He Died Building a Ship for the U.S. Government. His Family Got Nothing. — ProPublica

On the morning of Jan. 22, 2024, Elmer De León Pérez descended deep into the bowels of a ship that he was helping to build in Houma, Louisiana. Pérez was a welder, working to construct one of the U.S. government’s most sophisticated ships, an $89 million vessel for tracking hurricanes and conducting oceanographic research. It was funded by President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation.

Pérez’s assignment had him working at the bottom of a nearly 12-foot ballast tank, according to a subsequent police report; the walls were just 4 feet apart. That meant standing inside a metal cylinder, roughly twice the size of a household water heater, using an argon-gas torch whose flame can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees.

Something went very wrong that day. In the afternoon, workers noticed that Pérez, 20, had not come up for lunch. Friends and family began calling, with no answer.

His coworkers found him slumped over in the tank. “I couldn’t get to him because the gas was too strong,” one of them told ProPublica. “I started screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’”

When emergency workers found his body, Pérez was already showing signs of rigor mortis. A coroner’s report would note that he was wearing a red hoodie, plaid pajama pants and brown steel-toed boots, and that a “copious amount of clear fluid was noted to the mouth and nose,” as well as on the sleeve of his shirt. The coroner concluded that Pérez “died as a result of bilateral severe pulmonary consolidation and edema” — fluid in the lungs — and “copper and nickel intoxication.” (The ship, like many, used copper-nickel alloys as a coating because they resist corrosion from salt water.)

Pérez had worked for roughly the previous two years at the shipyard, which is owned by Thoma-Sea, a large employer with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. If employees are hurt or killed at work, they and their families are eligible for significant financial help. If one dies in an accident, for example, federal law requires companies such as Thoma-Sea to pay any surviving children. For an employee who perished the way Pérez did, that would have meant payments until his toddler son was at least 18, which could approach a total of $500,000.

But Pérez wasn’t working directly for Thoma-Sea; he was employed by a contractor. So when he died, Thoma-Sea paid nothing. Not to his family, including the partner that survived him. Not to his toddler son. Not even to help send Pérez’s body home to Guatemala. Instead, his family borrowed money and desperately tried to raise the rest online. Family members said they haven’t heard anything from Thoma-Sea since Pérez died.

When Pérez’s partner sought death benefits from G-4 Services, the local staffing contractor that had hired him to work for Thoma-Sea, G-4 rebuffed her. “Pérez was a self-employed independent contractor and thus a claim for death benefits is not compensable,” a lawyer for the company wrote in May. G-4 contends that Pérez “wasn’t working at the time of his death” even though his corpse was found in the ship with his welding equipment.

Investigators from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded in a September report that Thoma-Sea committed multiple safety violations. “An employee was allowed to weld in a confined space that was not monitored for atmospheric changes while hot work was being done,” OSHA’s report stated. The site supervisor, the findings continued, “did not verify that the ventilation ductwork … was set up properly to maintain a safe atmosphere.”

The agency imposed a fine of $41,480 and then, after Thoma-Sea appealed, reduced it to $31,340. As with potential death benefits, none of that money went to Pérez’s family.

For decades, U.S. politicians have blamed immigrants for all manner of national woes, particularly taking American jobs. These days, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump agree on the need for a border clampdown.

But the truth about jobs is more complicated. There is a dire shortage of blue-collar workers in the United States. Skilled tradespeople have been aging out of the workforce for years now, with fewer people to replace them, as students have prioritized four-year college degrees. The Biden administration has pumped millions into development programs to lure young people into trades, but it’ll take years to see any effects.

Today the lack of welders is acute. The U.S. needs at least 300,000 more of them in the next few years. Shipyards have been hit particularly hard by the gap, which has contributed to a shortfall in warship production.

As in many other industries, immigrants are filling that gap.

Pérez embodied many aspects of the immigration debate. He had exactly the skills that American companies are desperate for. He was an expert welder, willing to work in the cramped, dangerous spaces inside ships. And Pérez was able to earn $23 an hour at a shipyard in Houma, many times more than he could in his home country. Slightly built with jet-black hair, Pérez was funny, diligent and eager to succeed. He had begun building a life in the U.S.

But, like millions of others, Perez had not been able to do that legally. This spring, the secretary of Navy, Carlos del Toro, called for creating exactly such a pathway, to help construct the ships the Navy needs. “What we’ve got to do is open up the spigot a bit,” he said. “Allow blue-collar workers to come here.”

Without a work permit, Pérez was vulnerable. He worked at the shipyard but not for it, a contractor for a subcontractor.

