Citizenship Will Not Save Us
A US citizen is being held for immigration purpose—without charge despite showing his birth certificate—in a local jail in Florida. A nightmare scenario sees the light of day.
A US citizen is being held without criminal charges tonight in Florida as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda—a nightmare scenario that suddenly ceased to be merely hypothetical.
Juan Carlos Gomez-Lopez was in a car driving from Georgia to Florida when it was pulled over by State Highway Patrol. He is currently held in Leon County, home to Tallahassee, where initial reporting says he is charged with entering the state as an “illegal alien” under a new state law.
A local judge inspected Gomez-Lopez’s US birth certificate and found it to be authentic. Even so, and even though his misdemeanor charges have been dropped, Leon County Sheriff’s Office is still holding the 20-year-old in jail for no other reason than ICE asked them to. It was only a matter of time before this happened.
As I wrote earlier this week, Florida is ground zero for Trump’s aggressive efforts at building an army of deportation officers out of state and local law enforcement agencies. The State Highway Patrol officer who arrested Gomez-Lopez belonged to an agency that signed on to ICE’s exploding 287(g) program that delegates immigration enforcement authority to non-federal agencies.
The Sheriff’s Office in Leon County, Florida—where Gomez-Lopez is being detained—has two active 287(g) agreements: a Warrant Service Officer agreement signed in 2019 that the Biden administration allowed to remain in place and a Task Force Model agreement signed this February under the new Trump administration. (You can see the data for yourself here.)
This is precisely the nightmare scenario that many people have worried about for several months now. Trump has repeatedly refused to demonstrate any commitment to following the law in matters of immigration enforcement and has refused to draw the line at arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizens. In fact, the White House indicated as recently as this week that it would pursue avenues to deport US citizens to El Salvador.
It could get much worse. We don’t know the full story of Gomez-Lopez. The breaking story claims that he was born in the United States, moved to Mexico when he was one year old, then returned when he was 16 years old.
However, if one or both of his parents are undocumented (or were undocumented at some point in the past), it is possible that the Trump administration will attempt to exploit the Gomez-Lopez case not only to test the limits of deporting US citizens, but also testing their wildly imaginative claims that the 14th Amendment does not confer citizenship on children of undocumented immigrants.
In the case of Abrego Garcia, the man unlawfully deported to El Salvador, the Trump administration launched a public smear campaign to distract from more fundamental questions of law. Be forewarned: they could do so here, too. We do not know the entire situation yet, but we should not allow ourselves to get distracted. As long as these initial facts about Gomez-Lopez are accurate, the rest is of secondary importance.
This story arrived in my inbox just as I was assembling some initial thoughts for a post titled “Citizenship Will Not Save You.” My inchoate goal with that post was to try to urge more people to wake up to the reality that the protections we believe citizenship affords to us are far more fragile than we realize.
As we know from history, the benefits of citizenship—when gradually and unevenly extended to people—have always been mediated through gender, race, age, and other dimensions of social identity. For some people, the combination of race and citizenship will provide protection against deportation. For others, no amount of documentation will ever clear the hurdle imposed on their race, class, and indigeneity.
Yet like so much of the past three months, just as sit down to write a more speculative piece about the dangers we face, I see that same speculation show up in my news feed as horrifying reality.
Let’s not forget that Trump first made a political name for himself as spokesperson of the birther movement, the false claim that President Obama was not a legitimate president because he was not born in the United States. Here again, Gomez-Lopez provided the court with unambiguous proof of citizenship—yet he still sits in jail.
When the state refuses to see a difference between citizens and non-citizens, it should be a warning sign to us to stop dividing ourselves along these same artificial lines. And when the state promises to disappear citizens to legal black holes in El Salvador, it is time for us to realize that none of us are truly safe.
This is a hard truth, a scary truth—but buried within the moment of recognition is an opportunity to build new alliances, to draw new lines of dignity for all and a defense against authoritarianism.
We are less than three months into a 48-month presidency, friends. If you haven’t done so yet, today is the day to get honest about the dangers we face as a country.
They are not drawing the line at US citizens.
The initial story was reported by Jackie Llanos at the Florida Phoenix and picked up by Suzanne Gamboa at NBC News.
Update 4/17/2025: Gomez-Lopez was released today. His mother says she plans to sue over the detention. My appreciation to Jackie Llanos for excellent reporting and to Dara Lind for flagging this development for me in the comments.
Read: U.S. citizen released from jail after arrest under Florida’s new anti-immigration law.
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Gomez-Lopez was released earlier tonight. https://bsky.app/profile/llanosjackie.bsky.social/post/3ln2as4myj22e
"They are not drawing the line at US citizens."
Why would they? They're getting away with eliminating due process on immigrants, so why wouldn't they do the same to citizens if it suits their purposes?
It's time to wake up, folks. They system isn't broken and needs to be fixed--the system is fixed against us on purpose, and we need to break it open if we ever hope to build an actual democracy.