President Donald Trump’s mass immigrant detention and deportation agenda is creating a climate of fear and uncertainty for immigrant workers in Central Florida’s tourism workforce, including workers at the world-renowned Walt Disney World.
About one-third of the nation’s hospitality industry workforce — working in hotels, airports, restaurants and theme parks, for example — is made up of immigrants. This includes not just undocumented workers, but immigrants from countries such as Haiti and Venezuela, whose ability to lawfully live and work in the U.S. has been thrown into flux under the Trump administration’s proposed changes to programs that allow them to live here, like Temporary Protected Status and the asylum process.
“We’re not talking about people who have been here six months,” said Isaie Marc, a Haitian immigrant and U.S. citizen on staff with Unite Here Local 737, which represents roughly 18,000 workers at Disney World. “There are some people who have been here 10, 18, 20 years, so they’ve built a life in the United States.”
Marc is one of his union’s key advocates for Haitian workers, many of whom work back-of-house jobs at major Central Florida attractions like Disney World.
Some of his union’s immigrant members, including workers at Disney, have bought homes in Central Florida. They own cars, and they pay taxes that help support their local communities. “We’re not talking about criminals,” Marc said, referring to the Trump administration’s assertion that federal officials are only going after violent criminals in the U.S. without legal status. “There’s a lot of people who keep the economy going. That’s who we’re talking about.”
According to data compiled by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, nearly 75 percent of the roughly 68,000 people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as of Feb. 7 don’t have any criminal convictions on their record. Research has found that people born in the U.S. are more likely to commit crimes than immigrants, regardless of their legal status.
Living under threat
The Trump administration’s willingness to send federal agents after people who are trying to build a better life for themselves in the U.S. is hanging over some tourism workers like a cloud.
“Every single day is living under threat,” said Pericles Joseph, a Haitian immigrant who works as a dishwasher at Via Napoli, one of the Italian restaurants at Disney World’s Epcot. Joseph, a member of Unite Here Local 737, told Orlando Weekly through a translator that he originally came to the U.S. in 2008, alone, for economic reasons.
Now he has a family, in addition to a job at one of the most beloved theme parks in the world. He has two daughters who were born in the U.S., and he’s a homeowner. He’s one of more than 300,000 Haitian immigrants lawfully living in the U.S. under TPS, a program that recognizes that his home country is currently unsafe due to issues such as gang violence and other dangerous conditions.
Of the nearly 1.3 million TPS recipients living in the U.S., as of March 2025, nearly half were located in Florida, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Altogether, they contribute billions of dollars to the economy each year.
Efforts by the Trump administration to revoke TPS designation for several countries, including Haiti, over the last year have therefore left hundreds of thousands of recipients destabilized.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has argued that allowing Haitian TPS holders to remain in the U.S. is “contrary to the national interest” — an argument struck down by a D.C. District court on Feb. 2, just one day before TPS designation for Haiti was scheduled to be revoked.
For Joseph, the uncertainty of whether he’ll be able to stay and work in Florida, in order to pay the bills and provide for his family, is overwhelming.
He no longer has a home in Haiti, where he worries the lives of himself and his daughters would be at risk if he were to be deported. His life, his job, his home, is here. “It’s sad,” he told Orlando Weekly through a translator. Many of his Haitian co-workers, he said, feel the same way.
Evans Corvoisier, a food handler at Via Napoli who’s also from Haiti, told Orlando Weekly it’s not safe in his home country, and that life would be very difficult for him if he was forced to return. He’s also a TPS holder and has lived in the U.S. for nearly 20 years.
‘You can tell business has slowed down’
His union, advocating on behalf of 19,000 workers in Central Florida’s hospitality industry, is part of a local coalition of immigrant rights advocates who have called on Orange County leaders to stand up to federal immigration enforcement and ensure due process rights for immigrants detained by ICE in the local jail.
“My community is in fear,” Marc told county commissioners earlier this month, during the public comment portion of a board meeting. “Even people that have legal status have been questioned and targeted. That’s not right.”
Another union representative, Xiomary Rivera, told county leaders that she herself — a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico — had been racially profiled by local law enforcement and pulled over for questioning several times without being presented with any evidence of a traffic infraction.
The federal crackdown on unlawful immigration, she said, isn’t just hurting undocumented people, but entire communities. “Haitians and Latinos are the backbone of the tourism workforce,” she told county commissioners. “We need action, not silence.”
Hospitality and tourism is the most pivotal industry in Central Florida, a region that’s home to world-renowned theme parks like Disney World, Universal Studios (and its new park, Epic Universe), SeaWorld and other popular attractions.
