Key West, Florida

Vincent Scardina runs a roofing business in Key West, Florida. One morning in late May, he was thrown for a loop when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested six of his employees on the way to a job site.

Scardina had voted for Donald Trump last year, expecting his promised immigration crackdown to focus on the criminals, drug dealers, gang members and “killers” Trump had so often denounced on the campaign trail. Scardina’s roofers, all Nicaraguan nationals, had valid work permits, pending asylum claims, and, as their attorney later confirmed, clean records since their arrival in the U.S. Scardina figured he had done everything right.

“This situation,” he told a reporter for the local NBC station, WTVJ, “is just totally… not at all what they said it was.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told Newsweek that ICE had acted in response to a tip that Scardina employed “illegal aliens.”)

His company, A-Plus Roofing, had lost a third of its workforce in a single day. “It’s going to be really hard to replace those guys,” Scardina said – far harder than it would be in a big city. With “very limited people to pull from,” he explained, “you would have to train them, and that takes sometimes years.”

There was an emotional as well as a practical toll to reckon with: “You get to know these guys, you become their friends,” Scardina said, “and you see what happens to their families – it’s quite a shock.” Adding to the strain on their families, and complicating legal efforts to secure their release, three of the workers had been transferred to detention facilities in Texas and California.

And “it’s not just happening to me,” Scardina said. “I mean, it’s happening across the board to several contractors. I know they’re all being hit by this hard. I know of one landscaper that lost nine or ten of his whole crew… and he’s just totally out of business all of a sudden, just like that.”

Posted on September 14, 2025