Torn Apart: A Teen’s Plea to Stop the Expansion of ICE Collaboration in Lake Worth Beach
At eighteen most of us can remember not having our lives together, not knowing what we wanted to do with our lives and taking our first steps into adult hood. Sadly for many like Jessica Perez, an eighteen year-old Lake Worth Beach resident, these hopes and dreams have hammered into doubts and fears.
After her mother, Olga Perez, a 30-year local resident, interpreter of the Mam Mayan dialect, and community leader, was forced to self-deport to Guatemala, Jessica was left without her parents. Both mother and father have been removed. Today she stood at a press conference outside City Hall and demanded the Lake Worth Beach City Commission reject a proposed 10-year contract extension with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office that embeds collaboration with border and immigration authorities.
Lake Worth Beach urged to rethink PBSO contract extension over fears of immigration crackdown | WLRN
The proposed deal runs roughly $16 million a year and would lock the city into another decade of PBSO services starting August 27. Advocates flag language that references assistance to Border Patrol and other immigration-related activity. That language is not abstract. It sits on top of Florida’s expanded 287(g) apparatus and a documented surge in local assists that have already torn families apart across Palm Beach County.
Immigrant households are living under heightened fear. Residents avoid calling police for basic safety because the line between local patrol and federal removal has collapsed. Trust erodes. Crime data does not improve. What expands is the machinery that treats long-term residents and their U.S.-citizen children as disposable.
Immigrant advocates in Lake Worth Beach worry sheriff contract renewal will lead to more arrests – Sun Sentinel
Organizers and residents are clear on the demands ahead of the August 18 commission vote:
Reject the 10-year expansion of the sheriff’s contract.
Strip or prohibit any provisions that facilitate collaboration with federal immigration enforcement.
Publish full transparency on the specific duties and authorities already exercised and those contemplated under the new agreement.
“We have hundreds of families who are being separated, hundreds of kids who are left without a mom and a dad who are either in detention or deported at this moment,” Renata Bozzetto of the Florida Immigrant Coalition told the gathering. Jessica’s presence made the policy concrete. She lost both parents. The two weeks she had with her mother after detention were not enough. The family is restarting lives in Guatemala while the children remain here.
Olga Perez returns home after ICE detention center release
Olga Perez spent two decades bridging language gaps for police, courts, hospitals, and nonprofits. She was one of the few Mam interpreters in the state. None of that stopped the detention, the Arizona facility, the judicial order, or the self-deportation that left four U.S.-citizen children without parents. The same system that relied on her labor then discarded her.
The tragedy of Olga’s deportation | Letters to the editor – Sun Sentinel
Expanding the PBSO contract for another decade hardens that outcome into local policy. It prioritizes the logistics of mass removal over public safety and community cohesion. The record is already visible on the streets of Lake Worth Beach, where residents have mapped alleged ICE and Florida Highway Patrol arrests with signs that name the practice for what it is.
They kidnapped someone here’: Protesters map alleged ICE arrests in Lake Worth Beach.
The August 18 vote is a choice about power. It will decide whether Lake Worth Beach remains a cog in the deportation machine that tears families apart or throws a wrench into the gears of that apparatus. Jessica Perez is only one 18-year-old, but she is not alone in the void the regime has created.
