Joe CapozziChris McVoy says colleagues want to silence his remarks about immigration enforcement; commissioners say stick to city business.
In the wake of the federal immigration crackdown, Lake Worth Beach City Commissioner Christopher McVoy has used his elected position to spread awareness about the fear and anxiety gripping the city’s large Latino community.
At City Commission meetings and public pre-agenda work sessions, he has also shared concerns about Lake Worth Beach residents detained without due process at Alligator Alcatraz, the detention center that popped up this month at a rarely used airbase in Big Cypress National Preserve.
But his public bullhorn is annoying critics who say city meetings aren’t the place for his politically charged commentary.
Citing complaints from residents, Vice Mayor Sarah Malega suggested the commission consider new rules for the kinds of comments individual commissioners give at the end of meetings. The changes would restrict “Commission Liaison Reports and Comments” to topics directly related to Lake Worth Beach business and affairs, not state, federal or international issues.
“To get world view stuff is sometimes, frankly, time consuming and counterproductive to what we are trying to do, which is run our little city,” Mayor Betty Resch said July 11 when Malega broached the new rule at a pre-agenda work session.
The mayor and three commissioners said they’re not trying to silence McVoy. They said they just want to streamline the flow of meetings that start at 6 pm, at times run at least four hours and must end by 11 pm.
“It’s not fair to other commissions that don’t necessarily get to their city business when we get gummed up on national topics,” said Commissioner Anthony Segrich, who encouraged McVoy to host coffee meetings or his own “town halls” to offer such remarks.
‘A very unhealthy undemocratic approach’
Whether commissioners follow through on the proposal remains to be seen. But McVoy blasted the move as another attempt by the commission to muzzle him.
“The idea of the majority of the commission deciding what a given commissioner can talk about I think is a very unhealthy undemocratic approach,” said McVoy, a research scientist who has discussed climate change at city meetings and unsuccessfully sought a city resolution supporting a Gaza ceasefire last year.
He insists the comments he shares at public meetings about federal immigration are directly related to Lake Worth Beach, a coastal city of nearly 43,000 residents, nearly half of whom are Latino.
Many of those Latinos are living in fear of Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids, McVoy said, and at least 20 city residents as of July 26 are detained in Alligator Alcatraz, according to the Guatemalan Maya Center.
McVoy, who speaks fluent Spanish, said his Venezuelan wife teaches students who were friends with a 14-year-old who died by suicide in May, a death the center attributed to anxiety over federal immigration policies.
“Sometimes people on this particular commission seem to forget that we have a duty to represent all residents in our city. And some of the things I bring up are directly affecting our residents. And I will continue to do that,” he told commissioners July 11.
“Well,” Resch replied, “I think if we come up with a policy, that may change, and you might have to adapt to that policy.”
“And I will make sure,” McVoy said, “that our residents are aware of this continued approach that is head-in-the sand and is derelict in duty of looking out and protecting the health, safety and welfare of all of our residents.”
After a pause, Resch said, “Once again you have chosen to express that you are the person on the commission who takes the higher ground, which I think is a little insulting to the rest of us.”
Would you fly the ICE flag?
He apparently would still be able to say whatever he wanted at pre-agenda work sessions, which are carried live on the city’s YouTube channel but don’t attract as many viewers as commission meetings
But he said the proposal is especially troubling considering that it came 10 days after the commission voted 4-1 to stop raising the Haitian flag at City Hall, a move commissioners said was aimed at avoiding potential legal problems if other groups want to raise their flags.
Before the July 1 flag vote, Segrich noted McVoy’s “disdain” for ICE and asked him a hypothetical question: “What happens if they (ICE) ask to fly their flag? Would you support that? I don’t think so. I think you might find it offensive because clearly by your comments you find the work they’re doing offensive. And there’s many in our community that don’t find it offensive. And so there are many that would want to see that.”
At a commission meeting two weeks later, McVoy ripped his colleagues for the flag vote: “Shame on this commission for choosing this time in history to not stand behind all of our various communities.”
McVoy makes frequent trips to Alligator Alcatraz
McVoy, a city commissioner from 2011 to 2017, was elected again in 2021 and reelected in March. He has been a frequent target of opponents because of his rambling speaking style and knack for asking questions they don’t like about projects such as parking garages, the WMODA museum and apartment complex and Benny’s on the Beach.
As a public official and an ecohydrologist who has worked on Everglades restoration since 1995, he says he wears different “hats” that sometimes converge.
As a board member of Friends of the Everglades, a nonprofit that recently filed a lawsuit with other groups seeking to halt Alligator Alcatraz over environmental concerns, he has made five trips since June to the detention center’s entrance where protesters have held daily vigils filming the comings and goings of trucks.
At protest rallies outside the detention center, he has been a guest speaker along with the acclaimed Big Cypress photographer Clyde Butcher and Betty Osceola, a Native American environmentalist who has helped lead the fight to close Alligator Alcatraz. And he has given interviews to media outlets from Miami to Germany.
