Editor’s note: This story is part of a special series by Princeton University journalism students reporting on the discovery of an African burial ground in Key West, Florida, and how racial discrimination still reverberates across the island and beyond.
The woman opens the front door only partway. Before stepping out, she looks left, then right, scanning the narrow street for indiscreet eyes the way you might check for rain clouds. The houses here sit low and close to the road. Structures patched together with corrugated metal and makeshift extensions. The palm trees behind the row of houses catch the light, their fronds moving in the spring breeze. When she is satisfied that there is no threat, the woman steps forward and wraps her arms around Monica Caceres, who is already moving toward the trunk of her car.
They work quickly, Caceres passing the woman white plastic Winn-Dixie bags, thin and overfilled with rice, chicken, bell peppers, maseca. A child appears in the doorway. The mother turns and gestures, but the little girl stubbornly steps onto the street. Her mother firmly grabs her arm and leads her back inside the house. In three minutes, everything gets unloaded. Then the door to the home closes, and Caceres gets back in her car.
Key West markets itself as a tropical paradise built around the promise of effortless leisure. All-inclusive resorts, sunset cruises, beachside meals. What sustains the fantasy, often invisibly, is a workforce largely drawn from Latin America and Haiti. The line cooks, the housekeepers, the delivery drivers, the construction crews maintaining the beautiful waterfront houses.
For decades, that arrangement held. It is now collapsing.
Across the United States, immigration enforcement has expanded in ways that are often diffuse — workplace audits, courthouse arrests, early-morning raids that ripple through cities and disappear just as quickly into the scale of urban life. In larger places, the effects are uneven, absorbed into neighborhoods that can replenish themselves.
In Key West, there is no such buffer.
Since the spring of 2025, Customs and Border Protection agents have intensified immigration enforcement across the Florida Keys, detaining people on bike paths, in Ubers, at school drop-offs, and through license-plate scans that have become routine on the single road connecting these islands to the mainland. For most of the detained, their only crime is not having been born here.
“[They] have done everything the way our government says you should to come into the country,” says Lucy Hawk, 36, who co-founded the Key West Immigrant Support Network in June 2025. “They’ve done that, and they’re still being detained.”
On a typical day, around two people are taken from the Keys, according to figures tracked by the support network. Bad days reach six to nine, Hawk says. Most of the detainees are documented, with work permits, pending asylum cases, social security numbers, visas. In recent weeks, according to Hawk, the detentions have spiked as the government targets Haitian immigrants who’ve just lost Temporary Protective Status.
What’s happening in the Keys is part of a deliberate state-led program. In late April 2025, ICE launched Operation Tidal Wave across Florida, a six-day joint enforcement effort that resulted in 1,120 arrests — thelargest single-state immigration sweep over a one-week period in ICE history. Governor Ron DeSantis described the state as “the tip of the spear” of federal immigration enforcement, and the operation has continued as an ongoing framework. By January 2026, Operation Tidal Wave had logged more than 10,000 arrests.
What makes Key West different from Minneapolis or Chicago or Miami, the cities that have received most of the national coverage of ICE raids to date, is geography. There is one road in and one road out. There is no back entrance to slip through, no crowd to disappear into. On an island whose year-round population is roughly 25,000, in a county of about 80,000, the rate of detentions is concentrated in a way no large city is forced to absorb.
“This island is so small that if someone is being detained, everybody knows,” Hawk says. “It’s not like in bigger places where you might not realize that people are no longer around.”
In response, a grassroots network has emerged to do what local institutions have largely declined to: keep people fed, keep them informed, and keep them from vanishing into a detention system that can deposit them, without money or documents, thousands of miles from home. Monica Caceres, 34, born in Mexico and raised in Key West since the age of one, is one of its volunteers. She goes grocery shopping for immigrant families after work, still in her office heels.
“I really wish I didn’t have to do this,” she says, pulling away from the low-slung bungalow where she’s just delivered food. “But if somebody has to do it, I am more than willing to do it.”
CACERES DRIVES THE SAME palm tree-adorned routes she has known all her life. No navigator, no second glance at the turns. But something is different now. The beach cruisers are gone. On the “bike highway,” as locals call it, that runs through Stock Island and Newtown into downtown Key West, past souvenir shops and open-air restaurants, there is almost no one. It is a narrow strip alongside U.S. 1 that workers have used for years to reach hotels and construction sites from other Keys. Heather Slivko-Bathurst, 37, co-founder of the Key West Immigrant Support Network, who lives on the bike highway itself, used to see 200 to 300 commuters a day. Within a week of the first immigration stops, she said, that number had shrunk to nearly zero.
The change came abruptly, in early June 2025. U.S. Border Patrol agents — the primary agency operating here, though not the only one — began pulling over cyclists on those very paths. The pretext, at first, was minor traffic violations. People would be stopped for running a stop sign. They would end up in detention.
Word spread fast on an island this small, and the bike highway emptied almost overnight.
