ABSTRACT

Lake Worth, Florida, 15 minutes south of the City of Palm Beach, looks like many suburban communities in the southern United States or Midwest. The city is a segregated patchwork of uses: large open spaces at the eastern and western edges, neat strips of highway commercial uses, and low-rise houses laying on a grid of wide, straight roads. In March 2006, city officials showed how far they would go to maintain the city’s historic character. In a surprise night-time raid, police and code enforcement officers evacuated an apartment building housing more than 100 residents, most of them Guatemalan immigrants. A lawsuit by residents later revealed that the raid was part of a pattern of police and city workers using code enforcement to target Latino residents. 1