A 17-year-old girl was smuggled from Guatemala to the U.S. border over a grueling 10-day stretch.
Had she known what she would go through after arriving in the United States, she would not have made the trip, she later told investigators.
A relative of the teen, a 40-year-old West Palm Beach woman, was arrested by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office’s Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit while she was working at a Worth Avenue restaurant on Thursday afternoon. Investigators charged the woman with labor trafficking of a minor and with child neglect without great bodily harm. The woman is being held without bail at the Palm Beach County Jail, court records show.
The Palm Beach Daily News is not naming either the woman or the restaurant to protect the teen’s privacy.
The sheriff’s office began investigating the teen’s treatment last year after she reported it to the state Department of Children and Families, an arrest report said.
The girl told PBSO investigators she was smuggled from Guatemala to the U.S.-Mexico border, where she was taken into custody by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol. While in detention — the arrest report does not mention where she was held — the teen first contacted the woman, whose relationship to the teenager was redacted from the report released by the Palm Beach County Clerk’s office.