I'm a newb when it comes to orchids, but I've been taking care of house plants since I was a kid so I've had to deal with spider mites in the past. As stated before, mites won't be killed by the usual insecticides since they are arachnids, in the same family as spiders and ticks - you need a miticide to get rid of them. Wth enough frequent use of the same miticide, you can quickly develop a resistant mite population. For mites, you need to rotate amongst a set of different miticides. I recently had a mite outbreak on some crotons I keep indoors and tried a product called Sucrashield, purchased from First Rays. Three applications 5 days apart and they are gone gone gone. Much safer product than the miticides I've used in the past and the beasties don't develop resistance to the product.
And as others said, the things you are seeing on the roots are probably not mites - they feed on leaves and like to hang out in the leaves near the stem bases and you can often see some fine webbing. Mites don't like being wet and damp.
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