Carolina Amesty hopes voters judge work against sex trafficking, boosting law enforcement

Carolina Amesty. Photo via Florida House.

Rep. Carolina Amesty wants to talk about her work over the past two years in the Legislature. She passed controversial bills, like an increase in age requirements to work in strip clubs, and appropriations, including for a law enforcement facility in Ocoee.

But the Windermere Republican can’t talk about the topic that has most often landed her in headlines recently — four felony charges related to work as an administrator at Central Christian University.

A trial won’t take place before the election, and she won’t comment on the matter on the advice of attorneys. But she hopes voters judge her record, not allegations (which she denies) about something predating her time in office.

Her achievements include passing legislation to combat sex trafficking and curb crime in a district that has seen an uptick in violence.

Her proudest accomplishment remains legislation prohibiting hiring young women to dance nude in clubs. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill in May lifting the age limit for performers and other employees at adult establishments from 18 to 21. In discussing the bill, Amesty always references it as anti-sex trafficking policy, reflecting the social problem she hoped to attack when filing it.

“The Polaris Project identified that 44% of the young girls that are sex trafficked, they start in the strip club industry,” Amesty said. “They get recruited to supposedly dance nude, and all of a sudden they’re in this vicious cycle. They get into drugs, they get into alcohol, and then they’re in this vicious cycle of being sex trafficked here in Florida. It’s unbelievable, and it broke my heart when I saw that.”

That’s a particular problem in the Orlando area, where a simple drive down Orange Blossom Trail shows many establishments sometimes close to motels. Just last year, four people were arrested when police found Flash Dancer Orlando had hired underage dancers, including one employed by the club since age 15.

“It’s a gateway to an ugly business and ugly sector that we just don’t want the young girls of Florida involved in. I’m very happy to know that it passed, it was signed into law, and now we’re protecting young girls in Florida,” she said.

Another local concern, she said, involved long response times for 911 calls, something law enforcement attributed to bureaucratic hurdles to certifying telecommunications professionals. She looked to streamline the process with the Department of Health.

“Now, we have more people able to work in this field, because when people call 911, we want to make sure you have someone to take the call and dispatch the call accordingly,” she said.

Another law enforcement win, she said, came in securing funding for an Ocoee law enforcement facility where individuals could train.

She hopes some of this curbs an increase in suburban areas. “We’ve been seeing a lot of crime lately, especially in the Windermere area, which we have never seen before, we have never heard of before, and some of the stuff that the media has not wanted to talk about, unfortunately,” she said.

Amesty found disheartening a murder of a South American immigrant, one who entered the country illegally, by an ex who followed her into the country and killed her in her Windermere apartment while her two children were at the home. The killer was later arrested in Texas, Amesty said, but the homicide never made the news. She learned of the matter only when a neighbor contacted the Representative’s Office to intervene with the Department of Children and Families to ensure the children, once taken into state custody, weren’t separated.

“She had requested asylum. She had her daughter in high school. The daughter was just about to graduate when you’re near high when she lost her mother. I mean, it’s just a complete tragedy,” Amesty said.

It’s part of why Amesty wants to deal with a broken immigration system as best as it can be addressed at the state level. Of note, Amesty, the first Venezuelan American elected to the Legislature, said she supports Donald Trump’s immigration policies, including a wall on the southern border. But Amesty stresses a need to more quickly secure appropriate visas for those immigrants with legitimate reason to be in the U.S.

Amesty also passed a bill requiring counties to uniformly offer homestead exemptions for veterans, and said she has other veteran priorities she hopes to address in the Legislature next Session.

Amesty has come under fire for policy, including a $3 million appropriation to Key Biscayne for flood prevention. The Orlando Sentinel heavily scrutinized why a Central Florida lawmaker sponsored the bill. Key Biscayne ultimately fired a lobbyist after saying the city never listed the project as a priority anyway. She said the bill had been a priority of South Florida Sen. Alexis Calatayud and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

“When you talk to me about a Hispanic project that’s going to benefit our community and also going to benefit water quality in our state, I’m all in,” she said. “But of course, the House did not push it through.”

Amesty said most bills she sponsored were policies based on constituent concerns. One exception, she said, was a TikTok ban on government devices or networks. That means students at Florida universities can’t access TikTok on school networks, but Amesty said that’s necessary because of the sensitive research and other information of state servers. ByteDance, the parent company for TikTok, has close ties to the Chinese government, she said, and that raises security concerns.

“We’re not talking about just collecting the data and the violation of privacy, but we’re also saying the data that is being collected is going to be used against us in cyber security and warfare,” she said.

Amesty won her seat in the Legislature in 2022, two years after a majority of House District 45 voters backed Democrat Joe Biden in the last Presidential Election. This cycle, she’s in one of the most competitive battleground districts in the state, facing Democrat Leonard Spencer, a former Disney executive.

“Somehow my opposing party seems to really have an eye on it, but that’s okay,” she said. “That makes this district more relevant. We are a very important district, and I’m going to work in Tallahassee very strongly for this very important seat.”