The Kafkaesque Case of Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez Is a Warning to Us All
For almost a decade now, Florida has served as a laboratory for hardline immigration policies that are later exported to other state legislatures across the country. The recent arrest of Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a U.S.-born citizen who was mistakenly detained under an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hold in Leon County, shows the threat that these persecutory laws pose for the civil rights of all people, regardless of immigration status.
Since 2019, state lawmakers, at Gov. Ron DeSantis’s behest, have approved a series ofanti-immigrant bills, starting with Senate Bill (SB) 168 and SB 1808. These bills mandated cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and banned sanctuary cities in Florida, even though at the time of passage, no Florida cities had enacted sanctuary city-type policies.
That was followed by further legislation threatening licenses of nonprofit shelters that housed unaccompanied migrant children; more bills banning sanctuary policies (even though, again, no city in the state had enacted those policies); and the passage of SB 1718 in 2023. This legislation made national headlines by, among other things, establishing felony charges for crossing the state line with an undocumented person in your vehicle even if they were family; mandating that health care providers that accept Medicaid dollars ask a patient’s immigration status; and requiring the use of E-Verify for private companies with 25 or more employees.
Soon after Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, DeSantis started beating the anti-immigrant drum once again, convening the Florida legislature to enact a smorgasbord of policies that included making it harder for Floridians to send remittances to loved ones abroad, and repealing the state’s in-state tuition law, which allows undocumented students to pay the same undergraduate college tuition rates as U.S. citizens. He also levied harsh threats to remove elected officials who obstruct cooperation between local police and federal immigration enforcement.
State lawmakers did indeed meet for a special session in February, but they did not enact DeSantis’s wish list. After infighting between the governor and the legislature, Florida Senate President Ben Albritton and House Speaker Daniel Perez stopped DeSantis from establishing a state agency for immigration enforcement that would be de facto controlled by him via an appointee. The compromise was instead to set up a board composed of the governor, the agriculture commissioner, the chief financial officer and the attorney general to oversee this new agency, financed with $500 million of Florida taxpayer dollars.
Along with setting up this state-level immigration enforcement agency, the legislature also enacted Senate Bill 4C, which is now the center of a new scandal in Florida that has caught nationwide attention. This law established criminal penalties for undocumented immigrants over 18 years old who “knowingly enter or attempt to enter this state after entering the United States by eluding or avoiding examination or inspection by immigration officers.”
The organization that I work for, the Florida Immigrant Coalition, along with others and represented by the ACLU and Community Justice Project, filed a lawsuit that successfully got Senate Bill 4C temporarily blocked in court earlier this month. This law is currently not supposed to be enforced at all in Florida, and no arrests are supposed to be made based on it. Despite this, at least 15 arrests have been made.
This lawless behavior by Florida officials was capped off by the illegal arrest of Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez on April 16. Florida Highway Patrol, a police force that has been deputized under the orders of DeSantis to conduct immigration enforcement operations, arrested him. Lopez-Gomez was charged under Senate Bill 4C for having illegally entered Florida as an unauthorized alien, even though he is a U.S.-born citizen. He was detained at the request of ICE.
Lopez-Gomez was the passenger in a car and was traveling to Florida for work. He had been previously placed in an ICE hold for another traffic incident in Georgia in which his family had managed to convince officials to release him after showing proof of citizenship, which included his birth certificate. He had no such luck in Florida.
After his arrest, he was transferred to the Leon County jail and held there. Appearing virtually at his hearing, I met his desperate mother, Sebastiana Gomez-Perez, who showed up with his birth certificate to try and convince the judge to release her son.
I met his desperate mother, Sebastiana Gomez-Perez, who showed up with his birth certificate to try and convince the judge to release her son.
Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggans held and put Lopez-Gomez’s birth certificate up to the light after it was silently waved in the courtroom by the family. “In looking at it, and feeling it, and holding it up to the light, the court can see the watermark to show that this is indeed an authentic document,” Riggans said.
After inspection of the birth certificate, the judge found no probable cause for the charge but argued that, due to ICE requesting he be detained, she did not have jurisdiction to order his release.
It’s worth noting the depth of just how wronged Lopez-Gomez was here. He was arrested and detained under a law that was blocked by a judge and that was not meant to target him in the first place as a U.S. citizen, a double error which deprived him of his freedom. On top of that, this is all acknowledged by a judge who refuses to uphold his Fourth Amendment rights, and instead surrenders jurisdiction of a U.S. citizen who is acknowledged to have committed no crime to ICE, which is not supposed to hold jurisdiction over U.S. citizens. Lopez-Gomez’s arrest was a shocking violation of basic principles of U.S. civil liberties and constitutional rights. It can be compared to Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, in which a man must defend himself in a trial in which he does not know the crime for which he is accused by a nebulous authority.
We were able to secure legal representation for Lopez-Gomez, and the ensuing firestorm generated by his case once news broke out helped to ensure his eventual release, even though he had been previously ordered to remain in detention under a 48-hour ICE hold.
Journalists, advocates, and elected officials desperately called ICE officials and did not hear back until about 6 pm, when his mother was contacted outside of the Leon County jail, where we had gathered along with community members protesting Lopez-Gomez’s unjustified detention.
A Department of Homeland Security official met us at a Wendy’s restaurant about a block away, where Lopez-Gomez finally reunited with his family. He appeared shaken after spending 24 hours in jail and told us he was not fed while detained the day before.
“I felt bad in there,” Lopez-Gomez told us as he ate a meal upon his release. “They didn’t give us anything to eat all day yesterday.”
Sebastiana Gomez-Perez was immensely grateful to everyone who helped secure her son’s release, saying, “I don’t have a way to pay all the people who are helping us. People from other states have called us, and we don’t have a way to pay them; we can only thank them.”
Lopez-Gomez’s arrest was a shocking violation of basic principles of U.S. civil liberties and constitutional rights.
Lopez-Gomez’s arrest is a clear case of racial profiling. He was born in Cairo, Georgia, but spent most of his life in Mexico. He does not speak English, and when stopped, the Florida Highway Patrol officers assumed he was undocumented based on his inability to speak English, and based on his appearance. What is also shocking is that arrest records show that the ICE hold was requested based on biometric evidence — but if that is the case, the officers should have known Lopez-Gomez was a citizen.
In a hearing in Miami federal court the day after Lopez-Gomez was released, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said she was “astounded” that state authorities had continued to make arrests despite her ordering them not to. While stopping short of holding state authorities in contempt of court, she extended her initial 14-day restraining order against Senate Bill 4C for another 11 days, making it clear that Florida law enforcement was bound by her order and that the arrests needed to stop. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier finally ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Florida Highway Patrol, state sheriffs and police chiefs to “please instruct your officers and agents to comply with Judge Williams’ directives,” while still making the absurd argument that the court order should not apply to law enforcement officers.
Lopez-Gomez’s arrest shows why the persecutory and ever-growing hostile framework of immigration enforcement in this country is a threat to every citizen and not just undocumented immigrants. We currently see student visa holders detained and ordered deported for merely writing op-eds that contradict the opinions of the Trump administration. We see legal permanent residents detained and ordered deported because of peaceful student activism. We see efforts to strip citizenship from those naturalized. We have finally arrived at the unfortunate but logical conclusion of this government overreach: U.S. citizens detained by immigration enforcement agencies that should have no jurisdiction over them, while Trump threatens to ship “home-growns” to prisons in El Salvador, where due process is nonexistent and torture is rampant.
The scope of persecution against immigrants, the enforcement practices, the surveillance tactics and the erosion of our civil rights always expand to the broader population, as Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez experienced.