Pérez’s story is emblematic of a system that relies ever more on immigrants, even as employers and politicians vilify the very people doing work that generates profits and serves the nation. Employers use subcontractors and independent contractors to pass the risks and costs on to the workers, said Laura Padin, director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project. “These companies, particularly in occupations and industries with high rates of health and safety violations, use this to shield themselves from responsibility,” she said. “We also see that they do this with workers who are immigrants if they think they’re undocumented so that they can avoid responsibility for hiring someone who’s undocumented.” The point, Padin said, is to “protect the entity at the top.”

Houma, about an hour southwest of New Orleans, lies at the heart of bayous and wetlands that draw tourists for swamp tours, crawfish boils and Cajun music festivals. Hollywood film crews occasionally visit for the historic plantation houses that dot the surrounding towns and the wooden structures where enslaved people first lived and labored, and where Black sharecroppers later crowded in.

It’s a region in decline. Damage from 2021’s Hurricane Ida is still visible, and decades of oil and gas extraction, combined with the rapidly worsening effects of climate change, have caused an entire island to disappear into the Gulf of Mexico. Last month, another hurricane, Francine, slammed into the parish, and longtime residents are fleeing soaring insurance costs as much as the next storm

Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes (Houma is located near the line between the two) are sparsely populated and majority white, but with sizable Black and tribal nations communities whose ancestral homelands have been ravaged by climate change. Roughly three-quarters of the region’s voters supported Trump in 2020, and there’s a strain of anti-immigrant sentiment. In the small town of Golden Meadow, one family still has the sign they erected more than 15 years ago, after their son died in a workplace accident. “An illegal alien working at Port Fourchon killed Nicholas. 5-11-06.” (That sentiment is hardly limited to these two parishes: In June, Louisiana enacted a law that threatens prison terms for any “alien” found to have entered the state unlawfully.)

Like much of coastal Louisiana, the region has long drawn migratory labor, such as workers who come for the jobs linked to the giant oil-services installation at Port Fourchon or Filipino visa workers who commonly labor in seafood processing plants.

Latino immigration to southern Louisiana began increasing nearly 20 years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A pattern has developed: After a storm wreaks devastation, Louisianans move north while immigrants come to do disaster cleanup and other jobs deemed too dangerous or difficult even for members of a community built around grueling labor on oil rigs and the like. Hispanic residents barely register on the Census counts outside the New Orleans suburbs. But Latino immigrants are steadily becoming a stronger presence where their labor is needed. About a third of all Latino immigrants in Louisiana arrived within the last several years, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Thomassie family, owners of Thoma-Sea, have run businesses in the region’s trademark industries, first with family shrimping operations, and then with shipbuilding in 1990. The company initially built tugboats to tow offshore oil rigs and barges through the criss-cross of bayous and canals.

Walter Thomassie took over in the early 2000s and expanded the business and its ambitions. “My father set a good example for us, as owners of the company,” Thomassie told The Houma Times in 2014. “We live comfortably, but not lavishly. We re-invest heavily into the company as it is the mechanism that feeds us and it is our job to do all within our power to maintain its stability.”

Thomassie lives in Raceland, minutes from a billboard advertising workers’ compensation claims for maritime injuries. A half-mile drive leads from the blend of bayou towns and sugarcane fields to his home, partially hidden from view by a garage that blocks the path.

Thomassie didn’t respond to multiple email and phone requests for an interview for this article, and he declined again when ProPublica approached him outside his home in June. He had emerged with a smile, wiping his hand with a rag, from the shop where he was working. But his face dropped at the mention of ProPublica. Thomassie said he had looked up the website and didn’t want to talk about his company or Pérez’s death. “You really shouldn’t come to people’s homes,” he said. (The company also didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica.)

The Thomassie family’s political involvement has grown steadily in recent years. Walter Thomassie is a significant supporter of congressional Republicans, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who have been harshly critical of immigrants. “You’re seeing countries emptying out prisons to send people here,” Scalise claimed this year, citing brutal crimes he said had been committed by “someone here illegally” in his own district, which includes part of Houma. How many immigrants or terrorists, he asked, “are here in America planning to do us harm because Joe Biden opened the southern border?” Thomassie made roughly $35,000 in political contributions over the past year. He and his brother, who is also a member of Thoma-Sea’s board, have also donated to local Louisiana Republican candidates.

Several Louisiana Republican politicians have made appearances at the shipyards. In October 2022, Thoma-Sea executives gathered with local Republican representatives and federal officials to etch one of the ships the company was building for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Discoverer, with the signature of its ceremonial sponsor, second gentleman Doug Emhoff (who didn’t attend). Its sister ship, Oceanographer, where Pérez worked and eventually died, had received its ceremony and fanfare a few months earlier.

