- December 15, 2025
While working a fraud case, interpreter Bella Garalde decided she had to help.
After her third time being mugged at gunpoint in Manhattan, Bella Garalde knew it was time to “escape from the island” and move to Palm Coast.
A Filipino, she moved to the United States when she was 17 years old and has been a court interpreter for more than a decade. Currently working a $50.5 million fraud case, though, she feels compelled to do more than just translate. For the past two months, she’s been trying to help a group of 18 immigrants obtain legitimate work visas.
“I’m always an advocate for people who are in need of help,” she said. “I like fairness. … If you talk to (the victims), you really see how much they have suffered.”
Based in Orlando, the case Garalde has been working on centers around Rafaela Dutra Toro, who worked for a temporary staffing agency called VR Services. Toro was recently convicted of alien-smuggling and forging visas.
To Garalde, though, the real issue here is the victims, who she says were told they were legal citizens but now run the risk of being deported. After recruiting people overseas, Garalde said, the temp company would also take a portion of its clients’ earnings from work in resorts and hotels.
“It’s all ignorance — that’s why they got conned,” she said. “They’re kind of like babies, not knowing what’s going on and sort of thrust into this thing. … I can understand what they feel, I think. It’s confusing and scary.”
In a lot of ways, for Garalde, the case is personal. An immigrant herself, she was 5 when her parents abandoned her. She started selling fruit and washing clothes for money at the age of 8.
She began living on her own at 13 and had her first child at 17. Life, for her, has been hard.
“I grew up like a weed growing in a field, no direction, without a sense of who I am or where I belong,” she said. “I ran away when I was 13 … and worked odd jobs to survive.”
But all along, she’s had her scruples. She once put a well-paying job in car-rental management on the line by throwing a superior out of her branch because of the demeaning way the woman berated an employee in front of customers.
“I was glad to lose my job if I had to work for a company who allows its employees to do that,” she said.
She also hopes one day to own or manage an assisted-living facility. And she’s also the only female player on two Orlando dominos teams, one of which competes internationally (“The Orlando Winnaz Dominos Team” and “Crosstown Domino Club”).
Translating Tagalog and Spanish part time, Garalde currently does not hold a full-time job, and so she recently graduated from Daytona State College’s Fresh Start Program, which she feels offers camaraderie and hope.
Now, after all the migrant casework, she says that she’s been told by many that she should have gotten into law. And, in a way, she has. With the help of pro bono Colorado lawyer Chris Pooley (the only lawyer, she says, that would take the case), she is helping to organize another class-action suit to allow the migrants to stay in the country.
She’s also searching for support groups for her clients, as well as getting them in touch with people in similar situations, especially from the local Filipino-American community, in order to form a united front.
“It’s not done yet, but I’m getting a satisfaction inside me knowing that I might be helping a bunch of people,” she said. “I just want justice done. I want fairness and justice.”
For more, or to join Garalde’s cause, email [email protected].
