Lahaina fire upends lives of immigrant workers as 850 people remain on list of missing

Freddy Tomas was working in his yard in Lahaina, on the island of Maui, when the fire advanced with stunning speed right up to his fence. He rushed to save valuables from a safe inside his house but realized he didn’t have time and fled, his face blackened with soot.

Days after fleeing in his pickup truck, amid smoke so thick he could only follow the red taillights of the vehicle in front of him and pray they were going the right way, the retired hotel worker from the Philippines returned to his destroyed home with his son to look for the safe. Tomas, 65, said it had contained passports, naturalization papers, other important documents and $35,000.

After sifting through the ashes, father and son found the safe, but it had popped open in the fire, whipped by hurricane-force winds, and its contents were incinerated.

For immigrants such as Tomas, Lahaina was an oasis, with more than double the foreign-born population of the continental United States. Now, those workers are trying to piece their lives back together after the Aug. 8 fire leveled the town.

Maui County and the Maui Police Department on Sunday confirmed the identifies of another five victims of the wildfires that devastated the area, the county website said. The confirmed death toll remained at 114 as investigators continued to search the area.

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Sunday on the CBS News show “Face the Nation” that “an army of search-and-rescue teams” with 41 dogs had covered 85% of the affected area.

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Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said in a social media post Sunday that 27 victims have been identified and 11 families were notified of the losses. The FBI and the Maui County coroner’s office are working together to identify the recovered remains.

“There are currently 850 names on the list of missing persons,” Bissen said, adding that the number represented a positive change from the original list, which contained more than 2,000 names.

“Over 1,285 individuals have been located safe. We are both saddened and relieved about these numbers as we continue the recovery process. The number of identified will rise, and the number of missing may decrease,” Bissen said.

Jobs had been plentiful in the town, which boasted a row of restaurants and shops along Front Street, bordering the azure waters of the Pacific. Lured as well by its beautiful vistas and laid-back lifestyle, foreign workers had flocked to Lahaina from all over the world.

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And they contributed significantly to the population and economy.

The presence of immigrant workers in Lahaina boosted the proportion of its foreign-born residents to 32%, which is more than double the 13.5% for the United States as a whole, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated in July 2022.

Still, the labor shortage related to the COVID-19 pandemic took a toll in Hawaii, just as it did in much of the rest of the country. In February, almost three years after the start of the pandemic, employers were trying to fill 14,000 jobs in Hawaii — roughly double the number of unfilled job openings pre-pandemic, Hawaii News Now reported, citing state economists. Restaurants in Lahaina were literally hiring people off the street.

Many foreign-born workers lost everything in the inferno. Some residents perished.

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The Mexican Consulate in San Francisco said that two Mexican nationals were confirmed dead and that it was helping to arrange the return of their remains to their families in Mexico. A Costa Rican man was also among the dead.

The consulate said some 3,000 Mexican nationals are believed to be living on Maui, many working in pineapple fields, in hotels and restaurants, and in other establishments with ties to tourism.

Remedios Gomez Arnau, the Mexican consul general in San Francisco, dispatched three staff members to Maui to help Mexican citizens deal with the tragedy. The Mexican government has been in contact with at least 250 of its citizens in Maui, she said, and reissued passports and birth certificates lost in the fire.

“Many of them lost everything because their homes burned down, and they lost their documents,” she said in an interview Friday.

With businesses burned down, legions of those who survived are now jobless. Many are also without a place to live after the blaze also tore through housing for many people who worked at the town’s hotels and resorts. And others are without a clear path forward.

A document provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency says anyone affected by a major disaster may be eligible for disaster assistance, including non-citizens whose deportation status is being withheld for at least one year as well as for non-citizens granted asylum. That assistance can include crisis counseling, legal assistance, medical care, food and shelter, and other relief services.

However, callers to the FEMA assistance hotline are told in recorded messages that they should provide a Social Security number and are warned that lying on an application for aid is a federal offense.

For immigrants who were brought to Maui as children, the island is the only home they know.

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Chuy Madrigal fled the blaze with nine members of his extended family, which originally hails from Mexico.

They lost the home that his mom worked 30 years to buy and the food truck they started operating just three months ago, said Madrigal.

He said he and others from the immigrant community have been knocking on doors to gather supplies for those in need and offering to translate. They have tried to comfort those, like him, who lost everything.

“There has been a lot of fear,” he said. “But once you talk to people and tell them: ‘When we got here, we started from zero, this is zero again, we just got to get back on it and continue,’ a lot of people have said: ‘You’re right.’”