Over the past several years, Thoma-Sea has secured hundreds of millions of dollars to construct and repair everything from Coast Guard cutters and Army Corps of Engineers barges to parts for Navy submarines. In 2022, Thomassie said that building the NOAA ship and a second similar one, both designed to collect climate change data that would encourage coastal resilience, would bring more than 600 jobs to the Houma shipyard.

By all appearances, Thomassie’s company is thriving. Thoma-Sea has another, much larger contract to build two more ships for NOAA. (Asked about Pérez’s death, a NOAA spokesperson expressed “our condolences to the employee’s family and our appreciation for everyone working on these vessels” and followed up to note that it was the U.S. Navy that selected Thoma-Sea to build the ship that Pérez worked on.) Thoma-Sea was awarded millions in new federal contracts in the months after Pérez died.

A rough divide in Thoma-Sea’s shipyard is visible, according to workers who spoke to ProPublica. Non-Latino — mostly white — employees tend to be on staff, with many in supervisory positions. Some Latino immigrant workers are employed directly for the company and in supervisory positions, but they are more likely to work as independent contractors with no benefits.

The phenomenon is not limited to Thoma-Sea. Around Houma, Spanish advertisements for contratistas litter the windows and bulletin boards of Hispanic businesses on the long commercial and industrial strips leading to the shipyards and the Port of Terrebonne, offering positions for pipe fitters, riggers, deckhands, painters and tug welders. Some Houma-based agencies recruit for jobs in other Southern port towns in Mississippi, Alabama or South Carolina. Employers with federal contracts are supposed to ascertain workers’ eligibility — and ensure subcontractors do the same — using the government’s online E-Verify system, which checks identity information like Social Security numbers against federal databases. But experts say E-Verify makes it easy for workers to provide false information, and government agencies rarely monitor compliance with these rules.

Other shipyards working on federal contracts have also hired undocumented workers. At Detyens Shipyards in Charleston, South Carolina, three Mexican immigrants died between 2019 and 2023 in gruesome accidents while repairing the same Navy cargo ship. An investigation by Charleston’s Post and Courier discovered that two of the men were working under assumed names and both had been recruited by a contractor agency based in Houma.

A federal investigation found an abysmal safety record at the shipyard. But the Navy awarded Detyens several more contracts to repair ships soon after those deaths. A company representative declined to comment other than to say that it confirms every employee’s eligibility to work.

The same day OSHA fined Detyens for its safety record, a House Armed Services Committee hearing discussed the struggle to properly staff shipyards. Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington, gingerly broached the idea of relying more on immigrants. “This is not a great place to bring up an immigration debate, but you know immigration is potentially one place where we could find some of those workers,” Smith said. “And as we are all painfully aware, there are a lot of people who want to come here. Seems to me that we ought to be able to match up those two problems a little bit better than we are.”

Smith’s suggestion, which was echoed by del Toro, the Navy secretary, never gained momentum. It withered away nearly as soon as it was mentioned. Smith’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

Pérez and his father, Erick De León, left their hometown of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala, at the tail end of 2019, but they crossed into the U.S. separately. According to an account provided by his father, the 15-year-old Pérez gave himself up to U.S. authorities, leading to a brief detention, while his father crossed the border in the desert. Father and son reunited, then settled with family in Houston, where Peréz picked up jobs in restaurants and contracting jobs with his father. But by 2021, they had relocated to Houma, where several of Pérez’s aunts lived with their extended families.

Pérez’s father eventually returned to Guatemala when his wife got sick. But Pérez stayed, finding that the welding skills he’d learned on a job in Houston were coveted in Houma.

Pérez’s partner, another Guatemalan immigrant, moved with him to Houma. Their son was born on Christmas Day in 2022 at the hospital in Houma, making him a U.S. citizen. They relied on his aunt and uncle, who viewed Pérez like a son, to get established in Louisiana, and his aunt remembered how his son’s birth had shifted his priorities. He focused even more on building a life for his family and spent his limited free time with his son. (ProPublica interviewed several members of Pérez’s family in Houma, but agreed not to name them due to the legal and employment threats that immigrants face right now.)

By the time Pérez signed an independent contractor agreement with G-4 Services to work at Thoma-Sea just a few weeks later, photos of the proud father and son were filling Facebook feeds from Houma to Guatemala. “Tenerte como hijo siempre será el mejor regalo del mundo,” Pérez wrote beneath a photo with his son on Nov. 19, 2023, just two months before his death. “To have you as a son will always be the best gift in the world.”

