This is southwest Florida in focus.

Coming up, the economic victims of immigration enforcement, how small businesses are struggling to get by in communities impacted by Ice raids.

A breakthrough in breast cancer research could help cancer cells from recurring by using existing medications that treat other conditions, and the future of emergency services.

How drones are being refitted to help people faster than ever before.

Hello, I'm Sandra Victorova.

Thank you for joining us.

The federal crackdown on immigration is taking a toll on some businesses in Southwest Florida.

Statistics obtained by the Deportation Data Project show that in 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted more than 10,000 arrests in Florida between January and June last year.

The number was just below 3500 during the same period of time.

A 209% increase that has impacted industries like Florida's agriculture, which relies on seasonal migrants.

According to the Florida Department of Health, the state typically welcomes over 150,000 seasonal workers.

However, enhanced enforcement has led to a statewide labor shortage.

The Trump administration has stated their hope for a 100% American U.S.

agriculture workforce.

But the U.S.

Department of Labor recently warned of a national labor shortage Filing in the Federal Register, they wrote, quote, the department does not believe American workers currently unemployed or marginally employed, will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace large numbers of aliens no longer entering the country, voluntarily leaving or choosing to exit the labor force due to the self perceived potential for their removal based on their illegal entry and status.

Other businesses are also feeling the strain of Ice raids.

As WGCUs Elizabeth Andarge found out the immigration crackdown has left some local small businesses struggling to get customers and employees.

Fear of ice is growing.

But what's it doing to local businesses?

We're here in Bonita Springs to see if local shops are feeling the ripple effects.

It's lunchtime at El Gran Taco Local.

Doesn't look challenging to find a seat or a particular look.

What's going on right now?

This is the peak time of the day where people come into the business.

Do you see any activity going on?

It's affecting everything.

Those rates are affecting everything.

Owner Mauricio Martinez says what you're seeing has become the new norm, especially since earlier this year there's almost no we were working like any other normal day.

Two unmarked cars parked in the parking lot.

They're starting to talk to the people in the parking lot.

And also with the workers inside the business.

They arrested him slowly, and they took them away.

In fact, they even grabbed several people that were in the parking lot.

Martinez says sales have dropped 40%.

He owns five other locations and has tried reducing workers hours to save costs.

But after ten years, he's now planning to close more than half his locations.

Frustrated, I feel frustrated.

It's it's completely out of my hands.

I cannot do much.

His experience is an isolated drive down old 41 road, and you'll hear the pattern repeating.

We start losing customers a little of the time, and then with every week we'll hear the story that they went over universal and busted a few people came this way and took some more people as we went through, we kept losing business.

Today, with about 50% of any.

Nabeel Yusuf has owned Test Laundromat for over 30 years.

He's concerned about losing the familiar faces of his regulars.

It's just shame that this has taken place that way illegally.

That's beyond our, or or reach.

But I like to know I could leave my wallet here all day.

Nobody will pick it up.

So I don't call them criminals.

They're hardworking.

At Mixtec, a mini market owner, Erika Mendoza, agreed to chat off camera.

She's noticed a subtle shift in how consumers shop.

The celebratory items, like pinatas and special candies, remain untouched and testa.

People are afraid.

And, not only they're afraid, but they're just buying essential things.

I used to sell a lot of products that are not considered.

They're essential.

20% of her sales have decreased.

Yeah.

So I went to the Kinko's restaurant.

Owner Carlos Linderoth has seen a similar decline in sales and the way people dine.

They use an esthetic key.

They would like to come into my business with their families, enjoy the food, relax.

Watching the football games.

But it's the fear.

The fear that the, ice, rate will come into the business and take them away.

So that's why many of them come over just to take the food out instead of spending time enjoying themselves in my restaurant, Linda Dulce has had to let go of a few employees for care.

It's a heavy weight on my shoulders, because, there's less customers and there's less sales.

So we had to make adjustments to try to make ends meet.

These business owners continue to fight for survival.

The question becomes, Will Bonita Springs ever return to normal, or is this the new reality?

I just wish that things were different.

People won't be living in fear.

Also, it's terrible for the economy.

Everybody's paying the price here.

I just wish that we go back to where we were.

