Appearing with her lawyer before the media in Atlanta on Tuesday evening, Ximena Arias-Cristobal of Dalton said she has been holed up at home since getting out of federal immigration detention — fearful of exploring her community and removed from her old life of going to the gym, running, hanging out with friends.
“That’s not something I can do now,” she said, adding that she’s, for some people in her community, a target.
Arias-Cristobal is not the only one who feels this way. In a case that has received international media attention, her press conference comes days after the Dalton police officer who arrested her after pulling her over by mistake resigned, indicating he feels his employer didn’t have his back as false and unfair rumors about him spread.
In his resignation letter, Leslie Allen O’Neal said the city of Dalton has been silent in the face of “widespread defamation.” And in a message on social media Tuesday to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, O’Neal’s wife said her family has received harassment and slander and that those angry about Arias-Cristobal’s trouble with immigration authorities should direct their energies toward lawmakers, not local law enforcement.
With Dalton students’s arrest, many lives upended
“While no human is without flaws, Allen is, unequivocally, a good man,” Tiffany O’Neal wrote of her husband. “No human error that has occurred during his more than 10 years of service as an officer of the law has ever been of ethical question. The recent accusations leveled against him are baseless and deeply unfair.”
The saga of Arias-Cristobal, O’Neal and their families began early this month, when the Dalton police officer pulled over the Dalton State College student for allegedly making an improper right on red.
(READ MORE: For unauthorized immigrants, driving carries added risks)
After finding she had no driver’s license, he took her to the county jail, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained her shortly after, accusing her of being in the U.S. illegally.
Then came a twist. A police review of the incident, the city said, showed the officer had mistaken Arias-Cristobal’s vehicle for another similar-looking one which had in fact made the offending right turn.
The city said it dropped the local charges against Arias-Cristobal for an improper turn and driving without a license. And her effort — ultimately successful, after a recent bond hearing — to get out of ICE detention drew broad media coverage.
Then Friday came the officer’s resignation letter, addressed to Chief Cliff Cason.
“This decision stems from the department’s inadequate response to and defense against public accusations of false arrest, which arose after a charge from a valid arrest was publicly dropped without explanation,” said a copy of the letter made available by a city spokesperson. “The department’s silence in the face of widespread defamation has not only made my position personally untenable but has also created an environment where I can no longer effectively carry out my duties within the city of Dalton without fear of further backlash from the community.”
Asked for a response, the city spokesperson, Bruce Frazier said the Dalton Police Department’s standard practice is not to comment on personnel matters. The department’s review of the situation is not complete, he said. He said O’Neal was hired in 2020.
Tiffany O’Neal, meanwhile, rejected accusations she has seen leveled against her husband. She said her husband had treated Arias-Cristobal with professionalism and he had nothing to do with the decision by ICE to arrest her after she was booked into the county jail.
Moreover, she said, her husband’s decision to arrest Arias-Cristobal for driving without a license was a valid one, despite the honest mistake he’d made in pulling her over to begin with.
“The traffic stop was conducted in good faith and with reasonable suspicion, which allows for the admissibility of evidence obtained during the stop, even if the initial stop was based on a mistake,” she wrote. “The subsequent decision by the city of Dalton to drop the charge does not reflect any ethical impropriety on Allen’s part.”
Tiffany O’Neal said it is a shame that someone who was brought into the U.S. at the age of 4 can be detained and face deportation but added that has absolutely nothing to do with her husband or his duty to enforce the law that states you must have a license to drive.
“The true architects of immigration laws are in Congress,” she wrote.
(READ MORE: Ximena Arias-Cristobal returns home to Dalton after ICE detention)
On this last front, Arias-Cristobal’s lawyers may in large part agree. A good portion of the Tuesday evening news conference consisted of criticisms of the immigration laws that result in people like her — a 19-year-old who was brought to the U.S. at age 4 — getting detained, their lives upended, despite posing no clear threat to society.
Many people, like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, Ga., welcome the immigration crackdown and say it’s high time that immigration law gets enforced evenly and taken seriously. Arias-Cristobal and her attorneys, in contrast, called on lawmakers to change the law and offer pathways to citizenship for people like her.
For now, they said she is looking into multiple avenues for fixing her immigration status, including a visa typically granted to crime victims, though her attorney said the implication here — that the Dalton police officer’s arrest might have been criminal in nature — requires more research.
Asked about the suggestion of the arrest was potentially criminal, Tiffany O’Neal said the matter was for his attorney to handle. And the city of Dalton spokesperson rejected the idea.
“While she was not guilty of the improper right-hand turn, through the misfortune of the officer pulling over the wrong vehicle, he did still encounter somebody who was breaking state law and driving without a license,” Frazier said by phone Tuesday evening. “So, the city’s view is not that a crime was committed against her by the police officer.”
Standing before cameras at the office of her law firm in Atlanta, jumping between English and Spanish, speaking in a Southern accent, Arias-Cristobal, for her part, reflected on her experience in ICE detention and her encounters with people in many difficult situations in ICE detention — horrors of which hers was just a “speck.”
She said she hoped for a better immigration system and better America that would allow people to get legal status without going through the trauma she and her family have experienced. But she said she stayed strong by drawing on her faith — and her knowledge of what her parents have done for her.
“Knowing that my parents moved from another country with nothing in their pockets and gave me the life they so much wanted for themselves keeps me going. Because they crossed a literal river with me to be able to give me the life I have,” she said, adding, that she knows God has a plan for her. “I know that this is a moment in my life that is gonna build me to be a bigger person and just rocket me up in the sky. And like my dad always tells me, I’m in a country where the sky is the limit.”
Contact Andrew Schwartz at aschwartz@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6431.