In 2024, the region welcomed more than 75 million visitors, 6.5 million of whom traveled from overseas. Altogether, tourism drove an estimated $5.6 billion in local and state tax revenue to Central Florida in 2024 alone, according to estimates from Visit Orlando.
A new report from the union Unite Here, however, warns that Trump’s mass deportation plans — including his stated goal of deporting one million people per year — are having a chilling effect on industries that employ large concentrations of immigrant workers, including agriculture, construction and hospitality.
The report, dubbed “Inhospitable,” found that the national hospitality industry workforce shrunk by 98,000 workers from December 2024 to December 2025, with the industry’s unemployment rate ticking up just slightly. Citing U.S. International Trade Association data, the report says the U.S. saw 2.5 billion fewer trips by international visitors last year, and a 5.5 percent decline in tourism revenue — a loss of $1.2 billion — from Sept. 2024 to Sept. 2025.
“You can feel that business has slowed down. People are spending less, and some of my co-workers who depend on tips are seeing a real drop,” Shaleah Taylor, a guest room attendant and Unite Here union member in Las Vegas, said in a statement. “Everything costs more, and it feels like we are constantly trying to catch up. A lot of us are nervous about job security, about our hours, and about what happens if things slow down even more.”
“A lot of us are nervous about job security, about our hours, and about what happens if things slow down even more.”
Trump’s tariffs, and other economic pressures, have also weighed on small business owners, particularly those who are importing goods from overseas, like Asian food markets. Everyday people who are seeing higher prices at the grocery store, or facing rent hikes without a pay raise to match, may also be less likely to visit their favorite bar or restaurant, or shell out for the wares of a locally owned retailer when their purse is looking flat.
Visit Florida, the Sunshine State’s own tourism marketing agency, came out with its own report this month in collaboration with the governor’s office, announcing a record-breaking number of visitors to Florida in 2025, with domestic visitation (i.e., visitors traveling from other parts of the U.S.) accounting for 91.5 percent of that.
Despite less love from Canadians last year — who’ve reportedly shied away from U.S. travel due in part to ongoing tariff wars and annexation threats — Visit Florida found that the state still welcomed an estimated 9.3 million overseas visitors in 2025, compared to just under 9 million in 2024. Canadians made up 2 percent of visitors to the Sunshine State last year.
“Florida continues to set the standard as the top travel destination in the nation, welcoming millions of visitors while delivering real economic benefits for our residents,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a statement. “Through strategic investments in infrastructure, public safety, and environmental stewardship, we are ensuring that Florida remains a place where families can vacation with confidence and where our tourism industry can continue to thrive.”
Visit Orlando, a local tourism marketing agency that operates separately from Visit Florida, doesn’t release its own annual tourism numbers for the Central Florida region until May.
Still, president and CEO Cassandra Matej told Orlando Weekly that current estimates for international visitation to Orlando predict a slight 4.5 percent decline in 2025, with much of that decline resulting from Canadian visitor losses, estimated to be around 13 percent.
Other markets are expected to show growth or remain flat from last year, according to their numbers, with estimates of a 5.5 percent increase in visitors in 2025 from Brazil, a 0.2 percent increase from the United Kingdom, and a 0.3 percent increase from Mexico.
“Travel is influenced by many factors, including politics, inflation, and even the weather,” Matej said in a statement. “However, we remain optimistic about international outlook over the next three to five years, particularly as global travel continues to rebound, and Orlando continues to expand its international reach.”
Visit Orlando expects their international visitation in 2026 to rebound to where they were in 2024 “due to healthy gains across most origin markets.”
We keep each other safe
Across the country, fear of immigration enforcement agents roaming the streets doesn’t just stem from fear of deportation. Detention centers, including the so-called Alligator Alcatraz in South Florida, have been accused of dangerous living conditions, human rights violations and detention of people who are in the country lawfully.
Workers’ rights organizers have been targeted and abducted by federal agents. U.S. citizens have been shot dead by federal agents during ICE raids. State employees in the Florida Department of Financial Services, deputized to carry out immigration duties on behalf of ICE, have been accused of luring immigrants out of their homes in order to detain them here in Orange County.
In Orlando, labor union Unite Here Local 737 has hosted legal clinics for their members with local immigration attorneys over the last year, to help provide information and updates on TPS and other immigration policy changes.
They’ve also enshrined into some of their union contracts — covering workers at Disney and a couple of local hotels — certain protections that guarantee immigrant workers the right to get their jobs back for up to one to two years (varies by contract) if they lose their work authorization or work visa temporarily, and then regain it.
Marc, the union staffer, said Central Florida’s immigrant workforce is critical to keeping the magic of local tourist attractions (and their money-making potential) alive. “Without them, there is no industry.”
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