Anyone seeking help through a federal website would reasonably expect its links to lead to the organization listed on the page. But people searching for services for migrant and seasonal agricultural workers and their children through one federal database may instead find themselves on the official website of a member of Congress.

Go to the federal government’s Health Services Locator, enter “Sarasota, Florida,” in the location box and run the search. A list of nearby service providers appears.

Click the “Website” button beside those centers and the organization’s website does not open. Instead, the link leads to the official congressional website of U.S. Reps. Vern Buchanan, Laurel Lee or Greg Steube.

They are not the websites of the service providers displayed by the locator.

The locator is operated by the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The public taxpayer-funded tool is designed to help people find nearby health-related services. Its results provide the name, address and telephone number of each provider, along with a button labeled “Website.”

One result identifies the RCMA Palmetto Child Development Center at 2725 16th Ave. E. in Palmetto. The center is operated by RCMA, a nonprofit child care and education provider serving low-income rural families, including farmworker families. RCMA maintains its own website.

The center’s name, address and telephone number appear in the federal results. But clicking “Website” does not open RCMA’s site. It opens Buchanan’s official congressional website. Buchanan represents the district containing the Palmetto center.

Another result identifies the East Coast Migrant Head Start Project’s Palmetto center, which provides early-childhood services to children from agricultural-worker families. Its “Website” button also opens Buchanan’s congressional site instead of the organization’s website.

Other results follow the same pattern, directing users to the congressional websites of Lee and Steube based on the districts where the centers were located.

There is no evidence that Buchanan, Lee or Steube requested the links, provided them to HRSA or knew they were included in the database.

A spokeswoman for Buchanan appeared surprised to learn that the federal listings were directing users to the congressman’s website instead of the service providers’ sites. But Buchanan’s office did not provide a comment or respond to follow-up emails documenting the issue. Lee’s and Steube’s offices also did not respond to requests for comment.

Whatever the cause, the links interfere with the locator’s basic purpose. Someone clicking “Website” to learn about enrollment, eligibility, hours or services is sent away from the organization that could provide that information.

The misdirection is especially concerning for migrants and others seeking information, especially for children, that could be life-saving because Buchanan, Lee and Steube support ICE and expanded immigration enforcement.

Buchanan has supported legislation providing billions of dollars for ICE personnel and enforcement operations. Lee has supported additional resources for ICE and Border Patrol. Steube has urged law enforcement agencies in his district to participate in and ICE program, which permits designated local officers to perform certain federal immigration-enforcement duties under ICE supervision.

The most recent Census of Agriculture counted 1,732 migrant farmworkers in Manatee County in 2022. That included 1,187 workers employed directly by farms and 545 reported by farms using only contract labor. The USDA's count was higher: 4,012 hired farmworkers in Manatee County, including 2,474—nearly 62 percent—who worked fewer than 150 days. 

Sarasota County farms reported 20 migrant workers and 733 hired farmworkers in the same census.

Nationally, approximately 68 percent of hired crop farmworkers surveyed from 2020 through 2022 were foreign-born, USDA data shows. 

The federal H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers program allows agricultural employers anticipating a shortage of domestic labor to hire foreign workers for temporary or seasonal jobs after meeting federal requirements.

Florida accounted for 14 percent of all H-2A positions certified nationally in fiscal year 2022, the largest share of any state, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.

What caused the erroneous links, how long they've been in the database and how many people encountered them are unknown.

What can be demonstrated: A federal tool intended to connect people with services instead directed them away from the organizations providing them.