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Teen Vogue’s Red Tide series explores what it’s like for young Floridians living under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s conservative policies. No other 2024 presidential candidate has championed the right’s crusade against young people, especially the marginalized, quite like he has. We travel to Tampa, Tallahassee, and Sarasota — plus western Massachusetts — and speak with more than 20 Floridians who are fighting to make the state equitable and safe for everyone.
While Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was underwater in April, Governor Ron DeSantis was nearly 1,200 miles away on his book’s promotional tour, which left locals to guess about when he’d show. A deluge of rain had flooded roads, homes, and closed down the airport, but the state leader wasn’t there.
Months later, a Florida student recalls that moment for me as a sign of what was to come: In addition to the literal rising waters and storm fronts Floridians continue to face, that moment in Fort Lauderdale served as a visual for what it is to live under DeSantis and Florida Republicans’ proud “red wave” takeover.
All over the state, symbolic waters are also on the rise, and marginalized Gen Z'ers are struggling to keep their heads above it. As DeSantis continues to expand his “war on wokeness” for his presidential bid, his policies are devastating marginalized communities, leaving many young people reeling as they try to survive in the state they call home.
In just the last year, Florida policies targeting young, queer, trans, Black, and migrant people have abounded. In April, the Florida Board of Education expanded DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law in schools to include all grades. That same month, and just a day after Fort Lauderdale flooded, DeSantis signed into law a sweeping six-week abortion ban. In May, he signed his “Let Kids Be Kids” package of five bills, which includes a ban on gender-affirming care for minors that also impacts adults; banning trans students from using their correct pronouns; banning minors from drag performances; taking state control of the Florida High School Athletic Association under the guise of protecting “women in sports”; and criminalizing trans access to the appropriate bathroom. These anti-trans policies have forced some people to flee the state in search of safe, nonjudgmental health care.
In June, Florida's Board of Education banned the teaching of “critical race theory,” a legal framework term that has been turned into a racist dog whistle. Most recently, after leading the charge of Republican governors cruelly transporting migrants out of their states, DeSantis signed an anti-immigrant law punishing companies that knowingly hire the undocumented and pushing hospitals to ask Medicaid recipients about their citizenship status, thus targeting several hundred thousand migrant workers living in Florida. Because of these policies, over the summer the NAACP issued a travel warning for the state for people of color and LGBTQ+ people.
Now, young Floridians long for a time just a few years ago, before DeSantis. “The obstacle is just living, at this point," 21-year-old Micah Barkley tells me in a Tallahassee coffee shop, "trying to make sure that everybody lives in peace and can get Florida back to what it was.” We're seated beneath a hot-pink, faux “Wanted” poster with “DeSantis” printed in all caps at the top, “Fresh-squeezed Florida fascism” at the bottom, and a list of some of his legislative moves in between. “It wasn't even good [a few years ago], but as soon as he became governor, it's just gone downhill from there.”
While the Florida governor's policies may be unpopular nationally, DeSantis’s storm has made the state's young people vulnerable, and they wonder whether the rest of the country cares. “DeSantis don't care about us. He don't care,” says Trenece Robertson, 23, like Barkley a student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), one of Florida’s four HBCUs. “[Talking about it is] gonna upset me, because not many people are paying attention to what is actually going on in Florida. They see the little headlines and they call it a day.”
Across five days and three cities — Tampa, Tallahassee, and Sarasota — students, organizers, parents, resigned professors, and Floridians tell me about the pain the DeSantis administration has wrought on their communities. Some have fled the state after being forced out by discriminatory policies, FaceTiming me from a Massachusetts college dorm or while grabbing coffee in New York. Those left wading through Florida’s red tide — either by choice or because they don't have another option — are fighting for a different Florida: a Florida for everyone.
Tampa
At a West Tampa vigil on August 28, the crowd was sparse, thinned by the approach of Hurricane Idalia. Florida's infamous summer mugginess was already knotting my hair. In two days, the hurricane would make landfall, bringing historic storm surges to Florida’s Big Bend and wiping out power for hundreds of thousands of Floridians.
