In the Deep South, the COVID-19 pandemic creates unique challenges for immigrant communities

Monica Soto, an English language tutor in Forest, Mississippi, would typically be wrapping up end-of-year school projects and helping her students with their homework.

But this has been a year unlike any in Forest, a community still recovering from the largest workplace immigration raid in any single state last August. A total of 680 workers from nearby chicken processing plants were detained during the raid. 

Now a different crisis has hit the Mississippi town with a population of a little over 5,000, and Soto has found herself helping with food drives and checking in on the well being of many of those families. 

Scott County, where Soto works, has the highest number of cases in the state: 592 as of May 26. It’s one of seven counties under an extended stay-at-home order due to their high case count.

During her check-ins with families, Soto began noting a troubling pattern. People were not getting tested or receiving medical treatment even though they were presenting symptoms of COVID-19 like fever and dry cough.

“We are just recuperating from the raids and a lot of people are scared of having to go to a doctor’s office or the hospital because of possible confrontations with authorities,” Soto said. “So they are staying sick at home. Entire families are in quarantine.”

Fear around interaction with authorities is one of several challenges unique to immigrant communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic has also laid bare a slew of economic and social challenges that have uniquely impacted these communities, from food insecurity to access to public health information in different languages.

While reports out of California and New York have shown an uptick in the number of cases of COVID-19 in large Latino populations, ethnicity data is hard to come by in some Southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana, making it difficult for health workers to respond to cases in specific communities.

Recently, the city of New Orleans released new data on the alarming impact the virus has had on the Hispanic community. 

Grassroots response to COVID-19 

In the last two months, grassroots organizations in hard-hit areas of Mississippi and in Louisiana have been tirelessly working to address immigrant community needs.

In New Orleans, organizations like Familias Unidas, have been collecting and organizing weekly food donations for more than 2,000 people who have been economically impacted by the coronavirus crisis. 

“The pandemic has highlighted a lot of issues that already existed,” said Mary Moran, the executive director of Nuestra Voz, a non-profit in New Orleans that works on advocacy issues for immigrant parents navigating the local school system.

Now those efforts have shifted to arranging financial assistance for families with rent and bills that have accumulated over the last two months. Nuestra Voz recently distributed $100,000 to 100 families in New Orleans in need. 

Mujeres Luchadoras (Women Warriors) a group co-led by Marilo Rivera in New Orleans, is offering rides to immigrant families without transportation, and coordinating food donations and rental assistance for families that have lost employment. 

Mujeres Luchadoras was founded three years ago by several women who became the sole providers in their families after their partners were either deported or detained by immigration authorities. The group’s community outreach has now become a vital lifeline for dozens of mostly Hispanic immigrant families in the New Orleans-metro area who have been economically impacted during the pandemic.

“Our women work in hotels, restaurants, schools. All of this has ended,” Rivera said.

And while some restaurants are considering reopening now that New Orleans has relaxed its stay-at-home measure, re-employment is not a guarantee, she said. New Orleans began opening businesses at 25 percent capacity on May 16 after successfully reducing the number of new daily cases and hospitalizations. 

“I spoke to a mom whose restaurant is reopening at 25 percent capacity — she is at the bottom of the list to get her job back,” she said.

MORE:Amid COVID-19, New Orleans will start Phase 1 reopening on May 16

A 2016 Pew Research study reported that approximately 32% of undocumented workers were employed in the service sector before the pandemic. Approximately 79,4000 essential workers in Louisiana are foreign born. This includes individuals who have become “naturalized” U.S. citizens, those who have work visas and others who are undocumented, according to the Center for Migration Studies of New York. This includes jobs in construction, retail and essential health care operations.

In Mississippi, about 28,300 essential workers are born in a country outside of the United States. Dauda Sesay, the president of the Louisiana Organization for Refugees and Immigrants in Baton Rouge, said that while foreign-born staff legally working in the U.S. were entitled to unemployment benefits, many never applied. 

“I noted the lack of essential information in local languages and how important it is getting the right message at this critical time (to) saves lives,” he said during a conference call coordinated by the Center for Migration Studies on the impact the pandemic has had on immigrant and refugee communities in the Deep South.

To bridge the gap, Sesay coordinated the Virtual ONE Community using ZOOM to help communicate information about unemployment benefits, health resources, and other social services in local languages spoken by different immigrant communities.

Increased testing in high-risk communities

When the outbreak in New Orleans forced school closures, Dr. Kimberly Mukerjee said she lost a vital line of communication to the network of social workers and teachers that connected her to families she has worked with for years. Clinics at the time were limited only to urgent and emergency care.

“My population went off of my radar. We no longer had a robust social support network, no social workers, or schools to connect to kids,” she said. When she was able to connect to families, the No. 1 need she heard was the lack of food at home.

MORE:Food insecurity during COVID-19 stirs memories of Katrina for New Orleans' Ninth Ward

Families were unwilling to go to the hospital despite being sick, either due to lack of insurance or because of their legal status, Mukerjee added.

“People just weren’t getting tested,” she said. 

To improve testing rates in New Orleans’ immigrant communities, Mukerjee helped connect families to a mobile testing site in the Mid City neighborhood, which has one of the largest Hispanic populations in New Orleans. 

The lack of transportation and a requirement for people to present state identification at the federally sponsored drive-thru test sites posed significant barriers, especially for undocumented residents,  Mukerjee said. The mobile clinics do not require state IDs.

The Hispanic population in Orleans Parish doubled to nearly 22,000 in the last two decades, according to The Data Center. In neighboring Jefferson Parish, the Hispanic population has also doubled to nearly 65,000. 

In recent weeks, new data from New Orleans shows the startling impact the pandemic has had on this population.

An analysis of close to 5,000 tests from mobile test clinics and local hospitals found that more than 20 percent of positive cases are among people who identify as Hispanic, according to new data provided by the New Orleans Department of Health. Meanwhile about 3 percent of positive cases were among non-Hispanic residents.

MORE:Coronavirus disproportionately impacts New Orleans Hispanic community

The positive case rate is more than five times those of other ethnic groups, said New Orleans health director Dr. Jennifer Avegno.

"It quickly became clear that our Latino community is seeing much higher rates of infection compared to others in the metro area,” she said.

The city is working with community groups and local churches to increase information in Spanish and access to mobile test sites in high-risk neighborhoods. 

According to the Louisiana Department of Health as of May 26, people who identified as Hispanic only accounted for about 2 percent of the 2,596 deaths reported in Louisiana. 

Ethnicity data is not available among confirmed cases, but anecdotally medical professionals have started to see an uptick among Hispanic residents in New Orleans. 

“We don’t yet have a pulse on the situation fully, but we believe there are many more cases than we know about,” Mukerjee said. “As testing continues in the neighborhoods, we are definitely seeing higher rates among people who identify as Hispanic.”

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Part of the city’s phase one re-opening effort includes ramping up contact tracing work.

Contact tracers track people who have been exposed to a confirmed case, to try to isolate and reduce the spread of an individual outbreak.

Getting data at the neighborhood level will be an important next step. 

The quality of data also varies based on location of collection. Tests being conducted in hospital settings provide more insight because patients have to be registered. 

“If we start to see rates climb we can tailor the response to that population,” Mukerjee said. “It’s important to test everybody because we need to see where the hot spots are especially as we start to reopen."

Reporter Todd A. Price contributed to this report.

Maria Clark is a general assignment reporter with The American South. Story ideas, tips, questions? Email her at mclark@theadvertiser.com or follow her on Twitter @MariaPClark1. Sign up for The American South newsletter.