Then, according to Hawk and Slivko-Bathurst’s network, enforcement shifted toward Uber and other rideshare drivers, who in the Keys are predominantly Haitian — a community that makes up at least 15 percent of the population. When that community adapted, pulling back from rideshare work, the tactics evolved again.
Now, it is license plates. Officers run a plate, and a flag appears identifying vehicles associated with someone sought for immigration enforcement. The information gives officers another basis for an encounter that can ultimately lead to detention.
“Most people are being detained going to or from work,” Hawk says. “Or when they drop their kids off at school. We’ve had a large number of people taken before or after taking their kid to school, which is just cruel.”
The economic consequences have followed the human ones. According to Hawk, a major national grocery chain in Key West had to reduce its operating hours after losing so many employees to detention. She also knows of a single construction contractor who says he saw 11 documented workers taken. All of them, he told her, had work permits, visas. They were operating within the legal pathways the government itself established. Across the industries that keep the island running, the vehicles have disappeared from the roads, because driving a work truck has become sufficient cause for a stop.
For those who have not been taken, the calculus of daily life has been redrawn. Workers spend thousands taking Uber and Lyft, or renting cars — out-of-state plates, they figure, won’t draw a second look from authorities. Some employers have begun ferrying their staff. Others have told workers they’re on their own.
THE MORNING AFTER Slivko-Bathurst saw someone detained on a lawn in front of her house, Hawk walked into her art studio, the Sacred Space Gallery, and started printing. The signs were big and orange. “Warning: ICE Ahead.” Under cover of darkness, a small group placed the warning signs across the paths and streets that workers used.
“[The signs said to] make sure you stop at the stop signs, because they were pulling people over for running the stop signs,” Hawk says.
That was the first day. By the end of their campaign, the women had also produced know-your-rights cards detailing how to act in case of an encounter with immigration agents. The work was improvised, urgent, and improbable. Neither woman was an organizer before this. They were responding to what felt like a siege. Hawk is a hand-cut paper artist. Slivko-Bathurst manages a sailing excursion company.
Within three weeks, the women, by then joined by several allies, were standing in front of the Key West City Commission. Someone with access to county records had surfaced a document that most local officials had never seen: a 287(g) agreement dating back to months earlier, anICE initiative formalizing cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. It had beensigned on March 4, 2025, by Police Chief Sean Brandenburg with City Manager Brian Barroso’s knowledge but without commission approval.
The mayor had no idea. The commissioners had no idea. An emergency meeting was called.
The network organized quickly. Over 30 businesses signeda community statement; more than 20 clergypeople from various denominations added their names. On June 30, 2025, the commission voted 6-1 to nullify the agreement with ICE.
Two days later, the Florida attorney general’s office sent letters warning that commissioners who opposed the initiative could be removed from office. “Illegal aliens represent a significant danger to Key West,” the document read. “Facts are far more compelling than the nonsensical sloganeering of misinformed protestors.” That threat was enough. On July 8, after another packed meeting, the commission reversed course in a 4-2 vote.
Now, the back of Hawk’s studio has become a storage hub for the Immigrant Support Network’s materials. Her own art pieces — bright tropical landscapes and palm fronds — hang on the gallery walls. Behind them, a folding table is covered in stacks of intake forms and half-filled packets. Cardboard boxes spill over with door hangers in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole: “What to Do If ICE Comes to Your Door.” A sticker shows a melting ice cube with the words “ICE Melts in Key West.”
Today, the group has six board members and more than 55 active volunteers, none of them paid. It operates on small individual donations, often raised around specific needs — a broken air conditioning unit, a child who needs glasses and has to get to a specialist in Miami. The assistance includes grocery deliveries, transportation to work and medical appointments, pre-legal screenings, church clinics on power of attorney and document transfer, community alert systems for when agents are in the area.
Not everyone on the island shares the network’s views on the issue. “Key West is not quite as liberal as everybody thinks it is,” Slivko-Bathurst explains. The downtown skews progressive, she says, but the people who have been here for generations — many of them themselves descended from immigrants — often do not. The Cuban-American community, which in Key West dates back to the Cuban exile waves of the late 20th century, has been particularly absent. “The people who left Cuba to come to Key West represented a certain social class,” Slivko-Bathurst says. “There’s this air of superiority. We see it in the things people say to us: Do it the right way. My family did it the right way. They don’t even know their own history.”
Caceres, the child of Mexican immigrants, has heard the same line. “I find it hypocritical,” she says, “because you were once that same person.”
Caceres came to the network after an experience that clarified for her what documented fear felt like. Men outside a restaurant who wouldn’t meet her eyes; trucks circling, waiting for someone to stop. “It instilled a fear that as a U.S. citizen I should not have,” Caceres says. “For folks who don’t have status, imagine the real fear that they are living.” She called a friend, who connected her to Hawk, and she started doing grocery runs.
