worked on a roof in Sarasota. And Juvenal Dominguez, who fractured his left knee while laying pipes in a ditch in Palm City. And to Caleb Santiago, who had four fingers amputated after trying to repair a lawn mower at his landscaping job in Jacksonville Beach.

They are among the estimated 600,000 unauthorized workers in Florida, many of whom fill the ranks of the state’s most dangerous jobs — one in five construction workers, one in three farm workers.

And when they get injured, they become disposable.

After analyzing courts and arrest data, reviewing thousands of pages of court and investigative records, and crisscrossing the state to interview workers, the Daily News investigation found that:

At least 163 immigrant workers in Florida were charged since 2006 with a felony of providing false identification after they were injured. In at least 159 cases, their employers or their insurance company reported them.

More than 80% of these injured immigrants reported between 2013 and 2016 worked for employee leasing companies such as SouthEast or staffing agencies that actually recruit workers.

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With at least 56 cases, or about a third, SouthEast had far more workers charged than any other company. The company and its related businesses continued for a decade hiring immigrants without verifying documents and turning them in after they were injured.

The same Florida law used against the immigrants also makes it a crime for employers to hire workers they know are using phony identification. But the Daily News could identify only one employer who faced prosecution in the 14 years since the law was passed.

Companies could easily verify an applicant’s Social Security number to avoid employing undocumented immigrants, said Cora Cisneros Molloy, a Fort Myers lawyer who represents workers.

“Do they do that? No, because they don’t want to know. It’s willful blindness, and they take advantage of it,” Molloy said. “They use them to work, as cheap labor, but then, if they get hurt, ‘You are done. You get nothing.’ ”

SouthEast owner John Porreca and company lawyer Brian Evans declined requests for interviews from the Daily News and did not respond to questions submitted through email and certified letters.

Evans sent a statement saying SouthEast and its affiliated companies comply with Florida statutes. Florida law requires insurers to report cases where they suspect fraud.

The Daily News contacted more than a dozen insurers that reported workers and six employee leasing companies that had employees reported. All either didn't respond, declined to comment or refused to answer specific questions.

The director of Florida’s Division of Investigative and Forensic Services, which prosecutes workers found using false identity information, said he wasn’t aware that employee leasing companies and their insurers reported most of the injured immigrants in recent years.

“That’s not something I’m aware of and it would be unfortunate if that’s truly what’s taking place, so maybe that’s something that would need to be looked into,” director Simon Blank said.

Blank said his staff must enforce the law.

“Although it’s unfortunate and we feel for those people, the bottom line is they committed a crime, and that crime is putting other innocent people at risk,” he said.

But Florida could face a bigger problem, said Deborah Berkowitz, former chief of staff for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and senior fellow at the National Employment Law Project. The state law could make workplaces more dangerous if companies hire undocumented workers with the belief they can avoid the cost of injuries, she said.

“All the workers will suffer, the undocumented and the documented,” Berkowitz said.

The lure of jobs

Construction and other high-injury industries rely on unauthorized workers such as de la Cruz. Those immigrants make up 29% of roofers, 31% of drywall installers and 26% of construction painters nationwide, according to Pew Research Center estimates.

Companies turn to undocumented immigrants for good reason, Molloy said.

“They don't complain about work conditions," she said. "They just work, work, work.”

State legislatures and courts for the most part have declared that employers and their insurers — not workers or taxpayers — should pay for the care and compensation of those injured on the job, regardless of immigration status.

This approach is better, court rulings and worker advocates argue, because it discourages unscrupulous employers from hiring more undocumented workers on the belief they won’t have to worry about injuries. It also helps keep a level playing field for all businesses and provides safer workplaces in a system that threatens deductibles or higher premiums for employers with high injury rates.

For 31 years, federal law has required employers to ask new hires to sign a form certifying they can work legally and to show documents to prove it, such as green cards or Social Security numbers.

But in most states, including Florida, businesses aren’t required to check through the federal E-Verify system that the documents are legitimate. The Internet-based system compares identifying information an employee offers to information in federal databases.

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In 2003, Florida’s Legislature overhauled the state’s workers’ compensation system, including making it a third-degree felony to provide false identity information when obtaining a job or injury benefits. While the new law kept earlier language that all workers are entitled to injury benefits, it also allowed companies to deny benefits to many injured undocumented immigrants.

Biggest targets

Workers employed by staff leasing companies in high-risk jobs became the biggest targets.

About half of the 163 injured immigrant workers charged with using false identity documents since 2004 — or 85 — worked for staff leasing companies or, in a few cases, staffing companies, according to a Daily News analysis of arrest and court data from the Florida Division of Investigations and Forensic Services and the Office of State Courts Administrator, as well.

The proportion grew in recent years to 85%, with 53 of the 62 injured workers reported between 2013 and 2016 employed by staff leasing companies or staffing agencies.

