A U.S. citizen was arrested in Florida for allegedly being in the country illegally and held for pickup by immigration authorities even after his mother showed a judge her son’s birth certificate and the judge dismissed charges.
Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, 20, was in a car that was stopped just past the Georgia state line by the Florida Highway Patrol on April 16, said Thomas Kennedy, a spokesperson at the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
Gomez and others in the car were arrested under a new Florida law, which is on hold, making it a crime for people who are in the country illegally to enter the state.
It is unclear if Lopez Gomez showed documents proving he is a citizen to the arresting officers. He was held at Leon County Jail and released after his case received widespread media coverage.
The charge of illegal entry into Florida was dropped April 17 after his mother showed the judge his state identification card, birth certificate, and Social Security card, said Kennedy, who attended the hearing. Court records show Judge Lashawn Riggans found no basis for the charge.
Lopez Gomez briefly remained in custody after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested he remain there for 48 hours, a common practice when the agency wants to take custody of someone.
The case drew widespread attention because ICE is not supposed to take custody of U.S.-born citizens. While the immigration agency can occasionally get involved in cases of naturalized citizens who committed offenses such as lying on immigration forms, it has no authority over people born in the U.S.
Civil liberty advocates contend that this case is not an accident. They say was intentional and malicious. ICE did not make a bureaucratic error. It acted with full knowledge that it had no jurisdiction over a U.S.-born citizen, and did so anyway. And there has been no accountability.
That overreach reveals the true role the agency is being primed to play under Trump’s regime: an unaccountable and militarized enforcement wing willing to ignore citizenship status, court rulings, and constitutional protections in pursuit of a political agenda.
The 48-hour hold was not about confusion, it is seen as a deliberate test of how far ICE could go without consequence.
Legal experts and civil rights groups have increasingly warned that under Trump’s second term, ICE is being transformed from an immigration agency into a domestic surveillance and enforcement apparatus — functionally, a secret police force.
Isolated cases like Lopez Gomez’s are not anomalies, they are pilot programs. The targets are those who “look foreign,” speak accented English, or simply fit a profile. And the goal is clear: to build a culture of fear, bypass due process, and normalize federal kidnapping under the banner of immigration enforcement.
Adding to the confusion is a federal judge’s ruling to put a hold on the enforcement of the Florida law against people who are in the country illegally entering the state, which meant it should not have been enforced.
“No one should be arrested under that law, let alone a U.S. citizen,” said Alana Greer, an immigration attorney from the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “They saw this person, he didn’t speak English particularly well, and so they arrested him and charged him with this law that no one (should) be charged with.”