Two days prior, a white supremacist brought a gun into a Jacksonville Dollar General, killing 29-year-old Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 52-year-old Angela Michelle Carr, and 19-year-old Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, before turning the gun on himself. The police said the shooting was racially motivated.
You could almost taste the grief and anger in the sweaty air as we gathered in a West Tampa public square to remember the dead. Between speakers, chants for justice for victims of gun violence filled the silence, and loved ones called out the names of those they’d lost. Miss Brenda of the Circle of Mothers mourned her nine-year-old granddaughter Felecia Williams, violently murdered in 2014, and her daughter, who, she says, died two years ago of heartache. Deanna Joseph remembered her 14-year-old son, Andrew Joseph III, who was hit by a car and killed in Tampa in 2014 after law enforcement ejected him from a county fair without notifying his parents. (A jury found the sheriff’s department 90% at fault for Andrew’s death.) And the voice of the vigil's MC, Val Beron, 24, wavered almost imperceptibly when calling out for 26-year-old Manny Terán, otherwise known as Tortuguita, a Florida-based activist who was killed in January in the struggle against Atlanta’s proposed Cop City.
These deaths, speakers stressed, were not isolated incidents. They connected the Jacksonville shooting, specifically, to DeSantis’s push to criminalize protest in the state; to ban, distort, and defund the teaching of Black history; to disenfranchise Florida voters, including those with felony convictions — a group Floridians had just voted to re-enfranchise; to the legacy of racist violence and policing in the state.
“It's important to understand that none of the things that we've seen in Jacksonville is by coincidence," said Deanna Joseph, of Black Lives Matter Grassroots Florida, as she addressed the crowd. "It is by design that our people are dying. And there's no outrage, there is no sense of urgency.”
Some of the organizers see a connection between anti-Black policies and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd. “It was a rebellion in its simplest sense,” Laura Rodriguez, 24, told me after the vigil. I sat with Rodriguez, Beron, and 24-year-old Lauren Pineiro off to one side as speakers and organizers hugged and casually debriefed one another on their ride-out plans for Idalia. The towering palm trees rustled with the wind as a lizard darted up one trunk, and a quintessential Florida sunset unfurled above our heads like a watercolor in washes of pink, orange, and eggshell blue.
“Ron DeSantis, everything that he's done has been in response to that," Rodriguez continued. "The anti-protest bills were in response to people taking the streets looking for justice for George Floyd. [Targeting] Black education and history in schools is in response to people learning about the true history of the US.”
At the Tampa vigil, every speaker explicitly blamed the governor. “This act was fueled by Ron DeSantis inciting the flames of racism since he entered office," said Pineiro during her remarks. "To stand up and put through law after law aimed at restricting the rights and freedom of Black Floridians.”
On August 27, DeSantis was booed during a vigil after the shooting at Dollar General. In his speech, he told the crowd, “We are not going to let people be targeted based on their race.”
But Pineiro didn't buy it, nor did the rest of the Tampa vigil attendees and several others I met that week. “He may have offered empty words of concern yesterday, but his actions speak louder, and the resounding boos directed at him from the people of Jacksonville are even louder,” Pineiro said.
Pineiro and Rodriguez, both recent University of South Florida graduates, intimately understand repression under DeSantis. They are part of the Tampa Five, a group facing felony charges and up to 11 years in prison if convicted for protesting DeSantis’s “attacks on diversity” on campus.
Pineiro said she arrived late to what she described as a “very typical” protest – “holding signs, chanting” — and was greeted by, she estimated, 15 cops. Things quickly got physical between the protesters and the police: There’s footage of Pineiro crying out as an armed guard yanked on her arm, another protester pulling her from the other side.
Four of the Tampa Five were arrested that day; Pineiro wasn’t arrested until a month later. She said she believes her arrest was political: “If I had stopped talking about the case, if I wasn't being outspoken about DeSantis, about what happened on March 6, they wouldn't have charged me.”
