Foreign Student With Valid Visa Deported After Being Arrested At Florida Traffic Stop

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A Colombian student has been deported to his home country after being detained at a traffic stop and arrested for alleged violations.

Concretely, Felipe Zapata Velazquez was detained in late March in Gainesville, Florida, adding to the growing list of international students removed from the country during the Trump administration despite having a valid visa.

"I'm an international student," he can be heard telling an officer in footage obtained by NBC Miami. "I just came from Colombia." The outlet added that Velazquez had been cited for several offenses, including an illegal license plate and driving with a suspended or revoked license and registration tag.

The deportation of Velazquez was criticized by Florida Rep. Alejandro Maxwell Frost, who said in a statement that President Donald Trump and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are running a "government-funded kidnapping program."

"Felipe Zapata Velasquez is just the latest victim of Trump's disgusting campaign against immigrants. What should have been a routine traffic stop, resulted in a nightmare as Felipe is now forced to live in the hell on Earth that is the Krome Detention Center while he awaits deportation orders," Maxwell Frost said following the detention.

Velazquez's is also a case where an immigrant gets marked for deportation after what used to be routine encounters with law enforcement. Many others are being detained after regular check-ins with ICE in which they are supposed to show their papers are in order and they are continuing to follow the law.

ICE does not provide information on how many migrants it has arrested during their routine check-ins. However, a new investigation by The Guardian estimates, based on arrest data from the first four weeks of the Trump administration, that about 1,400 arrests, or about 8% of the nearly 16,500 arrests during that time period may have occurred during or right after people checked in with the agency.

This is the latest instance in which the Trump administration has proved to be willing to bend tradition, thinking of new ways to enact its mass deportation efforts. Most notably, the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act earlier this year, allowing hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to be deported to El Salvador's mega-prison.

Foreign students are being removed for different reasons, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio also saying he has cancelled hundreds of visas as part of a crackdown on anti-Israel activism. "Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas," Rubio told press in late March.