“A US-born man initially charged with being an “unauthorized alien” in Florida has been released after spending the night in jail on a 48-hour hold requested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid the Trump administration’s broad deportation crackdown.
Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, 20, was arrested by Florida Highway Patrol on Wednesday when the car he was riding in was pulled over for a traffic stop, said his attorney, Mutaqee Akbar. The American citizen – born in Grady County, Georgia, where he lives in the city of Cairo – was crossing into Florida for his work in construction in Tallahassee, about 45 minutes from home.
The new Florida law that Lopez-Gomez was arrested under – designed to discourage undocumented immigrants from entering the state and touted by its Republican leaders – had been temporarily blocked by a judge, according to news reports and a spokesperson for the immigrant rights coalition working with Lopez-Gomez’s family.
A state judge later found no probable cause for the charge of crossing into Florida illegally, but she said didn’t have jurisdiction to release Lopez-Gomez because of the ICE hold, court records show.
It was not immediately clear why Lopez-Gomez may have been the subject of an immigration detainer, with which ICE asks law enforcement agencies to notify it “before releasing a removable alien” and to “hold the alien for up to 48 hours” to give its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security, time to take the migrant into custody.
While “no US citizen is a proper subject of a detainer, … many US citizens have been the mistaken subject of ICE detainers and even prolonged detention and removal, despite their assertion of citizenship,” according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a non-profit working on such issues since 1979.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/american-citizen-detained-under-ice-013141935.html