Key West Border Patrol Incident

This is a true story.

Sometime during the spring of 2007 the US Border Patrol started to aggressively round-up illegal aliens in the Key West area. I remember one episode that made the front page of our local paper, The Key West Citizen.  It involved the raid on a hotel next to the Home Depot which was being renovated. The contractor had many illegals working on the site. This raid got a lot of locals riled up because of how aggressive it was. And it made illegals very cautious.

That same week I had workers making some repairs at my house. The workers included a man from South Africa, a carpenter from England, two day laborers from Nicaragua (who did not speak English),  an electrician from Ireland, a painter from Poland, and a tile setter also from Poland.

It was around lunchtime a few days after the Border Patrol raid.  The workers were sitting under the palm trees outside by my pool eating lunch. Like many of the homes in the Casa Marina Area where I live, my house has a large privacy fence.  Someone opened the gate without ringing the bell.  All of the workers eyes looked to the north end of the pool and saw male wearing a uniform enter the yard. Everybody but me scrambled and ran out the gate on the south side of the pool where we were congregated.

It took me a minute to figure out that the workers had confused the Orkin Man with a Border Patrol agent. The workers finally made it back to work, but checked over their shoulder for days to come.