A college student was stopped after turning right on red. Now she could be deported

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

On Monday, Dalton Police Department officers pulled over the 19-year-old college student for allegedly 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.

Now she faces the possibility of being deported from the country along with her family.

Arias-Cristobal was wearing chains around her wrists and ankles when she was moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center this week, according to friends and family.

Online records reviewed by The Independent show she is jailed inside the Stewart Detention Center, roughly four hours away from Dalton in Lumpkin, home to one of the largest and most notorious immigration detention centers in the country, operated by private prison firm CoreCivic, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America. 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.

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 not expected to appear before an immigration judge for several weeks, and she is isolated from her family members — except one. Her father Jose Francisco Arias-Tovar was recently arrested after going 19 miles over the speed limit and is inside the same ICE detention center, according to online records.

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 years, Jones said.

“We adore her,” she wrote on a GoFundMe that has raised nearly $50,000 as of this publication.

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 shown a wide majority of American support legislation that would open a pathway to permanent legal status for young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children. In January, days before Donald Trump entered office, a federal appeals court ruled against DACA, but the decision did not deliver any immediate changes for the program’s more than 500,000 beneficiaries, teeing up a Supreme Court challenge.

“The overwhelming majority of the American public” supports legal protections for immigrants who entered the country with their parents as children, said 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 comment from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

Dalton Police is among local law enforcement agencies with a “jail enforcement model” agreement with ICE, which allows 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 seeking to expand the use of those so-called 287(g) agreements, named after Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which lays the groundwork for partnerships between local police and federal law enforcement.

Arias-Cristobal’s 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.

The White House claims to have removed more than 142,000 people from the country within the president’s first few months in office, though it’s unclear how the administration is counting those numbers.