Be happy and live in peace for WGCU news, I'm Elizabeth Andarge.

Charlotte County is seeing a surge in development.

Earlier this year, we learned that Port Charlotte will be the home of a brand new Bucky's Gas station, scheduled to open in 2028.

That's just part of a significant growth spurt for the region since June of 2023.

Charlotte Counties added nearly 11,000 housing units to meet its rising population, which between June 2023 and February 2025 saw an 11% increase in population.

Joining us now to discuss Buc-ee's and some of the other big business news across the county is Kay Tracy, the director of economic development for the county.

Welcome, Tracy.

Thank you.

So let's start with Buc-ee's.

I thought it was just a jumbo gas station with a really cute beaver mascot, but my colleague said nope, it is actually a destination.

So help us to understand how big of a deal is Buc ee's arrival to Charlotte County?

It is a big deal.

It is, not just your average gas station.

It is a 120 pump gas station, and it's a 75,000 square foot building.

They'll probably employ, 150 to 200 people there.

And, their average or their starting wage is about $40,000 a year with, no education, no background, just stuck in the shelves.

Why do you think Buc ee's chose Charlotte County?

Well, I think it's the location.

We're a really, great location right off of I-75.

We have, plenty of property around for them to build.

And, I just think it would be a great place for them to to, attract, their customers right off of, I-75.

Easy on, easy off.

So, Miss Tracy, let's talk growth.

Since the introduction into you was about how many more housing units are coming to the area, where do you expect to see the most significant growth?

I would assume Babcock Ranch is one of them.

Definitely.

Babcock ranch is one of the, growth areas for Charlotte County.

We have a couple of others that is, burn store corridor, that is growing by leaps and bounds.

And that is, a gateway from Cape Coral, up north to, Charlotte County.

And then we have, we have the Parkside, Redevelopment District that is, pretty much central.

Port Charlotte.

And then we have another area that is, just a little bit, West and that is that Murdock Village area.

And that's the heavy growth area as well.

Do we have any idea how much we expect the county to grow in population?

Well, we have, we're only half built out right now.

We're predicting probably in the next maybe five years.

In the next five years, approximately 17 to 18,000 new residential units will be built.

So an economist studied the county is economy.

And what businesses are out there.

And so there's a real need to diversify the economy.

Obviously it's it's it's really dependent on on services and hospitality.

How critical is that need to diversify right now.

What did they find.

It's very it's very critical I think from any, any economic development, departments, you'll, you'll find that, having a sustainable economy, that is your number one concern.

So, we are looking at our numbers.

We, brought on The Economist to do just that for us to compare us to our neighbors to the north and the south.

And, it did uncover what we had suspected that, Charlotte County is in need of diversification.

We are low on the charts of industrial properties available, industrial properties, and also commercial lands.

All right.

Lots of, big change for Charlotte County.

Okay.

Tracy, with Charlotte County economic development, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Coming up, staying ahead of first responders.

The technology upgrade that helps the Venice Fire Department arrive on the scene in record time.

In 2024, more than 23,000 Floridians were diagnosed with breast cancer.

Despite major advancements in finding and treating carcinomas, there are still challenges, including detecting certain types of disease like lobular breast cancer.

This type of cancer doesn't form a lump like others, and it can be easily missed in both self-exams and mammograms because the cancer cells blend in with the breast tissue, making it harder to detect in early stages.

As a result, women are often diagnosed at a later stage.

Most of these lobular cancers are hormone driven.

And we have great anti hormone therapies and estrogen therapies.

And so even if these cancers are diagnosed at a later stage, maybe they're not all stage ones.

There can be stage two and stage three.

Those are still very much curable breast cancers.

And it may mean that the patients have a longer treatment journey.

Recently, a potential breast cancer breakthrough was announced that brings new hope to survivors who fear a risk of recurrence.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that dormant breast cancer cells can be detected and wiped out with existing drugs, dramatically lowering the risk of relapse.

For more on what this research means to patients, we're joined by Doctor Louis Cho Dorsch, an associate director of basic science with the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Doctor, welcome.

Thank you for joining us.

So nice to be with you.

So about 30% of people who have breast cancer will have a recurrence at some point.

Your research focused on how to help those patients.

So you targeted dormant cancer cells.

Explain why.

