Renata Bozzetto Is Leading the Fight for Immigrants’ Rights in Florida

Editor’s Note: This profile is part of New Times’ People to Watch issue, spotlighting figures we expect to make a big impact in Miami in 2026.

Renata Bozzetto, deputy director at the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), has lived most of her life between two countries.

She was born and raised in Brazil, but as she tells New Times, “my family has been living in the United States one way or another since the 1960s.” An uncle migrated to New York back then, and from that point on, her childhood was “always a bit transnational,” with relatives moving back and forth between Brazil and the U.S.

In the early 2000s, her parents moved to Palm Beach County. Bozzetto followed in 2004, arriving to pursue a university education that would eventually lead to an undergraduate degree, a master’s, and a Ph.D. But it wasn’t just the degrees that transformed her life — it was what she saw happening to the people studying alongside her.

“Very early in my experience, I realized that the opportunities I had were not the same as those around me,” she recalls. As an international student, she watched friends who were “by all measures American” — raised here, fluent in English, rooted in U.S. communities — pushed to the margins by an unforgiving immigration system.

“Some of them were on the verge of dropping out because they could not pay the out-of-state tuition,” Bozzetto says. “Some of them were fearing deportation, because at that time, DACA was not yet a protection for dreamers.”

That realization led her to FLIC in 2010, at the height of a youth movement demanding the passage of the DREAM Act, which would grant legal protection to undocumented applicants who came to the U.S. as minors. She remembers meeting the coalition while young organizers from Miami were walking to Washington, D.C., to demand action.

“When I met the Coalition, [I found] a political home. It was an opportunity to be part of this movement and to give back to the community that was receiving me and continued to receive me and welcome me over time.”

Bozzetto went from being a grateful newcomer to a leader in a statewide fight she never imagined would move in reverse.

“We had a huge victory in the state of Florida,” she remembers, referring to the 2010 bipartisan bill that allowed many immigrant students to pay in-state tuition. “Then, last year, the legislature invalidated that provision, really making college access much harder for youth who grew up in the U.S.”

That reversal is part of a broader hardline turn that she now confronts daily in her work, from local municipalities in Florida actively working alongside a surge in ICE agents, to the Department of Homeland Security’s crackdown on Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

“We have thousands and thousands of community members, from Cubans and Hondurans and Venezuelans and Haitians who, up to this year, had some sort of legal protection which is now being revoked under the new administration,” Bozzetto says. “These are the people who did everything that they were asked to do, who passed a background check, who were fingerprinted, and who were authorized to live and work. And now, they’re losing their opportunity to live with dignity.”

Her antidote to the nationwide immigration crackdown? Public education. Logistically, she says, her day-to-day comprises everything from community presentations to actively mapping out where and when ICE detentions take place — she says the most alarming part is the scale to which local police departments and other state agencies are being told to cooperate.

“Because immigration enforcement has been executed by our state police, by our Florida Highway Patrol (FHP), by our local municipal government, we have gigantic numbers of arrests and immigration encounters that are, in a way, invisible, because they happen through everyday interactions, so it’s very insidious. The ‘enemy’ is closer than we think.”

Still, Bozzetto’s vision for the future of Florida is ambitious, unwavering, and practical. She tells New Times she wants to deepen political education in communities across the state, so that residents understand not just their rights, but also how to hold elected officials accountable for the choices they make.

Above all, she clings to the welcoming spirit of the South Florida she’s always known: a region that is multilingual, culturally rich, and powered by the labor and creativity of people from all over the world.

After all these years, she’s trying to pay it forward: “We all deserve the opportunity to be safe in the place that we call home.”