A 20-year-old U.S. citizen was held in a Florida jail for hours by federal immigration authorities despite his mother showing his birth certificate to a judge.
Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez was released on Thursday night after being arrested during a traffic stop and accused of being undocumented.
“The Constitution provides guardrails to protect due process and prevent unlawful arrests,” American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Florida legal fellow and immigrants’ rights attorney Amy Godshall said in a statement to The Independent.
His detention was “based on a patently false allegation that he entered the state while undocumented,” she said. “All this despite his mother appearing in court with his Social Security card and his birth certificate showing his place of birth as the United States.”
Lopez-Gomez was taken to Leon County Jail after a traffic stop and charged with illegally entering the state as an “unauthorized alien” under a state law that has been temporarily blocked from enforcement by a federal judge.
During a hearing, Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggans claimed that she did not have jurisdiction to release him after Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested that he remain in detention, according to court records. The Florida Phoenix first reported the arrest.
He was released hours later, though it is not clear what led to the change.
Lopez-Gomez was traveling from Georgia when he was stopped by a Florida Highway Patrol trooper. Governor Ron DeSantis’s sweeping anti-immigration law, signed in 2023, makes it a state crime for an undocumented immigrant to enter the state without legal permission.
That law was blocked two weeks ago, “meaning that law enforcement cannot make arrests under its blocked provisions. Full stop,” Godshall said.
“U.S. citizens should not be detained by ICE, yet they are continuing to get swept up in these racially motivated raids and collateral arrests,” she said.
Lopez-Gomez’s first language is Tzotzil, a Mayan language, according to the Florida Phoenix.
His mother burst into tears when she saw her son virtually at Thursday’s court hearing, the outlet reported.
“I felt immense helplessness because I couldn’t do anything, and I am desperate to get my son out of there,” she said.
The Independent has requested comment from ICE.
The arrest and ongoing detention of an American-born citizen follows President Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda that has deployed federal agents into communities across the country and summarily removed dozens of immigrants.
Thursday’s court hearing came as a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. issued a blistering ruling that rejected the president’s attempt to block a lower-court ruling instructing the administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a wrongly deported Salvadoran father now imprisoned in a notorious jail in his home country.
“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” Appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote. “And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?”
A federal judge in Florida is considering whether to issue a preliminary injunction to further block Florida’s law, which makes it a misdemeanor for undocumented immigrants over age 18 to “knowingly” enter the state “after entering the United States by eluding or avoiding examination or inspection by immigration officers.”
“The Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda and Florida’s anti-immigrant law can only be implemented by abandoning the fundamental principle of due process,” Godshall said. “We are seeing this in real-time. And it is coming at the cost of lives and the rule of law.”
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