Now she coordinates all the deliveries, managing a rotating list of five to seven families. Tonight she has parked at the Winn-Dixie off North Roosevelt, still in the outfit she wore to her timeshare marketing job. Before she goes in, she sits in the car and pulls up the store’s coupon app. Milk a dollar off, a frozen chicken five dollars instead of 13. She’ll take two. She has a list from one of the mothers she’s shopping for, modified with a small request: Swap the ham for hot dogs, the family still has ham from the last shop. In the produce aisle she lifts a bundle of cassava, examines it, sets it down for a better one further along. By the self-checkout the cart is full and the running total is $128, comfortably under the $150 cap she aims to set for her largest families.
Caceres’ father was detained when she was a child. He and her mother, who had legal status at the time, were already married. They worked through the process, and both eventually became U.S. citizens. Caceres views the families she delivers to as a version of what hers used to be. She has two boys, five and seven; the younger has type-1 diabetes. “I see those kids that we take groceries to as myself,” she says. “And now I have kids. So I see them as kids who need to eat.”
“It’s luck where you’re born,” she says. “It’s luck who you’re born to. […] This could have been me.”
THE PATTERN ACROSS Caceres’ deliveries is consistent. In most of the households the network supports, a detained family member was the primary earner. What remains, after the arrest, is a household with half its income, the full weight of the rent, and a set of astronomical legal bills for most.
“The minimum you’re going to pay just to get somebody to look at your case is $5,000 to $7,500,” Slivko-Bathurst says. “And that doesn’t even include the application fees or bond.” While the network does include local attorneys who will contribute some expertise for free, most of that pro bono work focuses on legal screenings prior to arrests.
The detention itself can last weeks or months, sometimes much longer. According to Hawk, some people have been held for almost a year.
The detention centers themselves have been the subject of accumulating reports. Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, where many Florida Keys detainees are first taken, was themost overcrowded ICE facility in the country in April 2025, holding nearly 1,200 people above its contractual capacity, at times more thanthree times its operational ceiling. Human Rights Watch documented detainees describing prolonged exposure to cold temperatures, severe overcrowding, and degrading treatment during intake. At least 10 people have died in ICE custody in Florida since October 2024, six of them at Krome. Slivko-Bathurst says accounts of conditions she has heard from former detainees fall in line with these reports. “They’re shackled at the hands and legs,” she says. “Lights flicker so that people start to go insane.”
When one parent is detained, the remaining parent typically cannot afford childcare on a single income, which means they often cannot work either. When both parents are detained, children depend on neighbors, or on child protection services. The network has pushed hard for families to establish power of attorney — which allows someone else to make essential decisions — but many families don’t have the document ready when the moment arrives.
Last August, Hawk took a four-year-old to the playground. The child hadn’t been outside in three months. “The parents [told the child] the playgrounds were under construction,” she says, explaining the excuse the family had invented for keeping the toddler inside.
“The joy of seeing a kid go to the playground who hasn’t been in three months,” Hawk says. “It’s just heartbreaking. But what we do the most of [for these families], we don’t talk about.”
Release, when it comes, is not always idyllic. One man the network was helping was picked up here and eventually released — 3,000 miles from home, in California. The authorities did not return his documents. He had no money and a dead phone. The network traced a chain of volunteers and contacts from Bakersfield to Phoenix to Key West. “It was amazing how many people in our volunteer base have friends and family all along the way between California and here,” Slivko-Bathurst says. Someone met him at a bus stop at two in the morning with food. Someone else spoke Spanish. He made it back on seven Greyhound buses.
“Cruelty,” Hawk says, “seems to be the point.”
BACK IN HER CAR, driving the side streets of Stock Island, Caceres talks about the family she just visited. “Mom and dad, neither works,” she explains. “They have three kids.” But her mind is already turning to the new requests that constantly come in. There are other families on the list, other shops to coordinate before the week is out.
The network does not solve the structural problem. It was never meant to. What it does is sustain individuals inside it. “I don’t have the luxury of looking three years in advance,” Hawk says of the immigrants’ future. “It’s what’s happening now.” Their work is the difference, on a given day, between a family that eats and one that doesn’t.
Local government, meanwhile, has remained largely at a remove. In the spring of 2026, the network helped support a two-day strike by the Latino community — workers staying home to show their economic weight — and staged its own protest outside the Customs and Border Protection building. They hand-delivered a letter to every commissioner, the mayor, and the police chief asking them to formally acknowledge immigrants’ economic contributions to Key West. No one responded.
“I am no longer interested in trying to keep them informed of what we’re doing,” Slivko-Bathurst says. “We aren’t doing anything illegal.”
The tourism economy is intact, for now. The resorts survived the high season. The architecture underneath, however, is being dismantled. Restaurants operate short-staffed. Construction projects have slowed. Hotels are reshuffling coverage from a shrinking pool of employees. These are the results of removing, from a small and geographically enclosed community, the workers who keep it operational.
Key West has always been good at keeping its inconveniences out of sight. That is part of what it sells. Caceres drives back through streets that are quieter than they were a year ago. The bike path along U.S. 1 is empty in the late-afternoon light. A landscaping truck idles in a driveway with no one in it. Behind the door she has just left, a family is putting groceries away. She will be back in two weeks.
“I really wish I didn’t have to do this,” she says. “But there’s nothing more that I would rather be doing.”
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