‘She is not a criminal,’ says mother of college student in ICE detention

While driving to meet her mother, Ximena was pulled over and arrested by a Dalton police officer who mistakenly believed she had made an illegal turn at a red light. Like both of her parents, Ximena is living in the country without legal status after the family moved to Dalton from Mexico 15 years ago, when she was 4 years old.

Cristobal said she saw the arrest unfold in the office building’s parking lot.

“It hurts so much to see your daughter be handcuffed,” she said. “As a mom, I wanted to run out and say: ‘Hey, don’t take her away.’ But I couldn’t.

“I couldn’t because I have two other girls at home (ages 12 and 9). And if I had gone down and said something, maybe they would have said: ‘Well, you’re coming with us.’”

Shortly afterward, Cristobal went to the Whitfield County Jail to pay Ximena’s traffic tickets, but she soon realized police were not going to let her daughter go. They had already contacted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I was waiting for her outside, but she wasn’t coming out. She called me crying and said: ‘Mom, immigration is coming to take me.’”

Once she entered ICE custody, Ximena was transferred to the Stewart Detention Center, a sprawling immigrant jail in South Georgia that holds the second most detainees of any facility in the country.

There, she joined her father, Jose Francisco Arias-Tovar. Like his daughter, Arias-Tovar was sent to ICE detention following a traffic stop in Whitfield County. Police arrested him for speeding.

“I was still trying to come to terms with what happened to my husband, and then all of a sudden, Ximena,” Cristobal said. “It was like a bomb going off for me.”

News of Ximena’s arrest spread fast and wide, sparking national headlines and several rounds of protests in this majority Hispanic town in the northwest corner of the state.

Outrage grew further following a Dalton police news conference Tuesday, where local authorities announced Ximena had been mistakenly pulled over and that they were dropping all charges against her.

But that development does not affect the college student’s status as an ICE detainee.

“Because of one person’s mistake, someone like Ximena can lose the life they had here,” Cristobal said. She added that she felt angry and sad when she heard the police’s statement, but not surprised. Ximena knew the risks of getting behind the wheel as an immigrant who lacked legal status and was careful, she said.

“She was very cautious. She always put her phone on silent,” Cristobal said. “We would tell her, ‘Ximena, please, you know you’re not supposed to drive.’ And it wasn’t because she wanted to do it, it was out of necessity, to get to school.

“Most times friends would give her rides, but sometimes that couldn’t happen and she had to drive.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

More Dalton residents picked up for deportation

America Gruner is a longtime Dalton immigrant community advocate and president of the Coalition of Latino Leaders, a local Hispanic-serving nonprofit. She said arrests like Ximena’s happen on a recurring basis in Dalton, even if most don’t generate the same level of attention.

“We receive calls almost every day about similar situations, from people who have been in Dalton for 30, 35 years, with children born here, and because of a traffic violation, they are now in a detention center or have been deported,” she said. “In (Ximena’s) case, what she has done is to draw attention to people who were not familiar with this type of situation, and they have given them visibility at a state level and national, right?

“But, as I say, unfortunately, it is not the only case.”

Gruner explained ICE has not had to be physically present in Dalton this year for city residents to face deportation. Instead, a long-standing partnership between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents means that anyone without lawful status who is booked in Whitfield County Jail is flagged for ICE pickup.

According to Gruner, most immigrants who are living in the Dalton area illegally wind up on ICE’s radar because of traffic violations.

“They stop people and tell them that were going too fast, or that they drove through a stop sign. But how do we really know if that’s true or not?” Gruner said, referencing the police error that led to Ximena being pulled over.

Credit: Miguel Martinez

Credit: Miguel Martinez

According to the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office, ICE lodged 98 “detainers,” or requests to pick up immigrants arrested in the county, from January through March, up from 30 detainers sent from October through December 2024.

To lower community members’ exposure to detention and deportation, Gruner’s nonprofit operates a long-running initiative dubbed Ruta de la Libertad, or Freedom Road, which organizes a network of volunteers with driver’s licenses to give rides to people without status.

The organization also has been distributing flyers asking immigrant residents to avoid getting behind the wheel.

“A lot of people think that us telling people to not drive without a license means we are giving up. But we see it as the opposite,” Gruner said. “Right now, they have the power to detain us if we don’t have licenses. We take that power away from them if we don’t put ourselves in that situation.”

Like Gruner, state Rep. Kasey Carpenter, a Republican from Dalton, says he gets multiple calls from constituents every week about ICE detention. He said he would like to see federal immigration policy address both border security and the needs of families like Ximena’s, who don’t currently have a clear pathway to legal residency.

“Secure the borders, everybody’s cool with that,” Carpenter said. “Get the criminals out of here. Nobody’s got heartburn with that. But let’s figure out what we are going to do with the rest of these people. Because the economy can’t handle hauling all these people off.”

Ximena, he said, “is not supposed to be without a license. I get that. And I’m not trying to downplay the reality of that, but I also know you got limited resources to detain and deport people. Let’s focus our attention on the hardened criminals.”

Carpenter’s views on immigration can make him a target of criticism in his district. Whitfield County is both heavily Hispanic and heavily conservative. He says he is used to it.

“There’s always flak but, I mean, it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “I can’t be a Christian on Sunday and then haul a Christian off on Monday.”

Dalton’s more high-profile Republican representative, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, offered a different perspective on Ximena’s case.

“While local Dalton officials dropped her charges, the facts remain: she was driving illegally without a license and has no legal basis to remain in the United States,” Greene said in a statement.

“Today, there are currently 1.6 million American citizens living and thriving in Mexico legally,” Greene’s statement says. “But if I moved to Mexico illegally with my children when they were young, Mexican authorities would enforce their laws. I would be arrested and deported. That’s how sovereignty and the rule of law work.”

In a statement, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security echoed Greene: “Both father and daughter were in this country illegally and they have to face consequences … (They) will be able to return to Mexico together.”

‘She is not a criminal’

According to Cristobal, her family moved to Dalton in 2010 because her brother had already settled in the area. That timeline locked Ximena out of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects some undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.

To be DACA-eligible, young immigrants had to have lived continuously in the U.S. since 2007.

Cristobal’s husband got his start working odd jobs, then launched his own construction company. Ximena studies business administration at Dalton State and had hopes of teaming up with her father to help grow his company. She planned to get a real estate license and help sell the houses her father built.

“Ximena would ask her father, ‘Dad, do you think I can do it?’ And he would say, ‘Xime, for you, the sky’s the limit. Whatever you set out to do, you’ll make it happen.’”

Memories like those come back to Cristobal when she spends time in her daughter’s bedroom, looking through photos she has there.

Shortly before speaking to the AJC, the family received some good news: Ximena’s father had just been granted bail, meaning he will be able to leave detention and fight his deportation case from home. Ximena will have her own bail hearing Tuesday.

Although she speaks on the phone with her daughter every day, Cristobal is not sure how she is coping with the conditions in the ICE jail.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Ximena doesn’t share too many details, probably so that her mother doesn’t worry too much, Cristobal said. She has thought about traveling to the detention facility to visit her daughter, but worries doing so could put her in danger as someone who lacks legal status.

“It would scare me to go near that place,” she said.

“I’ll tell you again, and maybe this will sound repetitive, but this is my daughter. She is not a criminal. My daughter is just a young woman filled with dreams for the future.”