Now, as fear builds that the Tampa Five case could become precedent for more repression, there’s a movement that is fighting the charges. With communities of color and queer and trans communities already under a magnifying glass, targeting protest rights is one strategy, organizers have said, through which DeSantis’s Florida suppresses resistance to his policies.
Said vigil MC Val Beron, “The Tampa Five are not an isolated incident. I see this connection with the Tampa Five to the Tally 19, to the protester that was arrested in Gainesville for protesting [for] abortion [rights], to Manny,” again referencing Terán. “People don't realize how national DeSantis's Florida is, how national this political repression is. At the end of the day, people think, Oh, Manny happened in Atlanta. Well, Manny was from Tallahassee, and people knew them as a community organizer in Tallahassee.”
The Tampa Five were fighting repression, but Rodriguez said she feels it’s the fierce backlash to DeSantis’s policies that has spurred even harsher crackdowns. “I've noticed when speaking to other people outside of Florida, they don't think anyone in the state of Florida has been resisting,” she explained. “But the reason there's so much political repression at this time is because of the amount of people who are protesting. At every single bill that [DeSantis] puts out there, there's a protest happening somewhere in the state, usually multiple…. They see that we have power, they see that we're angry.”
Tallahassee
Just after Idalia’s rainfall blew through Tallahassee, I drove across town to meet 24-year-old Delilah Pierre. As we sat on the couch in her living room at least two of her cats wound around us. Pierre’s serious, attentive gaze flitted from the cats to my recorder, from her fidgeting hands back to me. She slowly opened up, and by the end of our meeting, her wide smile — a bright flash of teeth — came easily.
Pierre is a person perhaps best described by a line originally said about the labor organizer Jane McAlevey: To know Delilah Pierre is to be organized by her. Pierre is the president of the Tallahassee Community Action Committee, a local organizer for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and on the executive board of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression. Like many organizers, she was brought in by a friend, and found herself and the work at the same time. She first got involved as a college student, then fell in love with organizing: “It felt powerful, like it was actually, directly challenging things.”
She described years of building community through campaigns, how reading groups turned to protests, which turned to an ultimately successful fight to stop the opening of a police station on Tallahassee’s south side. Previously, she had struggled to imagine doing this as a Black trans woman in a state that was trying to make her life impossible.
I mentioned how that campaign reminded me of the fight against Cop City, so celebrated in Tallahassee, and she replied, “You know, I used to organize with them.” Tortuguita, or “Tort,” had been a friend.
The Florida bill that banned gender-affirming care for minors has also made it more difficult for adults to access care. As a result, Pierre has had a hard time getting her hormone therapy, recently going without health insurance coverage in addition to navigating the political and logistical challenges.
Ostensibly, legislation against trans health care in Florida has been on the basis of “protecting children" from transness. In and of itself, this is dependent on a lie that says trans youth are somehow being seduced by a sort of leftist agenda or “groomed” into transness, rather than being a documented, preexisting historical reality unto themselves, as found by Jules Gill-Peterson in her seminal book Histories of the Transgender Child. Many who study conservative history in the late-20th century connect this to the Satanic Panic. It’s all part of a broader attack on trans life in general, in and outside of Florida, at a tremendously organized scale across the US.
The May gender-affirming care ban for minors made it “difficult, even impossible” for many trans adults to access care, reported PBS. A former FAMU student spoke to Teen Vogue earlier this summer about deciding to leave the state and transfer schools while working on a class project about Florida’s misdemeanor-penalty trans bathroom ban. Jen Cousins, a Florida mom who spoke to us for another story in this package, knows of several LGBTQ+ adults who have fled the state, either over health care access or fear of what’s to come. “Everybody's gone to Colorado or Chicago,” she told me.
