Juan Aguilar was driving home from work in a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, when he took a wrong turn and grazed the side of another car.
For the other driver, the minor accident meant she had to miss a country music concert and deal with the repairs. For Aguilar, a 49-year-old undocumented immigrant and father of three, it ended 30 years of life in America.
Aguilar was arrested and convicted in May under a controversial new Florida immigration law that police and prosecutors weren’t allowed to enforce, after a federal judge blocked it in April. The undocumented passenger in his car was also arrested, though not convicted, under that law — which makes it a crime to enter the state as an undocumented person. They are among at least 27 people arrested in Florida since the judge’s order.
Within three days of his May 29 arrest, Aguilar was convicted and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. By the time prosecutors corrected the unlawful charge and threw out the conviction, Aguilar had already been deported to Mexico.
“They never gave me the opportunity to defend myself,” he told The Marshall Project in Spanish.
His arrest and deportation — never before publicly reported — show what can go awry as local police and prosecutors increasingly become part of the country’s rapidly expanding immigration dragnet. A legal battle over the Florida law reached the U.S. Supreme Court last week, when justices allowed the injunction blocking the law to remain in place.
Legal experts who reviewed Aguilar’s case said the justice system failed him at every turn: St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office deputies booked him and his coworker, Alejandro Perez, on the state immigration charge even after the department had told employees not to enforce the new law. The following day in court, when Aguilar asked for an attorney, the judge did not appoint him one. Instead, the prosecutor — whose office is a named defendant in the federal lawsuit — rushed to offer Aguilar a plea deal, court video shows. Aguilar immediately agreed to take it. An assistant public defender at the hearing did not intervene, and the judge approved the deal.
“It violates his due process to be prosecuted for an unconstitutional crime,” said Brandon Garrett, a law professor at Duke University. “That’s incredibly troubling.”
The State Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes most criminal cases in Florida, declined to comment. A spokesman for County Court Judge Alexander Christine, who presided over Aguilar and Perez’s cases, did not respond to questions. A spokesman for the sheriff’s office said the arrests were a mistake. “Essentially, this was an error, and the State Attorney’s Office was notified. We are honoring the direction of our General Counsel and the injunction,” Sgt. George Harrigan said.
Matthew Metz, the elected public defender for the judicial circuit that includes St. Johns County, said he had not previously heard of Aguilar’s case.
“While it does appear Mr. Juan Aguilar was told he was proceeding without a lawyer in his native language, I think my office can do better and intend to provide them with additional instruction,” Metz wrote in an email.
ICE did not respond to requests for comment.
When the Florida legislature passed a raft of anti-immigration bills in February, lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis touted their efforts to support President Donald Trump’s agenda. One measure, Senate Bill 4-C, made it a crime to enter the state after illegally entering the country, or re-entering after a removal. The law effectively created a state immigration enforcement system parallel to the federal government’s, even though courts have consistently held that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility.
Civil rights groups challenged Florida’s law in federal court. On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams issued a restraining order to block the law while the case makes its way through the courts. But Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier insisted that officers could continue making immigration arrests. In an April 23 letter to law enforcement agencies, Uthmeier wrote that “there remains no judicial order that properly restrains you from” enforcing the law. Williams later held Uthmeier in contempt for repeatedly defying the court’s orders.
Aguilar and Perez are among 27 people who were arrested under the Florida statute following the federal court’s order. The Tampa Bay Times previously reported 25 of those arrests were mostly by the Florida Highway Patrol. An analysis by The Marshall Project found the people arrested included a driver accused of briefly crossing a few inches into another lane, two passengers in two separate car accidents, and a U.S. citizen who was a passenger in a speeding car.
In at least two cases, prosecutors did not dismiss charges until late June — nearly two months after the federal judge’s order. Aguilar is the only person we found who was convicted of the charge among the cases we analyzed, though the outcome of every arrest could not be immediately determined.
Federal courts have blocked enforcement of similar laws creating state immigration offenses in four other states in the past two years. If federal courts eventually lift the injunction and allow Florida to enforce the new law, experts say some state courts may be flooded with non-English-speaking defendants pushed quickly through a system they may not understand.
The Marshall Project asked six legal experts to review videos of Aguilar and Perez’s court hearings. All said that the public defender, the judge and especially the prosecutor had a legal duty to halt the proceedings.
“No prosecutor in the state is allowed to prosecute this new crime the Legislature passed,” said Eric Fish, a law professor at the University of California Davis who studies the criminalization of immigration. “They either didn’t know or didn’t care.”
The experts said that the videos showed potential violations of due process rights that are endemic to lower-level courts, which process the vast majority of criminal cases in the U.S.
At their hearings, Aguilar and Perez had court interpreters but expressed confusion about the charges, copies of which were provided solely in English. In addition to the “unauthorized alien” law, Aguilar was charged with driving without a license.
The two men asked for attorneys. Experts said the judge should have paused their hearings to appoint one. Instead, the judge allowed the prosecutor to offer the men plea deals. Aguilar agreed to waive his right to an attorney — though he told The Marshall Project he thought that was his only option. The judge never determined whether Perez could afford an attorney, and no one from the public defender’s office offered to represent him.
“That was painful to watch,” Fish wrote to The Marshall Project, after reviewing the video of Perez’s hearing. He said the public defender in the room “should have spoken up and advocated that they be appointed.”
Legal experts said the judge also did a poor job of explaining the potential consequences of accepting the plea deal — such as immigration detention — and that it seemed as though the judge was pressuring Perez in particular to make a decision. “You wanna take the deal, or not?” the judge said at one point.
“The focus is on resolving cases and procedural efficiency, rather than due process,” Alisa Smith, a law professor at the University of Central Florida, wrote after reviewing the video of Perez’s hearing. “It strikes me as if the judge is trying to get Mr. Perez to change his mind and plead guilty or no contest, rather than get an attorney.”
Perez ultimately declined the plea deal and requested a bond. He was placed on an immigration detainer by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Marshall Project was unable to reach Perez for comment.
Aguilar, after accepting the deal, spent one more day in jail before he was transferred to ICE custody, where he was detained for seven days, he said.
After the federal judge in the legal dispute over the state law held Uthmeier in contempt of court in June, she ordered the attorney general to file regular reports on arrests made under the Florida immigration laws. One day after the office reported Aguilar and Perez’s arrests to the federal court, the state attorney moved to vacate Aguilar’s immigration-related conviction and drop Perez’s charge under the new state law. Aguilar remains convicted of driving without a license.
At immigration detention, Aguilar said authorities came to him every day with papers in English that he couldn’t understand, threatening him with deportation if he refused to sign them. Aguilar did eventually sign, although he said he doesn’t know what the documents said.
Aguilar said he was kept in shackles before officers uncuffed him and drove him to the Mexican border, where they handed him over to Mexican authorities.
He remains in Mexico, separated from some of his family who remain in the U.S. The experience of being detained and deported after three decades in the U.S., he said, has made him feel helpless. He said he feels safer in Mexico than in the U.S., where he spent his final weeks in a state of constant panic.
“Not everyone who is there is a criminal, a lot of us are good people,” Aguilar said of immigrants. “But they treat us all the same.”