Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a twenty-year-old American citizen born in the US, has been released as of Thursday evening, after spending 24 hours in jail on charges of entering Florida as an “unauthorized alien.” Lopez-Gomez has alleged that his statemets to the arresting officer that he is indeed a US citizen were ignored, despite Lopez-Gomez backing that claim with his Georgia state ID and a copy of his Social Security card.
According to the Florida Phoenix, which first reported Lopez-Gomez’s arrest and release, Lopez-Gomez was driving with a few other individuals from his home state of Georgia to Florida for a job when he was stopped by a Florida Highway Patrol trooper for speeding. Lopez-Gomez, who does not speak English fluently, asked the trooper why he was being taken into custody, as he is a US citizen. The arrest record filed by the trooper apparently indicated that Lopez-Gomez was in the country illegally, even though Lopez-Gomez had shown identification indicating his citizenship.
Georgia does not permit undocumented immigrants to apply for state ID cards. Consequently, it would have been impossible for Lopez-Gomez to produce such an ID without being a legitimate US citizen or legal resident in the country. Moreover, the trooper made no mention of the Social Security card although he acknowledged production of the ID.
To make matters worse, in what appears to be another defiance of a court order repeatedly seen under President Donald Trump’s rule, Lopez-Gomez was charged under a Florida law that has been blocked from enforcement by Judge Kathleen Williams of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida as of early this month.
That law, Florida Senate Bill 4-C signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in February, prohibits any “unauthorized alien who is 18 years of age or older” from “knowingly enter[ing] or attempt[ing] to enter” Florida after entering the US by “eluding or avoiding examination or inspection by immigration officers.” The law imposes mandatory escalating minimum sentences for first entry and subsequent entries and authorizes state authorities to arrest and detain individuals suspected of entering the country illegally.
Judge Williams, agreeing with the plaintiffs who challenged the law on the basis of the federal supremacy clause and dormant commerce clause, granted a temporary restraining order preventing enforcement of the law. Therefore, this arrest and detention would additionally represent yet another action of defiance of a court order by elected Republicans—this time at the state level—contributing to increasing rule of law concerns.
In this case, Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggans examined Lopez-Gomez’s Social Security card and birth certificate and confirmed that they were authentic. However, Riggans ruled that she lacked jurisdiction to release Lopez-Gomez, although she concluded there was no probable cause for charging Lopez-Gomez.
Lopez-Gomez will have to reappear before court on May 6.
Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigration Coalition advocacy group criticized Riggans for making “a judgment call to deny the constitutional rights of this US-born citizen [and] give ICE jurisdiction over someone they should have no jurisdiction over.”
Although there have been a series of highly controversial immigration-related cases that have surfaced since Trump took office, this represents the first known case that involves a US-born American citizen. In another incident last week, a US-citizen couple was allegedly detained and handcuffed on the Vermont-Canada border after a short family trip to Canada. However, while these two individuals were legitimate US citizens, they were not born in the US.
That Lopez-Gomez could not speak fluent English and the fact he was not white have raised concerns that Republican-led states are engaging in racial profiling for enforcement of immigration laws. It is also worth noting that Lopez-Gomez’s first language is Tzotzil, an indigenous Mayan language, and that he also does not speak fluent Spanish.
