A university scholar was stopped after turning proper on crimson. Now she may very well be deported | EUROtoday

Ximena Arias-Cristobal has lived in Georgia’s Whitfield County since she was 4 years outdated.

On Monday, Dalton Police Department officers pulled over the 19-year-old school scholar for allegedly making an unlawful proper flip at a crimson mild. She advised officers she didn’t have her worldwide driver’s license on her, in keeping with a police report, and she or he was taken into custody.

Now she faces the potential for being deported from the nation alongside along with her household.

Arias-Cristobal was carrying chains round her wrists and ankles when she was moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention heart this week, in keeping with family and friends.

Online data reviewed by The Independent present she is jailed contained in the Stewart Detention Center, roughly 4 hours away from Dalton in Lumpkin, house to one of many largest and most infamous immigration detention facilities within the nation, operated by personal jail agency CoreCivic, previously the Corrections Corporation of America. At least 10 individuals died within the facility between 2017 and 2024, in keeping with a report from the American Civil Liberties Union, which had beforehand criticized the ability for insufficient situations and due course of violations.

Arias-Cristobal’s dad and mom didn’t have authorized permission to enter the United States from Mexico in 2010 when she was a toddler, and she or he didn’t qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which ended the yr earlier than her household entered the nation, in keeping with household mates.

She is just not anticipated to look earlier than an immigration decide for a number of weeks, and she or he is remoted from her members of the family — besides one. Her father Jose Francisco Arias-Tovar was lately arrested after going 19 miles over the pace restrict and is inside the identical ICE detention heart, in keeping with on-line data.

“The family will be able to return to Mexico together,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent.

“Mr. Tovar had ample opportunity to seek a legal pathway to citizenship. He chose not to. We are not ignoring the rule of law,” she added.

The Trump administration’s CBP Home app “is giving parents illegally in the country a chance to take full control of their departure and self-deport, with the potential ability to return the legal, right way and come back to live the American dream,” McLaughlin said.

Arias-Cristobal is a recent graduate of Dalton High School and a cross country athlete now attending Dalton State College. She was enrolled for the spring 2025 semester, a college spokesperson told The Independent.

The family came to the United States “with big dreams because they wanted a big future for my older sister,” Arias-Cristobal’s younger sister told Georgia’s WTVC NewsChannel 9.

“My sister goes to college, and she was an honor student since middle school. And she runs. She loves to run. It’s her passion, and the only reason they came is to follow my sister’s dreams,” she said.

Arias-Cristobal was a babysitter for family friend Hannah Jones for the last three years, she told The Independent.

“She’s extended family,” she said.

The last few days have been “an emotional rollercoaster” for the family, Jones said. She created a GoFundMe that has raised more than $60,000 as of this publication.

Dalton is a largely Republican-leaning part of the state, but Jones said “everyone knows this is wrong.”

Republican state Representative Kacey Carpenter is pressing an immigration judge for her release.

“The reality is, the conversation has always been that we need to get hard criminals out of the country,” Carpenter told NewsChannel 9. “Unfortunately, the people that aren’t hard criminals are getting caught up in the wash. It seems like we are much better at catching people that are committing misdemeanors than people that are actually a danger to society.”

Polling has routinely proven a large majority of American assist laws that will open a pathway to everlasting authorized standing for younger immigrants delivered to the United States illegally as youngsters. In January, days earlier than Donald Trump entered workplace, a federal appeals court docket dominated towards DACA, however the determination didn’t ship any instant adjustments for this system’s greater than 500,000 beneficiaries, teeing up a Supreme Court problem.

“The overwhelming majority of the American public” helps authorized protections for immigrants who entered the nation with their dad and mom as youngsters, stated Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior Fellow with the American Immigration Council.

“It makes no sense to deport this woman. We make the USA worse off by doing it,” he wrote.

The Independent has requested remark from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

Dalton Police is amongst native regulation enforcement businesses with a “jail enforcement model” settlement with ICE, which permits federal officers to “identify and process removable aliens — with criminal or pending criminal charges — who are arrested by state or local law enforcement agencies.”

The Trump administration is looking for to increase using these so-called 287(g) agreements, named after Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which lays the groundwork for partnerships between native police and federal regulation enforcement.

Arias-Cristobal’s arrest follows a number of high-profile instances throughout the nation involving immigrant households with combined authorized statuses, because the president and immigration officers embark on a sweeping, aggressive anti-immigration agenda.

The White House claims to have eliminated greater than 142,000 individuals from the nation throughout the president’s first few months in workplace, although it’s unclear how the administration is counting these numbers.