Staff leasing companies, known as professional employer organizations, become the employer of workers already hired by their client businesses, and manage payroll and benefits of workers, who are leased back to the businesses. Staffing companies usually recruit workers for companies.

Instead of verifying their documents when hiring, staff leasing companies like SouthEast and their insurers used the law to report undocumented workers after they were injured, court and state records show.

SouthEast could have avoided hiring de la Cruz by using E-Verify when he applied. Based on his case reports, a quick search would have shown the Social Security number he provided belonged to someone else.

A year after de la Cruz was hired, SouthEast’s affiliated insurer reported him.

A few weeks after the injury, he was still unable to move his hand without pain, when officers knocked on the door of the cramped trailer he rented and arrested him at dinnertime.

“I felt it was unfair what happened to me, because I had had an accident,” said de la Cruz, who still works construction jobs when he can. “I wasn’t trying to steal from the company.”

Blank, head of the state office that investigates workers' comp fraud, said his staff has an obligation to enforce the law if someone's Social Security number is used fraudulently by a worker.

But state prosecutors, who often seek restitution from workers for insurance companies that may have paid benefits, rarely seek restitution for victims of stolen Social Security numbers. The Daily News found only one case in the past 14 years in which the owner of the stolen Social Security number is listed as owed restitution.

Blank said the victims of identity theft may not suffer a loss until years later.

Employers not prosecuted

In addition to the injured workers arrested, state investigators have used the statute to charge more than 600 other workers since 2004 for using false identity information to get jobs. Those arrests were often the result of investigations that identified one Social Security number used by multiple workers or state checks on businesses.

But the state agency has done little to hold businesses accountable for hiring undocumented immigrants they know used false documents.

The Daily News could identify only one employer charged since the law was passed in 2003. Arturo Salas, owner of a small construction business in Lake Worth, told officers in a sworn 2007 statement that he knew his workers were using false documents and were here illegally.

Short of a flat-out confession, state investigators don’t charge employers, even with evidence that managers provided phony identifying information to unauthorized workers seeking a job or demanded kickbacks from undocumented immigrants to work.

When authorities arrested 12 undocumented workers in a Fort Pierce Waste Pro plant in 2012, accusing them of obtaining a job with false identifying information, six employees told officers they were hired under the identities of former workers or with false information provided by managers or another worker.

Arrested workers told U.S. Department of Labor investigators they were asked to pay hundreds of dollars in kickbacks to work at the company.

State investigators charged the workers for using fake identities, but not the employer.

Blank said his office has investigated companies.

“I can tell you, in those cases where we’ve seen multiple people from one company, we’ll look at the company to see if they, too, committed a crime,” he said.

Profiting from workers

SouthEast boasts on its website that it can save businesses money.

One pitch promises big savings in workers’ compensation costs to companies with a history of above-average injury claims in high-risk industries.

Businesses with an annual payroll of $1 million can save up to $100,000 a year if they use SouthEast, one corporate website states. It pledges “aggressive workers’ compensation claims handling.”

SouthEast and other staff leasing companies promise high-risk businesses lower workers' comp costs through a bigger pool of employees and work-safety efforts.

Denying claims can also help lower workers’ compensation costs for staff leasing companies that have a large deductible, which means lower premiums because they must pay some or all of the injury claim.

Frank Pennachio, co-founder of Oceanus Partners, a company that provides training and consulting to insurance agents, said many leasing companies rely on high-deductible policies.

“If they have the claims denied, it’s to their advantage,” he said. “They don’t have to pay a deductible.”

An insurer, Pennachio said, could be encouraged to deny claims from undocumented injured workers using false Social Security numbers so they can show their clients they saved them money.

Often after an injured worker was arrested, their employer’s insurer went after them for benefits and expenses they may have paid, records show. At least 43 of the workers arrested, about a fourth, were ordered to repay more than $345,000, criminal court records show.

‘Absolute entrapment’

In some cases, insurers help prosecute injured workers by prodding them to provide evidence that's later used against them.

Workers typically are unaware they forfeit their benefits if they provide a false Social Security number to receive workers comp assistance or that they don’t have to provide the number to insurers or adjustors who call, said Molloy, the workers' comp lawyer.

“Those companies have a system in place to set people up,” Molloy said. “It’s absolute entrapment.”

Martin Rojas, of West Palm Beach, didn’t know signing some papers and telling the adjustor he was undocumented would land him in jail.

Rojas was working in 2014 as a leased employee of SouthEast when he sprained his ankle at his job with Southern Truss Companies Inc. in Fort Pierce.

After the accident, a SouthEast-related adjuster interviewed Rojas by phone and asked for his Social Security number. Rojas said he didn’t remember it but confirmed it was on his job application, according to a recording of the call.

When the adjustor asked if he had a driver’s license, Rojas volunteered he was undocumented.

John Byers, owner of Southern Truss, said Rojas should not have been denied workers' comp benefits.

“It doesn’t matter whether he is legal or not,” Byers said. “If he is hurt, he is hurt.”