Georgia man arrested as ‘unauthorized alien’ calls police encounter traumatic

But speeding wasn’t the issue for Lopez-Gomez — his legal right to be in the country was.

The police report says Lopez-Gomez told the officer that he was in the country illegally, and that allowed his arrest and detention under Florida’s “unauthorized alien” law — legislation that also directs state police to work with immigration enforcement officials to turn over those arrested for possible deportation.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement placed a “detainer” on Lopez-Gomez that continued holding him in jail for hours after his birth certificate was produced in court and a judge determined his citizenship. A spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security also said Lopez-Gomez was arrested after admitting he was in the country illegally.

“When individuals admit to committing a crime, like entering the country illegally, they will of course be detained while officers investigate,” the statement says.

But Lopez-Gomez says none of that makes sense. He was born in this Grady County town of 10,000 people and knows he is a U.S. citizen. Lopez-Gomez said he also tried to show the trooper his Social Security and Georgia identification cards, hoping that would convince him of the truth.

“He was asking me if I was from Mexico. I told him I was from Georgia,” Lopez-Gomez said. “It didn’t matter to him.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

The arrest and subsequent detention in the Leon County jail has had a profound impact on Lopez-Gomez and his mother, Sebastiana Gomez-Perez, the two said in a recent exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The interview was conducted in a park near their home and was one of the few times Lopez-Gomez left his home since the arrest, he said.

Florida’s law is the latest manifestation of the immigration crackdown upon which President Donald Trump campaigned and has started to implement during his first 100 days in office.

Lopez-Gomez’s mother had a stark word for the encounter.

“The right word is racism,” Gomez-Perez said. “Just because of skin color, just because someone has Hispanic traits, that makes you illegal.”

Lopez-Gomez’s attorney, Mutaqee Akbar, said his client’s attempt to declare citizenship and provide documentation to the officer is exactly what he should have done during the encounter.

“He did everything he was supposed to do,” Akbar said.

Bulk of childhood in Mexico

Although born in Cairo, Lopez-Gomez spent the bulk of his childhood with his grandparents in Mexico, only returning to the U.S. three years ago.

He said he believes his appearance and lack of English language skills likely colored the treatment he received during the stop — and afterward at the jail.

“When I got to (jail), they started asking me how I could be from here and not speak English … the officers were making fun of me,” he said, adding that he felt desperate during his overnight stay in jail. “They said they were going to deport me.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

At a court hearing the next day, Gomez-Perez produced her son’s U.S. birth certificate. Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggans held it up to the light and concluded it was “indeed an authentic document,” according to coverage by nonprofit news outlet Florida Phoenix.

As a result, Riggans found no probable cause for the charge of an immigration violation, court records show. But, the judge said she lacked the jurisdiction to release Lopez-Gomez because ICE had lodged the detainer.

At that moment, Gomez-Perez said she felt immense disappointment and fear.

“It was as if my son didn’t count as an American citizen,” she said. “I started to cry in the courtroom.”

Lopez-Gomez was eventually released several hours later, on the evening of April 17, after dozens of protesters gathered in the jail’s parking lot, the Florida Phoenix reported. An ICE agent took him to a nearby Wendy’s restaurant, putting an end to 36 hours spent in detention.

When she reunited with her son at the restaurant, Gomez-Perez said it struck her that he was still wearing his work clothes from the day before.

“It hurt my heart a lot to see him like that, because he wasn’t a criminal … He didn’t deserve that,” she said. “He was going to work.”

Days before the Florida arrest, Lopez-Gomez was involved in another traffic stop in Grady County. That time, he was behind the wheel and was charged with driving under the influence.

But he wasn’t detained for ICE pickup because Georgia officials accepted that he was in the country legally, his mother said.

Not the first

Lopez-Gomez is not the first U.S. citizen taken into custody during the Trump administration’s drive for more deportations.

In late January, Chicago native Julio Noriega, 54, was walking down the street in Berwyn, Illinois, when he was approached by ICE officers who handcuffed him and placed him in a van, he said in court documents. The agents took him to an ICE processing center, where he remained for hours without receiving an opportunity to explain his citizenship.

According to a lawsuit he filed against the federal government, Noriega was never shown a warrant for his arrest. He was only released after officers examined the ID in his wallet, the lawsuit says.

And earlier this month, Border Patrol officials arrested U.S. citizen Jose Hermosillo, 19, in Arizona, and a criminal complaint was filed alleging he had entered the U.S. illegally. Hermosillo, who has intellectual disabilities, wound up being detained for 10 days, according to his family.

U.S. citizens are also showing up in the ranks of those who are deported from the country.

Last Friday, three U.S. citizen children from two families were deported with their mothers, The Washington Post reported. Among them was a 4-year-old with stage 4 cancer who was reportedly deported without medication.

Travel to Florida part of daily life

Gomez-Perez settled in Cairo as a teenager in the early 2000s, following in the footsteps of other relatives from Mexico who had moved to the area.

At the time, she said the Hispanic community mostly looked to South Georgia farms for economic opportunity, picking tomatoes, chilies, squash, cabbage and cotton. But the seasonal nature of agricultural labor made it difficult to provide for growing families. After giving birth to Lopez-Gomez at age 16, Gomez-Perez had three more children, all daughters.

Increasingly, she said Cairo’s Hispanic residents turned to construction jobs in the growing Tallahassee metro area. She began painting houses south of the state line in 2015, traveling from Georgia six days a week for work.

Cairo continued serving as a home base because of its lower cost of living, she said.

The South Georgia Hispanic community’s growing integration with Florida job sites put workers on a collision course with hardening immigration policy in the Sunshine State, where Republicans led by Gov. Ron DeSantis have turned a longtime haven for immigrants into a leading ally of the federal immigration crackdown.

Among a sweeping package of immigration bills recently passed in Florida was SB 4-C, which seeks to empower local law enforcement to arrest and prosecute immigrants who lack legal status. A federal judge blocked the law from taking effect earlier this month, but as many as 15 arrests have been made since then under SB 4-C, including Lopez-Gomez’s.

“Us, the people who go from here to Florida, we don’t go to steal, we don’t go to make trouble,” Gomez-Perez said. “We go to work, we go to look for a way to provide for our family.

“But that’s what they don’t understand.”

Chilling effect

As they are still processing the arrest, mother and son say they have yet to cross the state line and return to Florida for work. News of Lopez-Gomez’s detention, as well as the deportation of several Cairo residents, has created a chilling effect throughout the community, they say.

“I have work mates who call me and say, ‘What are we going to do? I’m scared to go (to Tallahassee), but I have bills to pay.’ … Everyone is in a panic,” Gomez-Perez said, adding that she is waiting for God to give her strength before going back to Florida.

To recover lost wages and legal costs, the family has launched a GoFundMe fundraiser.

Akbar, their attorney, said they are discussing a possible wrongful arrest lawsuit.

To lower the possibility of wrongful detention, he recommends people always carry documents with them and to make sure family members have readily available copies so they can quickly present them to lawyers or judges as needed.

Lopez-Gomez’s story shows that “it can happen to anybody who doesn’t fit a certain norm, so to speak,” he said. “Anybody who doesn’t speak enough English, anybody who is brown, anybody who may have too strong of an accent that is also a U.S. citizen is under threat.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez