Ximena Arias-Cristobal, the 19-year-old Dalton College student whose arrest following a traffic stop earlier this month landed her in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will be released Thursday, her lawyer told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Arias-Cristobal was granted a $1,500 bond after being held for more than two weeks at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin. She will be able to stay at home with her family while the U.S. government continues to pursue her deportation.
While driving in Dalton on May 5, Arias-Cristobal was pulled over and arrested by a Dalton police officer who mistakenly believed she had made an illegal turn at a red light. Police determined she was living in the country without authorization, and turned her in to ICE.
Weeks earlier, Arias-Cristobal’s father, Jose Francisco Arias-Tovar, was also sent to ICE detention in South Georgia following a traffic stop in Whitfield County. Police arrested him for speeding.
“I was still trying to come to terms with what happened to my husband, and then all of a sudden, Ximena,” Arias-Cristobal’s mother, Ndahitha Cristobal, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She watched her daughter be arrested in real time. “It was like a bomb going off for me.”
Arias-Tovar was released on bond last week, following nearly one month in ICE custody at Stewart.
“It’s the worst thing that could have happened to me as a father, leaving my daughter there,” he told Univision upon his return to Dalton.
News of Arias-Cristobal’s arrest spread fast and wide, sparking national headlines and several rounds of protests in Dalton, a majority Hispanic town in the northwest corner of the state.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
The family, originally from Mexico, had been living in Georgia without legal status since 2010. Arias-Cristobal was 4 years old when the family came over, but she was ineligible to apply for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects some undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.
To be DACA-eligible, young immigrants had to have lived continuously in the U.S. since 2007.
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