Many cannot or will not leave, and they are stuck navigating a logistical minefield that is designed to be difficult. “These laws and bills being passed that ‘only affect trans kids,’ they also economically impact poor trans people," Pierre explained. "It's already difficult enough with the social conditions, the lack of familial support, and all these other things affecting your transition.”
Even in “safer” states, the flurry of legislation around trans medicine has created a tense situation for trans people who already fear transphobia from a largely cis medical establishment. The political climate in Florida has compounded those anxieties.
“There's no money invested, especially in the state of Florida, for trans people, for our medication, for our Medicare,” Pierre told me. “I think I know more about my own care, when it comes to gender-affirming care, than the doctors who take care of me, which is a little scary.”
The attack on so many aspects of life — abortion access, gender, sexuality, race, immigration status — has made organizing feel impossible for many Floridians. “It makes people depressed about change, about what can happen, how things can improve, and that affects everyone,” Pierre said. “People are more worried about their individual issues, because their individual issues are important.”
These young people intrinsically understand that a strategy dependent on anti-Blackness, homophobia, and transphobia makes all other struggles more difficult by magnitudes, echoing across the fight against police brutality, for education access, to health care and reproductive justice.
Before Micah Barkley became president of the Planned Parenthood Generation Action chapter at FAMU, she’d heard about the state’s proposed abortion ban, but she thought it didn’t impact her. When a friend invited her to the Capitol in spring 2022 as the state was considering a 15-week ban, she went and was asked to read testimony from someone who couldn’t attend. Barkley's involvement snowballed from there, and there have been no shortage of opportunities to engage.
Last fall, she joined the Planned Parenthood group as its secretary, and this fall semester is her first term as president. Barkley was unfazed by the challenges, committed to keeping the fight going. “I’m the queen of loopholes," she said with a grin. "I will find a way around anything.”
But the sheer number of fires burning has been exhausting. “The legislative session took me out,” Barkley recalled, citing the abortion ban, expanding Don’t Say Gay legislation, and HB 999, the diversity, equity, and inclusion bill. “You have multiple fights to fight, but only so little time.”
As if the number of attacks on marginalized communities wasn’t enough, Barkley and Trenece Robertson, also a FAMU student organizer, highlighted the specific challenges that face young Black organizers along with the intensity of attacks on Black history and education in the state. Of the existing criminalization of protesting, Robertson said, “Organizing around this stuff is very hard. I’m always on edge about [getting arrested].”
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Said Pierre, House Bill 1 would make getting arrested while protesting harder to avoid, in part due to concern for the Tampa Five. In the ACLU of Florida's interpretation of the law, currently in legal limbo, the organization criticized the bill’s redefining of rioting as “grant[ing] police officers broad discretion in deciding who could be arrested and charged with a third-degree felony at a protest.” In August 2022, a United Nations committee warned that HB1 and laws like it “unduly restrict the right to peaceful assembly following anti-racism protests in recent years.”
Despite the risks and how quickly they have escalated, Pierre said, people organizing against repression in Florida won’t stop — in fact, she thinks they’ll pick up steam. “Ultimately, a confrontation with the police and their role in our society and how they work, that's inevitable to happen in our lifetimes,” she noted. “I think people forget that three years ago, more people than ever in the United States of America protested police violence, and nothing has changed. Yeah, the energy has died down, but it's gonna pick back up again.”
Sarasota
When I arrived at the New College of Florida in Sarasota, cleanup from Hurricane Idalia was slowly underway, with debris from fallen trees still piled on the side of the highway. The hurricane hit during New College’s first week of classes, but a different type of storm had been brewing on campus well before Idalia made landfall: The public college had become DeSantis’s ideological test subject for his attack on college campuses.
Founded in 1960 as a private institution, New College joined the state university system in 1975, quickly becoming an outlier among the larger research universities with robust athletic programs that dominate the state’s collegiate system. New College is the state’s smallest public institution, a liberal arts school that has been home to creatives, intellectuals, and the “proudly unconventional.”
