Mayan translator who helps police, courts faces deportation from US

LAKE WORTH BEACH — Olga Perez has spent the past 20 years helping Florida government agencies, hospitals and nonprofits work with people who speak an indigenous Mayan language. Now, she faces possible deportation to her native Guatemala, leaving her four U.S.-citizen children behind.

Perez is in custody in Arizona following her detention by Florida Highway Patrol in November as she rode in her family’s landscaping truck on Interstate 95 near Hypoluxo Road. Now 47, she arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum in 1997, her attorney says, and has filed a request for cancellation of removal.

Immigrations and Custom Enforcement had detained Perez’s husband two months earlier as he worked a landscaping job in Lake Worth Beach.

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A judge was scheduled to decide Perez’s case on Thursday, Feb. 19, but issues in the Arizona immigration courtroom delayed action until March 4. One of the problems: Deputies brought out the wrong woman to face the judge. The delay left her four children sobbing as they watched the hearing by livestream at the Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth Beach.

At the center, a touchstone for immigrant families across central Palm Beach County, Mariana Blanco and Lindsay McElroy embraced the children and held them in silence while their sobs and wails filled the room. The siblings have struggled to get by without their parents for four months, Blanco said.

The eldest daughter, Eliza, 21, has put on hold her plans to attend college so she can run her father’s landscaping business to cover bills and pay rent. She also takes care of her siblings Jessica, 18, Romeo, 15, and Cynthia, 13, who are struggling to focus in school and report feeling depressed and anxious.

Last year, their parents missed key family celebrations including Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. On Valentine’s Day, Eliza turned 21. As she blew the candles, all she wished for was for her parents to come home.

After the hearing, the Rev. Frank O’Loughlin, the founder of the Guatemalan-Maya Center and an advocate for immigrants for 50 years, gathered the siblings and the center’s staff to speak on Perez’s crucial role in the community as a translator and how the family’s separation has devastated the children.

“You can’t be a regular kid anymore, as greatness has been thrust upon you,” O’Loughlin told Eliza, quoting from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” Eliza hugged O’Loughlin while tears fogged her glasses.

“It’s terrible that the woman who does the most for others is getting the least from those guys,” O’Loughlin said as he held Jessica’s hands before pressing her forehead against his and letting her sob.

Absence of translator leaves Mayans in Florida vulnerable

Perez is the latest county resident to land in immigration detention as part of President Donald Trump’s enforcement of laws about people in the U.S. without deportation. Trump has promised the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, saying it would target “the worst of the worst” and make the nation safer.

She fled Guatemala in 1997, after the country’s civil war and genocide on indigenous communities devastated Maya population, including her family in Colotenango, Huehuetenango. She has lived in Palm Beach County ever since.

Perez became a translator with the Guatemalan-Mayan Center in 2009 when she enrolled Eliza at the Escuelita Maya — literally, Mayan School — which offers support for the children of migrant workers. That year, Perez began volunteering there to interpret and translate Mam, one of over 22 indigenous Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala.

Over the next 20 years, Perez became a crucial for the indigenous Guatemalan community in Florida, serving as one of the rare Mam translators in the county and the state, Blanco said.

Blanco said Perez has translated for victims and investigators at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office; for students and counselors at local schools and the Children Services Council; for patients and doctors in local hospitals and federally funded health clinics; and in the courts across Florida.

Recently, Perez played a key role in the case of Virgilio Aguilar Mendez, a 19-year-old Guatemalan farmworker who in 2024 was cleared of criminal charges in the heart-attack death of a Florida officer near Jacksonville, a case that drew national attention.

“The only reason we were able to bring that case to justice was because of Olga,” Blanco said. “Olga was the interpreter that helped everybody.”

Blanco said Perez also ran a group for domestic-violence victims, helped start the center’s food distribution program and organized activities for children. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she translated CDC guidelines and information related to vaccines into Mam for indigenous communities nationwide.

Since Perez’s detention, Blanco says the Guatemalan-Maya Center has received over a dozen calls of indigenous families seeking help but cannot communicate with them. She said her absence left a void in the community that relies on her translation services.

“It leaves people vulnerable. It doesn’t give them a fair chance at whatever service they were requesting,” Blanco said.

Mother, Maya translator detained by ICE since November

Last year, Eliza and Romeo witnessed the nightmare of every child born to immigrant parents: They saw officers arrest their mother and a cousin to turn them over to immigration authorities.

The events of the morning of Nov. 25 still haunt them, Eliza said.

It was two days before Thanksgiving, and Eliza was driving her father’s landscaping truck along I-95. Right past the Hypoluxo Road exit, Eliza said an FHP vehicle turned on its lights and pulled the truck over.

Eliza said a deputy approached her window on the driver’s side and asked for her license, without saying why she had been pulled over. Then the deputy asked for the identification of everyone inside the vehicle.

Eliza said she told the officers she was the only driver and only person who needed to provide a valid driver’s license, as she had learned at the “Know your Rights” classes at the Guatemalan-Maya Center.

Moments later, other officers surrounded the truck and began banging on the windows, Eliza said. Perez was frightened the officers would attempt to break a window and told Eliza they would turn over their identifications.

Perez and her cousin gave deputies their Guatemalan identifications, Romeo handed over his school card.

When deputies returned, they ordered Perez and her cousin out of the vehicle and proceeded place them in handcuffs as Eliza and Romeo watched crying in panic from inside the truck.

Blanco arrived at the scene minutes later and pleaded with the deputies not to take the mother of four, saying their father had been detained a month earlier and their four children would be orphaned. Nothing worked, Blanco said.

Perez spent three weeks at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach before she was transferred to the Arizona lockup. Her husband has been held since September, first at the Alligator Alcatraz detention center in the Florida Everglades and most recently at a site in Gainesville.

“I felt angry and powerless,” Eliza said. “I followed all the rules and did all the things they said would protect me. I stayed calm, I asserted my rights, I gave them all my information, and they still did whatever they wanted.”

Reporting by Valentina Palm, Palm Beach Post