TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis has invoked the 2022 death of Pinellas County sheriff’s deputy Michael Hartwick as a peril of illegal immigration, after the deputy was struck by a front-end loader driven by someone in the country illegally.
However, DeSantis rarely mentions the fact that the man driving the machinery was working for a state contractor, Archer Western-de Moya Group Joint Venture, overseen by his administration.
Last week at an unrelated news conference, the governor defended the company, saying that it was the victim of an “interstate fraud ring” of people who created fake IDs to pass citizenship verification screenings, DeSantis said.
One of the people with a fake ID was Juan Ariel Molina-Salles, who was operating the front-end loader that hit Hartwick at a construction site on Interstate 275. There, Archer Western and its partner company were building the Gateway Expressway. Molina-Salles, who fled the scene, said it was an accident.
“It’s not a business’s fault,” DeSantis said. “If someone has bona fide documents and they pass it, I can’t blame the business at that point.”
DeSantis’ comments were his most substantive remarks to date about the incident. But they also represent an unflinching defense of a company with a history of hiring workers in the country illegally and whose safety protocols have been questioned since the deputy’s death.
In 2021, Pinellas Park police reported Archer Western to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after another worker who was in the country illegally was struck and killed by a concrete pillar at the same work site, the Times previously reported.
After Hartwick was killed a year later, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri held a news conference in which he said investigators struggled because many workers were lying about their identities.
Molina-Salles told law enforcement that his employer didn’t train him on how to drive the loader because he operated similar machinery in Honduras, Gualtieri said.
Molina-Salles also said that he never saw Hartwick, who was guiding traffic that night, in part because one of the loader’s lights was broken.
According to depositions in the state case against Molina-Salles, Archer Western had a policy to instruct law enforcement officers working near construction sites to wear safety vests anytime they left their patrol cars.
But another officer often assigned to work the same site told lawyers that the company never instructed him on this policy, before or after Hartwick’s death.
Gualtieri said Friday that he was not aware of an interstate fraud ring to make fake IDs, as DeSantis alleged.
Gualtieri forwarded his office’s findings to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which reports to the president, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to DeSantis. The Florida Department of Transportation’s internal review after the incident was two pages.
Gualtieri previously said the federal investigation was trying to uncover “who at what levels of the company knew what” about the hiring of workers in the country illegally.
At least 14 construction workers from the job site, including Molina-Salles, have been federally indicted for using Social Security numbers that weren’t theirs in order to work while in the country illegally. Several of them reached plea agreements in exchange for helping the feds investigate, court records show.
The state’s response to Hartwick’s death was criticized by Senate Minority Leader Jason Pizzo, D-Miami, over the past three weeks during a heated debate between DeSantis and the Legislature over how to respond to illegal immigration.
Lawmakers eventually passed legislation that increases penalties for people in the country illegally, but did nothing to crack down on businesses that hire them.
After signing the bills into law on Thursday, the Times/Herald asked DeSantis why the state didn’t appear to have penalized Archer Western after Hartwick’s death.
DeSantis said it “wasn’t true” that the state didn’t hold Archer Western accountable.
“We absolutely pursued,” DeSantis said. “The reality was, it was an out-of-state contractor. There was a lot of shady things going on, but we absolutely did pursue that.”
When asked twice how the state penalized Archer Western, DeSantis said, “What you’re saying is totally false.”
At a news conference the next day, DeSantis said that he didn’t think the company was at fault.
The state has continued to pay millions to the contractor. Archer Western, in partnership with another contractor, Traylor Bros, is finishing up the most expensive bridge project in Florida history: the $865 million revamp of the Howard Frankland.
More information about the company’s hiring practices could emerge soon in state court. The trial of Molina-Salles is scheduled to begin March 3. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
He has pleaded not guilty to leaving the scene of a crash involving death, a first-degree felony with a sentence of up to 30 years in prison.
