Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen, was being held in the Leon County Jail Thursday, charged with illegally entering Florida as an “unauthorized alien” — even as a supporter waved his U.S. birth certificate in court.
The man, who was arrested Wednesday after a traffic stop in which he was a passenger on his way to his job in Tallahassee, is set to remain in jail for the next 48 hours, waiting for federal immigration officials to pick him up, even though Leon County authorities dropped his first-degree misdemeanor charge.
His mother, Sebastiana Gomez-Perez, burst into tears at the sight of her son, who appeared virtually for his first hearing at the Leon County Courthouse. She left the courtroom distraught because she could do nothing to help her son, who was born and lives in Grady County, Georgia.
“I wanted to tell them, ‘Where are you going to take him? He is from here,’” his mother told the Phoenix in Spanish moments after exiting the courtroom. “I felt immense helplessness because I couldn’t do anything, and I am desperate to get my son out of there.”
Fair enough. But at least if you aren’t a legal citizen, what they’re doing might technically be legal. And you’re probably “just” going to be deported to your home country. If you are a citizen, there may be no ambiguity. There often may simply be nowhere to deport you to except an offshore gulag.
I’m a US citizen by birth. My ancestry in the country goes back to before the revolution. I have citizenship nowhere else. There is nowhere on Earth that I could emigrate and qualify for citizenship by ancestry. Believe me, I’ve checked. There is no country on Earth that they could deport me to that would accept that deportation. If I’m getting rounded up by ICE, it is guaranteed that I’m going that hellhole in El Salvador.
This doesn’t mean that me being sent there is somehow worse than an immigrant being sent there. No one deserves to be sent there. But the fact remains that the vast majority of people being rounded up by ICE are not being sent there. But if ICE comes for me, there is no ambiguity. I have nothing left to lose.