“Mostly I’ve done (interviews) as a scientist but sometimes I do say I am a city commissioner and this affects me and my residents because inhabitants of my city are sitting in this place,” McVoy said in an interview with Stet News.
He said it’s his duty as an elected official to share his concerns at public meetings about how the latest federal policies are affecting residents.
‘How does Alligator Alcatraz have anything to do with Lake Worth Beach???’
He made remarks about Alligator Alcatraz at a Palm Beach Transportation Planning Agency board meeting on July 18.
“They managed to build a detention center in the middle of the Everglades,” said McVoy, one of 21 TPA board members, “and we don’t have $40 million for public transportation.”
But it was comments at a July 1 Lake Worth Beach Commission meeting, when he mentioned the “opening of a mass detention center” in Big Cypress, that sparked the move to restrict topics commissioners can discuss.
Later that night, commissioners received an email from Parrot Cove resident Adriane Coplan with the heading: “How does Alligator Alcatraz have anything to do with Lake Worth Beach???”
‘We do have a duty to speak out on it’
That email was the only one McVoy said he received from a resident complaining about his comments. He said it’s possible Malega and other commissioners heard complaints from other residents, but he said that’s still no reason for commissioners to try to regulate what he can say at commission meetings.
“The father of an 11-year-old who is in school here in our city is sitting in that hot humid place,” he said at the July 15 commission meeting after mentioning the proposal Malega had broached four days earlier.
“There is no due process of law happening there. That is residents of our city, multiple residents of our city there. We do have a duty to speak out on it,” McVoy said.
City commissioners are supposed to be nonpartisan. Coplan said she knows of many city residents who think McVoy’s politically charged remarks have no place in city meetings.
“To spew political vitriol and biases is not appropriate,” Coplan said. “The dais is not meant to be a soap box for that. It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you are on, there are protocols.”
Not much the city can do
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, which provides police services for Lake Worth Beach, has a 287(g) agreement to assist ICE.
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw has said his deputies won’t engage in mass roundups, but that hasn’t alleviated fears in the city’s Latino population, said McVoy.
In other meetings, Resch, usually in discussions started by McVoy, has acknowledged the anxiety felt by many about immigration raids. “It’s going on all over the country. It’s a terrible, terrible situation,” she said June 27.
But she also said there’s not much the city can do, a point McVoy disputes.
He points out that blue state mayors in cities such as Los Angeles and Boston have tried to resist the immigration crackdown amid fierce backlash.
In Key West, a city often compared to Lake Worth Beach for its artsy and quirky vibes, commissioners on June 30 voided an agreement that had allowed the police department to participate in ICE operations. The move was rescinded July 8 after Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier warned that the commission had violated Florida law.
Lake Worth Beach might not have the resources to file a lawsuit as Los Angeles did, but commissioners should at least try to show that they “are unafraid and willing to stand up for issues that matter” to Lake Worth Beach’s Latino residents, said Mariano Blanco, director of operations at the Guatemalan Maya Center.
Trying to prevent McVoy from speaking out at city meetings on behalf of residents affected by federal immigration policies is “cowardly” and “a bit tone deaf,” she said.
Blanco said she is not aware of other individual elected officials in towns around Palm Beach County publicly advocating for Latinos as passionately as McVoy has this year.
County commissioner joins in
On July 24, Palm Beach County Commissioner Gregg Weiss used his comments at the end of a zoning meeting to share his concerns about what he called the “totally unnecessary” treatment of a U.S. citizen detained by Border Patrol for six hours in May. The incident was reported, along with video recorded by the detained man, by The Palm Beach Post on July 22.
‘It was very troubling,” Weiss said of the incident, including the report of an agent using an ethnic slur. “That’s not our values. I just ask that those that run these operations and agencies, please, please we can do better.”
His comments prompted Commissioner Sara Baxter to defend the agents and say that “most of our men and women in law enforcement do an amazing job.”
McVoy suggested the city should make “Know Your Rights” cards for Latino residents instead of asking PBSO to crack down on unlicensed Guatemalan food vendors, as it did this year, a move he said put residents at risk of being detained.
And he scoffed at the contention by some commissioners that they’re not trying to silence him.
“The whole point of having multiple commissioners on an elected body is to try to crowdsource a range of views of your community. Having a subset of them say ‘No, we don’t want to hear from some of them’ is disenfranchising a whole lot of people who in fact elected somebody,” he said.
“We all want to make America great again,” he said this month, quoting Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, “but you’re not gonna make America great by making America mean.”
If the commission approves the rules, McVoy said he’s not sure if he will comply.
During a heated discussion on July 11, he sounded like he would not.
“I will decide what is city business,” he said. “I will not accept a decision that says only how much money we’re gonna spend painting fire hydrants yellow is city business.”
