Crime is rearing its ugly head in Florida in the aftermath of the hurricane.
What law enforcement found left them seeing red.
And a Florida sheriff was raising hell after arrests exposed this ugly reality under Kamala Harris.
Most looters arrested after the hurricane are illegal aliens
Communities on the barrier islands of Florida’s Gulf Coast were devastated by two hurricanes in two weeks.
Hurricane Helene slammed into the Big Bend region and caused flooding up and down the Gulf Coast from the storm surge.
Residents barely had time to pick up the pieces when Hurricane Milton made landfall in Siesta Key, Florida, in the Sarasota area.
The barrier islands in Pinellas County were among the harder-hit areas in the state, being directly on the Gulf of Mexico.
Criminals are never going to miss an opportunity to try to exploit a tragedy for their own gain.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned looters before Milton made landfall that they would face the consequences.
“Don’t even think about it. We’re going to come down hard on you, and you’ll regret that you did that,” DeSantis said at the time.
Not everyone got the message.
In the weeks following the storms, 45 people were arrested in Pinellas County for looting and scams involving unlicensed contractors.
And 41 of those were illegal aliens from countries like Mexico, Cuba, Columbia, Honduras, and Venezuela.
The charges included armed robbery, loitering, grand theft, vandalism, trespassing, and others.
The worst a Florida sheriff has ever seen
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri had never seen this many criminals descend on his county after a storm.
“We’ve never seen anything of this magnitude before, we’ve never seen this influx of people from out of the area that are clearly just here to steal and to pilfer and to do bad things and to target these vulnerable people,” Gualtieri said.
“They’re going into people’s homes, they’re taking stuff, they’re rummaging through their things,” Gualtieri added. “In one case, it was an armed robbery where they went in and stole from them forcibly.”
Law enforcement may have only found the tip of the iceberg.
Sheriff’s deputies stopped almost 200 people who were acting suspiciously but they did not have any cause to arrest them.
Most of those stopped had out-of-state license plates on their vehicles.
An undercover sting operation in Madeira Beach resulted in 62 people getting arrested on unlicensed contracting charges.
Almost everyone arrested in the sting had a long criminal rap sheet.
“It’s really pretty telling and pretty sad that this whole operation was just on a couple of streets in Madeira Beach,” Gualtieri said. “This is just prevalent up and down the Pinellas beaches, from Clearwater all the way down to St. Pete Beach.”
The sheriff said these scammers are no different than someone trying to break into a home.
Either they take the money and run or do a shoddy job that will never pass code.
“It‘s maddening,” Gualtieri continued. “This is the epitome of people trying to exploit others when they’re down and when they’re out and when they’re trying to rebuild and they’ve got nothing.”
The border crisis imported countless criminal illegal aliens into the country who look to prey on hardworking Americans.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
