When police in Dalton, Georgia pulled over Ximena Arias-Cristobal, officers accused the 19-year-old college student of making an illegal right turn at a red light.
She told officers she didn’t have her international driver’s license on her, according to a police report, and she was taken into custody.
Then she was moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center roughly four hours away, and now she faces the possibility of being removed from the country along with her family.
But local police this week admitted the officers made a mistake.
After a review of dash cam footage from the traffic stop on May 5, “it was determined that Ms. Arias-Cristobal’s vehicle appeared similar to the offending vehicle but was not the vehicle that made an improper turn,” according to a statement from the Dalton Police Department.
Police and prosecutors dismissed the charges against her, but Donald Trump’s administration intends to remove her from the United States, where she has lived since she was four years old.
Arias-Cristobal’s parents did not have legal permission to enter the United States from Mexico in 2010 when she was a toddler, and she did not qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which ended the year before her family entered the country, according to family friends.
She is now isolated from her family members — except one. Her father Jose Francisco Arias-Tovar was recently arrested after allegedly going 19 miles over the speed limit and is inside the same ICE detention center, according to online detention records reviewed by The Independent.
“The family will be able to return to Mexico together,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent following her arrest.
“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.
Her bond hearing is scheduled for May 20.
During a news conference on Monday, Dalton’s assistant chief of police Chris Crossen “we certainly regret the circumstances that led us to where we are today.”
“After suffering for more than a week in police and ICE custody, it turns out this was all the result of a police mistake,” her attorney Dustin Baxter said in a statement.
“The tragedy of our system is that there is no immediate remedy for Ximena, as ICE does not care about fairness or justice,” he added.
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.
Her arrest sparked outrage and ongoing protests throughout the Dalton community, and Republican state Representative Kacey Carpenter is pressing an immigration judge for her swift release.
“It’s impossible. I mean, that’s the argument that you hear all the time from people on the other side is, ‘well, they’ve been here 15 years. Why haven’t they become a citizen?’ Because it’s impossible,” Carpenter told NewsChannel 9. “There is not a pathway for someone that is in America right now towards citizenship, unless they get married or they have a child, and the child grows up and the child’s 18, then they can petition for their parents. But as far as an individual that’s between the ages of four and 25, there’s no pathway.”
A GoFundMe established by family friend Hannah Jones, whose children Arias-Cristobol baby-sat for several years, has raised nearly $80,000 as of this publication.
Dalton is a largely Republican-leaning part of the state, but Jones told The Independent last week that “everyone knows this is wrong.”
She is currently jailed inside Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center, operated by private prison firm CoreCivic. At least 10 people died in the facility between 2017 and 2024, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union, which had previously criticized the facility for inadequate conditions and due process violations.
Her arrest follows several high-profile cases across the country involving immigrant families with mixed legal statuses, as the president and immigration officials embark on a sweeping, aggressive anti-immigration agenda.