In the days before Pérez’s death, he was pulled into extra work shifts on Saturday and Sunday. It meant he missed the service at the small Spanish-speaking church near the shipyard, but he arrived home in time to join family dinner with his aunt, uncle and cousins. Eating a huge Sunday meal they had cooked together was one of the most treasured traditions for their busy extended family in Houma, his aunt told ProPublica. Pérez had requested carne asada, one of his favorites. He wanted to bring the leftovers to work that week.

The next day, Monday, marked the beginning of a harrowing ordeal for Pérez’s family. It started around 3 p.m., when relatives who also worked at the shipyard received a worrisome message via Facebook: Something had happened to Pérez.

Family started messaging friends and calling each other frantically, trying to figure out what was going on. When they couldn’t get answers, a handful went to the shipyard itself. As they arrived at the Thoma-Sea parking lot and rushed to the security gate, one of Pérez’s aunts remembers seeing a small caravan of emergency vehicles, including a coroner’s van, driving in the opposite direction.

The company didn’t tell them anything at first, leaving them to wait in increasing despair outside the security gate. It wasn’t until later, after someone emerged to break the news, that Pérez’s aunt realized that it was his body that had passed them. “It was like the world came crashing down on me,” she told ProPublica.

Standing in the shadow of the ship where he had died hours earlier, Pérez’s family clutched each other and cried. Distraught, confused and angry, they returned home to break the news to Pérez’s partner.

Word of Pérez’s death spread quickly across Facebook, mostly thanks to the tight-knit evangelical Christian community of his hometown in Guatemala. His U.S. family hosted bake sales and started a GoFundMe page, which raised just $470 toward the $8,689 undertaker’s bill and other funeral costs. Pérez’s hometown church in Guatemala, as well as a local evangelical Facebook page, raised much more through posted calls for financial assistance across their network.

Neither Pérez’s partner nor the rest of his family in the U.S. could attend the funeral in Guatemala. But they watched a Facebook livestream from the Guatemalan radio station. It showed his coffin arriving in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, a caravan of cars following the hearse down the winding mountain road as the sun set. They watched his younger siblings and cousins weep over his open casket, then weep again as his family and neighbors buried him in San Miguel’s cemetery.

Pérez’s family members in Houma are still reeling from his death. None of his relatives who worked at Thoma-Sea could stomach staying there any longer. They eventually quit and moved to different jobs in the region.

His partner still keeps his phone exactly how he left it, the recent call list full of missed calls from family and coworkers who were looking for him that day. His son still wakes up crying for him in the middle of the night. A cousin made a TikTok of Pérez dancing with his son, the overlaid text promising that they’ll find him justice.

There’s a chance Pérez’s family could obtain financial compensation, but it’s a long shot. Federal law does create a path for a workers’ compensation lawsuit, even for a shipyard contractor or an undocumented immigrant. Steve Wanko, a Houma workers’ compensation lawyer, said he won such a case in 2015.

Another lawyer filed a claim on behalf of Peréz’s partner against the contractor, G-4 Services. G-4 is disputing the benefits claim, citing Peréz’s ineligibility as an independent contractor, saying his partner was ineligible because they were not legally married, and claiming the sudden death of a healthy 20-year-old was not caused by his job. His death, a medical review conducted at the request of G-4 argued, “occurred while he was working but was not caused by workplace related factors or activities.”

Reached in May outside his home, Ricky Guidroz, one of the owners of G-4 Services, declined to discuss Pérez’s death, citing the advice of his lawyers. Guidroz said he had tried to reach out to Pérez’s family. Guidroz’s wife came by the house crying at one point, Pérez’s aunt said, but they didn’t really know what to say to her. “It’s so unfortunate,” he told ProPublica. “Just know that my heart hurts, really.” (ProPublica also sent a detailed list of questions to G-4 Services, which didn’t respond.)

This October, ProPublica visited Thoma-Sea again, one month after the OSHA report excoriated the company for not protecting Pérez. At the end of the day’s shift, the workers, mostly Latino, passed an Army Corps of Engineers barge, under repair just behind the shipyard’s security guard shack, in groups and pairs to reach cars in the muddy parking lot.

The workers filtered out to the handful of Hispanic businesses near the Port of Terrebonne to buy tortillas for the weekend and to wire money home. Some drove upwards of an hour to reach homes scattered from the New Orleans suburbs to small towns hugging Bayou Lafourche and the Atchafalaya River. Most of them would be back the next morning, to resume building America’s ships.