Students are drawn to New College for that very reason, said senior Gaby Batista, who summed it up with an informal tagline for the school: “Keep New College weird.”
In January, DeSantis appointed conservative activist Christopher Rufo — the mind behind the “anti-woke” campaign against teaching critical race theory in US education — along with five other conservatives to New College's 13-person Board of Trustees. The new administration has been open about its goal to make the campus more like Hillsdale College in Michigan, a private, conservative Christian school at the center of the conservative drive to take over education. They hope to make New College the “Hillsdale of the South.” (Teen Vogue has reached out to New College for comment.)
“The new [board of trustees] appointees include vocal opponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and curricula that includes critical race theory (CRT) and gender studies,” wrote then-New College professors Erik Wallenberg and Debarati Biswas in an op-ed for Teen Vogue in March. Until this summer, Wallenberg was New College’s only US history professor; he was effectively fired when the school did not renew his contract. (Rufo derided Wallenberg on X, formerly Twitter, for contributing to this publication.)
That was just the beginning.
On January 31, the new board forced out university president Patricia Okker, the school’s first woman leader, and replaced her with Richard Corcoran, previously the Florida education commissioner under DeSantis, who led DeSantis’s anti-CRT campaign in the state's K-12 schools.
That same month, the New College Board of Trustees voted to disband the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion office, firing its leader, Yoleidy Rosario-Hernandez, who told the Washington Post, “I am the only trans person in our team and I am the only one who got canned.” (The other positions were supposed to be transferred to other teams within the college.)
In April, the board denied tenure to five professors who had already received approval at all other stages of the process, citing, in part, “extraordinary circumstances.” The decision was questioned by the American Association of University Professors for potential “interference in the tenure process and academic freedom.” And Steve Shipman, president of New College’s chapter of the United Faculty of Florida, said at a press conference the following day that, though the professors could apply again for tenure the next year, “they’ve just been shown that the school doesn’t value them. I don’t know why they would stick around.” Shipman further called the decision “tragic.”
The New College Board also fired openly LGBTQ+ campus librarian Helene Gold. And the school is facing a civil rights investigation over alleged discrimination against disabled students, which calls out the treatment of LGBTQ+ students too. Furthermore, on August 10, the board of trustees voted to begin the process of abolishing the gender studies department.
Nicholas Clarkson, a gender studies professor, resigned after the move. “New College students are more creative, thoughtful, curious, hard-working, and inspiring than any other students I’ve taught. I’m so grateful to have had five years to cheer them on and see them progress,” Clarkson wrote in his letter of resignation. “But now Florida is the state where learning goes to die.”
As a result of the maelstrom of change, New College has become a school with part of its community in exile: In mid-October, according to numbers from the Sarasota Herald Tribune, over a quarter of New College students enrolled in the 2022-2023 school year did not return for fall 2023, with the lowest retention rate of any first-year class in the school’s history.
The changes have ushered in the school’s largest-ever first-year class, nearly half of which is comprised of student athletes. Incoming standardized testing scores and GPAs for this class are lower than the last, a drop, USA Today reported, that “can be attributed to incoming student athletes who, despite scoring worse on average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school's $10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships.” (Libby Harrity, who spoke to Teen Vogue for our separate story on New College students who transferred to Hampshire College, went from a full ride to taking on loans to transfer when, she said, she was pushed to withdraw.)
Those athletes (and the rest of the first-year class) were reportedly given preferential housing, pushing other students into hotels. With infrequent shuttles, accessing campus by bike or walking has been difficult; many students do not drive or own a car.
Dave Zirin, The Nation’s sports columnist, wrote in October, “The far-right extremists in charge [at New College] are using sports to overhaul the ideology of the student body.” Ushering in so many athletes — one stat put New College’s new baseball team at 70 players, in comparison to the University of Florida’s Division 1, 37-person baseball team — seems to be part of the plan to combat what Rufo has called the “great feminization of the American university” by increasing male enrollment.
