11 PM on 4/17/25, There is currently a US citizen being detained by order of ICE, in a county jail in Florida.
He appeared before a county judge (via Zoom); she saw, examined, and verified his birth certificate, which was brought to her by the man's mother. The judge confirmed that he is a US citizen and there is no probable cause to hold him on the charge of crossing into Florida as an undocumented immigrant*, because he is a US citizen.
However, she does not have the authority to dismiss the ICE order to detain him. So the jail, the prosecutor, the county sheriff, everyone involved, has decided to err on the side of caution by just keeping him there in jail until either ICE give them permission to let him go, or comes and gets him, or the order expires.
Because, you know, that's the prudent thing to do these days, as a county or state official. Trump has declared that certain government agencies, individuals, and groups are answerable only to him, and not to the rule of law, so if they give you an order, you obey it whether it makes any sense or not. Because getting in Trump's crosshairs is worse than, in this case, wrongfully imprisoning a fellow citizen.
The good news for this man, whose name is Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, is that the ICE order expires in 48 hours, at which time the jail will automatically be authorized to release him.
The bad news is that, as we have seen, if ICE does show up and collect him within those 48 hours, they could do literally anything to him, up to and including disappearing him to a supermax prison El Salvador--for the crime of being in Florida while Hispanic--and there will be no legal recourse or due process whatsoever.
So, that's some real dystopian shit right there. Per the CNN article, it is looking like ICE is planning to let him go and frantically shift blame to one or more of the state or county-level agencies involved in this fiasco, but it's still super-fucked up, and about all we can do about it is hope that, by making clear that we noticed--both that it happened, and that it's super fucked-up--we will generate an atmosphere in which ICE et al. feel somewhat constrained from doing it again.
(*Florida recently made it a state-level offense for undocumented immigrants to enter the state. This law is currently suspended for review by the courts, so they shouldn't be detaining anyone under suspicion of having violated this law. However, even if the law were in force, it would not apply to this man, because he is a US citizen.)
