By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Sept. 11, a day Americans came together to remember a deadly attack on democracy, was business as usual for federal agents in Palm Beach County, who invaded a parking lot to seize an immigrant worker and remove him from his family.
Also on Friday, at a memorial in Lake Worth Beach, speakers were evoking the amazing grace that 9/11 inspired 25 years ago.
“Unity is a choice that we make every single day,” Palm Beach County Commissioner Gregg Weiss said. “We’re honoring those we lost by strengthening our community.”
Speakers appealed to the better angels of their audience. “I beg each of you to love your neighbor, to defy the 24-hour-news calls to hate your neighbor,” said state Rep. Emily Gregory, a Democrat from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home district.
Meanwhile, ICE agents were snatching a member of the local immigrant community, a man with an active work permit, from a West Palm Beach parking lot, according to the nonprofit Guatemalan-Maya Center. ICE left the man’s two U.S. citizen children, one of whom is deaf, parentless – their mother was already in custody.
“How are they getting away with this!” says a post on the center’s Instagram page, asking also, “Why is ICE detaining people with legal status? Why does ICE continue to tear families apart and traumatize children?”
“The contrast was not lost on me, nor on some other observers as well,” Christopher McVoy, one of the officials at the 9/11 ceremony, told Florida Bulldog. “It was a missed opportunity for elected officials to comment more critically on the country having lost its way.”
Recently McVoy, a Lake Worth Beach commissioner, tried to use contract talks between the city and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) to assert some control over immigrant detentions and removals. He said PBSO assigned nine deputies to assist ICE and they’ve helped federal agents make questionable arrests; thus their duties should be spelled out clearly in the contract.
Mayor Betty Resch expressed sympathy with McVoy’s position but wouldn’t even try to negotiate limits on PBSO’s collaboration with ICE.
“We have the whole city to protect and take care of,” she said. “So it was difficult to know that this was happening in the city. But in terms of the coverage that the sheriff gives us, there’s no question that we should vote for it.”
On Sept. 1, McVoy was outvoted 3-1 and Lake Worth Beach agreed to a no-strings payment to PBSO of about $15.8 million the first year of a three-year contract. The lion’s share of the city’s general fund budget is, as always, dedicated to public safety.
LAW ENFORCEMENT FALLS IN LINE
Lake Worth Beach is handling its ICE/immigrant dilemma no differently than any other Florida city, a close observer suggested.
“I don’t believe that there’s much resistance within Florida to the pressure and ultimatums issued to local police departments to cooperate with ICE,” said Gregory Schell, deputy director of Southern Migrant Legal Services in Palm Beach Gardens.
“The pressures and threats from federal officials have been amplified by the DeSantis administration and in order to retain their funding, all local police departments in Florida appear to have fallen in line and executed cooperative agreements with ICE,” he said.
State law mandates that local police work with ICE under what is called the 287(g) program. Also, the state Legislature has prohibited adoption of “sanctuary city” policies, forcing local officials to order their police departments to help with immigrant roundups and detentions.
What stands out about the immigration crackdown in little Lake Worth Beach (estimated population 44,000) is the unusual main target: Indigenous Guatemalans, descendants of the 4,000-year-old Maya civilization.
Guatemalan Mayas fled to Palm Beach County starting in the 1980s to escape their government’s genocidal purges. They were undocumented but they found work in the lowest ranks of the agriculture, construction and hospitality industries and they held tight to their families and community. They didn’t speak English or Spanish; they spoke their own distinct Mayan languages.
For 34 years they’ve had the Guatemalan-Maya Center, founded in Lake Worth Beach by Father Frank O’Loughlin, an Irish immigrant priest who’s been advocating for migrant rights and other progressive causes for six decades. Last year Father Frank said Mass outside the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp in the Everglades, which closed in June.
With the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by the Trump administration, the center’s focus has, by necessity, turned more toward defensive and nurturing missions than social development.
On Friday, for example, assistant director Mariana “Mari” Blanco rushed out to the scene of the ICE arrest in West Palm Beach to provide legal guidance and care for the remaining family members. She could not be reached later for comment.
The center has reunited 53 children with their parents in Guatemala, El Salvador and Colombia, according to one of its Instagram posts.
“Our days are spent looking for missing family members and mending the broken hearts of the children left behind,” the post says. On a trip to take eight children to reunite with their deported parents in Guatemala, Father Frank hugged them “as they said their goodbyes.”
“At 84, he tells us that he has never seen immigration policies so cruel,” the post says.
STANDOFF AT EL QUETZAL BAKERY
The incident that brought those policies to life for at least some Lake Worth Beach residents occurred on July 9, when ICE and the Florida Highway Patrol teamed up to arrest Jacob Zepeta-Castro, owner of the El Quetzal bakery and cafeteria on Lucerne Avenue, a short drive from the 9/11 memorial site.
Zepeta-Castro was charged with defying deportation orders by returning to Florida more than once from his native Guatemala. His family told WLRN that he was working legally and had a pending asylum application.
The arrest followed an hours-long standoff that attracted a crowd of officers, troopers, protestors and passersby. Zepeta-Castro had fled from ICE agents at a traffic stop, entered his bakery and locked the doors. With his distraught children watching from outside, he finally surrendered.
According to ICE, Zepeta-Castro tried to ram the agent’s car during the traffic stop, an account that his family and advocates disputed. They said he locked the bakery’s doors to protect his workers and surrendered voluntarily to prevent violence.
Today Zepeta-Castro is locked up in a Stuart detention facility, held without bond because, a federal judge ruled, his asylum application is no defense against the claim he illegally reentered the country after being deported.
On Sept. 1 the Zepeta-Castro story still seemed top-of-mind for Lake Worth Beach Commissioner McVoy. During the PBSO contract debate he pushed to create a “buffer zone” to prohibit arrests near schools, hospitals, places of worship and “within the sight of children.”
Also, McVoy wanted PBSO to account publicly for all detentions and provide the commission with immigration activity data. He said PBSO should be solving serious crimes instead of joining ICE in prioritizing non-violent infractions.
Mayor Resch and the other commissioners responded by rejecting all his proposals.
On Friday, the mayor said the sparse crowd at the Lake Worth Cultural Plaza was actually the biggest turnout she’s seen for a 9/11 ceremony in five years. “I wish more people came out,” she said.
Among the first to arrive was Suzi Niemy, a retiree who’s lived in the city two-and-a-half years. Asked about the recent immigrant troubles, she said, “It makes me sad, but what can I do except pray?”
Leave a Reply