As reported by the New York Times Magazine in September, many colleges are attempting to win over more male students. A New College spokesperson told USA Today that the 2023-2024 first-year class had higher enrollment of Black, Hispanic, and yes, male students.
This was the climate in which I met student activist Batista, 20, in a quiet building plastered with stickers and host to a few Ping-Pong tables. True to the school’s reputation for attracting creative people, they looked striking and thoughtfully put-together, their curly pixie and Y2K fit giving “Pink Slip’s fourth member off to college.”
Batista has worn plenty of hats on campus. Currently, they are a TA, in addition to doing organizing work and contributing to the campus paper. Most of the roles came to them by virtue of their passion for the school. But in the last year, Batista quit their job as an admissions ambassador for the college under the new administration, uninterested in recruiting new students on their behalf.
Instead, Batista and their fellow students are fighting to keep New College weird. “It's on us to keep it a safe space, to keep it inclusive, to include one another,” they told me.
But that goal has been difficult to meet. When we spoke, Batista was gearing up to help host “unity” events in an attempt to connect new students with the returning student body. "The majority of us understand,” Batista suggested, that the new students are getting a rough bargain as much as the returning students. “Not just the athletes; the other incoming freshmen might not agree with what's happening, but they're reaping certain benefits the first years are getting from the administration. Either way, they're still in the same boat as us.”
Junior Isabelle Campesi, who attends New College for free as part of the state’s Bright Futures program, which provides free in-state tuition, would have to take on loans to transfer out of state. She may leave Florida for graduate school, but right now, it feels impossible, and she resents the implication that she should have to leave her family behind to get an education.
These are the same dilemmas students across Florida's public colleges and universities are being forced to face: Even if New College is DeSantis's test run, he and his allies appear to have big plans for the state’s public education system overall (something Florida's rank-and-file academics have been flagging as he targets the tenure system).
“People don’t realize how important a role public universities play within our government, in terms of being able to provide fair and accurate and affordable education opportunities," Campesi told me on that blindingly sunny afternoon, a hush over the empty campus as she spoke. “And it just sucks when people say, ‘Oh, we should just cut Florida off.’ You don't know how many people live here — how many people of color live here, how many queer people live here in Florida.”
Campesi continued, "You have the right to stay and be who you are. When our representatives and politicians don't realize we — people, queer people, and people of color – exist, when you just completely forget about them, it hurts. And I hurt for them.”
Pain and grief were present in every conversation I had for this story, as a result of the constant whammy of harsh headlines, over what’s already been lost or destroyed, over what might happen next. But another commonality also came through in each conversation: resilience and commitment to one another. These young people know, as Leslie Feinberg wrote two decades ago, “The course of our movement is not fixed in its bank like the Hudson River — it is ours to determine.”
Delilah Pierre said it herself: “A lot of people think it’s just downhill from here. Apocalypse. But I believe, in these really hard moments — although it sucks — it's also the time for us to potentially change things in a way we've never seen before.”
These young people know the work they do for one another can outlast and overcome a gubernatorial administration or a hostile campus takeover. It’s their home, and they stay to fight for it.
Said Lauren Pineiro on that first steamy evening back in West Tampa,“You would think that something like this — seeing students brutalized and arrested on campus, face five to 10 years in prison — would turn students away from protesting. But we've seen it invigorate them.”
Laura Rodriguez echoed that comment: “In this deep dark hole of Florida, there are still glimmers of hope.”
Art Credits
Photographer: Jae House
Illustration: Kashton Kane
Art & Design Director: Emily Zirimis
Designer: Liz Coulbourn
Associate Visuals Editor: Bea Oyster
Editorial Credits
Editor-in-Chief: Versha Sharma
Executive Editor: Dani Kwateng
Features Director: Brittney McNamara
Contributing Editor: Alyssa Hardy
Politics Director: Allegra Kirkland
Research Director: Yulia Khabinsky
Copy Editor: Dawn Rebecky
Writer: Lexi McMenamin
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