Well the the problem with breast cancer is when it comes back.

That is what most deaths from this disease are due to.

And cancers come back from these sort of sleeping or dormant cancer cells, which you might think of as, seeds from a dandelion that might have spread in Deer Lawn and patients don't know whether they have these seeds or not.

But if we could target those seeds and prevent them from regrowing, we would have the ability, we think, to prevent recurrent breast cancers from arising in the first place.

And this is, a different approach.

If you will, than what is currently being taken.

So what are you finding that might help people who are at risk of relapse?

Well, the first thing that I think we're finding is that we can actually look for these cells and identify those patients who might have them, because looking at the other side of the coin, 70% of patients aren't going to recur.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if those patients could have a test that would give them some reassurance that they didn't have these, dormant sleeping cells and that they were at a lower risk of having their breast cancer recur.

So that's, I think, one important feature.

The second important feature is for those patients who do have these dormant cancer cells or these seeds of recurrent cancers that we can now, we believe target those cells with therapies, that do not have a lot of side effects, do it over the course of a number of months, and try to eradicate those cells such that they're no longer available to give rise to recurrent breast cancers.

So part of what we found so interesting in your research is that you were able to use pre existing FDA approved drugs to treat patients.

Are those drugs common already for people who have had cancer?

That's a that's such an interesting question.

So one of the drugs, hydroxychloroquine isn't used for cancer at all.

It's generally used for preventing malaria or treating malaria.

But what we found is that these sleeping cancer cells behave very differently, than normal cancer cells.

So normal cancer cells, say, in a breast cancer that's detected, they're growing.

They're proliferating, they're dividing, they're constantly growing.

Whereas these sleeping cells really just sit there and they can sit in a patient's body, in the bone marrow or in other tissues in the body and stay alive for decades.

Before they wake up and start growing again.

And why that's important is that we found that these sleeping cells are sensitive to drugs that maybe don't do very much against actively growing cancer cells.

So hydroxychloroquine and everolimus, which is the second drug that was used in this trial, they have some effect on, growing cancer cells, but not that much.

Whereas dormant cancer cells in this sleeping state are highly sensitive to these drugs, and these drugs are actually able to kill them, thereby by removing them, from the reservoir of cells that we believe give rise to recurrent cancers.

Doctor, can you explain what makes these dormant tumor cells so tough to essentially detect?

Yes, it's an excellent question.

Many of the therapies that are used now to treat cancer cells are directed against the fact that these cells are rapidly dividing and proliferating.

So, for example, most people, you know, have heard of chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy can be very active against rapidly proliferating cancer cells.

But it turns out that chemotherapy is not very active against these dormant cells that are not dividing.

And really just sitting there in a state that's very different from a rapidly proliferating cell.

And so because these dormant cells reside in a different state and do so for many years, in some cases, we need different types of therapies.

And so there's almost a divide between the kind of therapies that you would want to use in patients who have actively growing cancers as compared to patients who have just these dormant or sleeping cancer cells that reside in their bodies.

Doctor Lewis Cho, thank you so much.

We appreciate your time.

Thank you for having me.

When it comes to drownings, every second matters.

That's why the Venice Fire Department has added a new tool to help save lives in the Gulf waters that surround the city in Sarasota County.

The latest addition to their search and rescue operations can swoop through the skies at 45mph to deliver lifesaving equipment.

WGCUs Jennifer Crawford reports.

But surely a $25,000 drone soaring through the skies of Venice.

Purchased more than a year ago by the Venice Fire Department.

Shirley has flown a variety of missions.

It has a thermal imaging camera on it, which allows us to see heat signatures.

We can see where a fire is in a structure.

It also allows us to have an aerial view of the scene itself, and ensure all our crews are out of harm's way.

I've used it on brush fires.

We also can use it for search and rescue.

And with the thermal imaging, be able to have an eye in the sky to help search for that person.

But Assistant Fire Chief Kyle Hartley says all eyes are on Shirley's newest accessory.

More importantly, we got this third party attachment.

That's a dropper.

And so it allows us to drop pretty much anything from the drone for our demonstration today.

It's a life preserver or an inflatable that we're able to attach to the drone and drop to a swimmer in distress.

Hartley says, for example, if Shirley is launched from his office a few miles away, she can fly at more than 40mph, reaching a swimmer in the Gulf in 3 to 4 minutes, compared to about ten minutes it could take rescuers.

Our crews, they get dispatch, say, to a swimmer in distress out on the beach.

It's going to take them roughly 5 to 6 minutes to get on scene.

And now you have their swim time to get to the the victim, whereas this can can fly straight to the location, drop the inflatable to them so they at least have something to hold on to until our crews can.

You can get them with a vessel or a rescue board and bring them back to shore.

Hartley, a 20 year veteran of the department, says they received several calls a month for water rescues.

More than 25 emergency calls came in last year.

He says the $300 cost for the attachment helps make their $25,000 investment that much more valuable.

This is just one more tool to assist us with getting someone help.

When seconds count for pilots are trained to fly the drone and it can be deployed in as little as 30s remotely from anywhere in the city.

As more residents and vacationers head out to enjoy the beaches around Venice, Hartley says it's just a matter of time before a water rescue call will come in.

And when it does, they'll be able to provide their fastest response ever.

Thanks to Shirley and her new water rescue capabilities.

For WGCU news, I'm Jennifer Crawford, reporting in Venice.

After the break promoting peace through art, the journey that allowed Bob Rauschenberg to take his Florida flair across the globe.

There's a common phrase that encourages people to think locally, act globally.

For Bob Rauschenberg, that meant using his art as an olive branch to other cultures.

As we continue our celebration of 100 years of the artist, arts reporter Tom Hall shows us how Rauschenberg fostered creative dialog in countries where artistic expression had been suppressed.

In 1984, Robert Rauschenberg was at the height of his fame.

Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art.

He was the giant of American art, and, I would argue, most important artists of the second half of the 20th century.

Jay Dellinger with the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, says the artist decided to use his celebrity to take art to places where artistic expression had been suppressed.

So in 1982, he made a trip to China to work with the shorn paper makers in ennui Province.

That collaboration resulted in one of his most iconic artworks, a 100ft long print called Chinese Summerhall, and that was a springboard for trips to a dozen other countries.

For Bob, he had always envisioned making a kind of peace mission traveling the world and going to places, frankly, where there were dictators and authoritarian regimes, where it was difficult for Americans to travel to because he believed in one on one communication with people.

He named this initiative the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, or Rocket, between 1985 and 1990.

He traveled to Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Tibet, Japan, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Malaysia.

Rocky wouldn't have happened without Donald Saff, the former director of graphic studio at the University of South Florida, made all the arrangements for these trips and oversaw the production of the multiples the artist created upon his return.

Rauschenberg had been introduced to South by a friend and fellow artist, Jim Rosenquist.

Rosenquist first came to Florida at the invitation of Graphic Studio in around 1970, at the beginning of Graphic Studio.

And he had this sort of tragedy, which was he had brought his family, his his very young son and his wife, and they got in a car wreck in Tampa, and they ended up in the hospital for an extended period in ICU.

Bob, hearing that his family members, his wife and son were in the ICU, came up from Captiva to visit.

At the time, Rauschenberg was just beginning to experiment with printmaking.

He had a small studio next to his beach house.

It paled in comparison to Graphic Studio.

They had all these printmaking facilities, and they would give him as expansive a studio environment as he cared to work with them.

So he came to Graphic Studio, started making additions in 1972.

And then through the entirety of his life, he made work, really connecting with Don self and or with Graphic Studio.

This strategic partnership culminated in some of the greatest artworks of the last half of the 20th century.

His Made in Tampa series of clay works, hundreds of lithographs and scores of solvent transfer prints.

This work helped cement Rauschenberg's reputation as the preeminent global artist of his time, and tethered him to Southwest Florida, where he had everything he needed to make great art and create a lasting legacy.

One of the things that I think kept him in Florida was having this deep relationship, not only with us, but also with the University of South Florida.

For WGCU news, I'm Tom Hall.

Thousands are expected to protest across southwest Florida over the weekend.

Coming up next week, we examine the divide that is growing in our political discussions.

But we thank you for joining us today.

Make sure to download that WGCU app where you can find all of our stories, plus those extended interviews.

We hope you will join us here next week on Southwest Florida in Focus.