Florida's new license plate law leads to immigration detention and a wrongful arrest in Broward County

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Justin Cuellar was driving through Davie with his father to pick up their trailer last Tuesday when a Florida Highway Patrol trooper knocked on their window.

He told them that it was difficult to see the “Sunshine” letters on their truck’s license plate and they couldn’t have anything obstructing it, Cuellar, 17, recalled. Then, before Cuellar could even take out his license, five immigration agents in plain clothes emerged and surrounded them, questioning them about their legal status. Shortly after, they took Cuellar’s father and another passenger away.

A new Florida law makes it a criminal misdemeanor to have anything obscuring one’s license plate. The statute, 320.262, went into effect in October and has sparked confusion and backlash in recent weeks, as police began cracking down on violators and drivers throughout the state questioned whether license plate frames boasting their alma mater or favorite sports team were now criminal.

Advocates and attorneys believe the law could also become another tool to stop and detain immigrants like Cuellar’s father. FHP in particular has already been accused of using existing laws — such as those governing commercial vehicle inspections — to make immigration arrests, targeting landscaping trucks and other vehicles that are often used by immigrant workers. In recent weeks, some advocates have observed troopers also pulling people over for their plates during immigration enforcement operations.

Beyond the immigration issue, some attorneys say the law gives police oversized power to stop and search all drivers.

“It’s worrisome when they look for more reasons to give authorities the power to stop you in general,” said Jorge Delgado, an immigration lawyer based in Davie. “Not only as an immigration attorney, I think every citizen should be concerned when they give authorities the right to stop you for something that sounds capricious.”

Spokespeople for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles did not respond to requests for comment about the use of the license plate law in the context of immigration.

What is the law?

Under Florida law, obscuring your license plate has always been a ticketable offense. But the new law makes it a misdemeanor crime, giving police more power to stop, search and arrest drivers, including those without legal status.

Proponents of the law say it will make it easier for police to track and stop criminals who might be using devices to intentionally obscure their plates to avoid license plate readers and to help people catch offenders in the context of a hit-and-run or other driving-related crime.

In addition to adding harsher penalties, the new law includes more detailed language about obscuring devices, prohibiting anything “covering, obscuring, or otherwise interfering with the legibility, angular visibility, or detectability of the primary features or details, including the license plate number or validation sticker, on the license plate.”

Over the last few weeks, panic spread on social media as drivers and organizations tried to make sense of the law’s application to decorative license plate frames.

Confusion over the law has also extended to those tasked with enforcing it. A Broward man said he was arrested this week in Davie because the “S” in Sunshine was covered by his license plate frame, just like in Cuellar’s case, according to news reports. The man, Demarquize Dawson, was initially jailed before getting released.

Just two days before his arrest, Florida Highway Patrol Executive Director Dave Kerner had issued a directive to clarify that frames obscuring the bottom of a license plate, where the “Sunshine” is located, are in fact allowed. Frames or devices obscuring the plate’s letters and numbers and upper-right decal are not, however.

Davie Police later apologized to Dawson, citing the vagueness of the law.

“After checking our records, we can confirm Mr. Dawson was arrested for this statute,” Alesia Furdon, a spokesperson for Davie Police, said in a statement. “At the initial release of this updated law, the wording was vague, unclear and appeared to be open for misinterpretation. Since the release of a memo of clarification from the Florida Police Chief’s Association was provided to our department, our officers are educated on the application and use of this statute. Unfortunately, it appears this arrest was invalid and we extend our apologies to Mr. Dawson.”

Immigration enforcement

The clarification from the state came three days after troopers stopped Justin Cuellar and his father, Jose, for the same reason as Dawson. Jose Cuellar is now being held in a detention center in Colorado.

An immigrant from El Salvador, he had been living in the U.S. for over 30 years and did not have a criminal record, Justin Cuellar said. The two worked together, mostly doing tree trimming, but his father could do all kinds of jobs, from power-washing to plumbing.

“Literally we’d never need anything, a plumbing problem, I’d tell my dad and find him under the house fixing it,” Cuellar said. “He always knew. He was just literally kind of the perfect Papa Bear.”

Cuellar’s arrest was part of a series of immigration-related stops across South Florida last week, which appeared to take place in conjunction with license plate-related enforcement, according to observations from witnesses and social media posts.

Last Monday, when FHP and ICE made a series of immigration stops and raids in Lake Worth Beach, advocates with the Guatemalan-Maya Center began following them, said Mariana Blanco, the center’s director.

While FHP used motor vehicle inspections to stop landscaping trucks and other commercial vehicles, Blanco said, the remainder of the stops were due to license plate frames.

“The work trucks, they were stopping them with motor vehicle inspections,” she said. “Any regular car they were stopping, it was because of the license plate frame.”

Officers would have people get out of their cars and look at their license plate frames, then issue a warning, Blanco recalled, though she couldn’t say how many of those stops resulted in immigration-related detentions compared to other kinds of stops.

Other South Florida residents also noticed enforcement of the new law in conjunction with immigration sweeps.

“This random massive enforcement of this new license plate coverings ban, a ban on borders on license plates here in Florida is really, really convenient,” Cesar Flores, an influencer and law student based in Miami, said in an Instagram reel on Dec. 11, describing a recent immigration crackdown across Miami-Dade County during which officers also issued warnings over license plate frames.

It remains unclear to what extent those or other stops in South Florida resulted in immigration detentions or arrests. The Sun Sentinel requested records of stops by FHP under the statute last week but has not received a response.

Immigration attorneys who spoke to the Sun Sentinel said they had not yet seen the law’s use in relation to their clients but anticipated that it could become another tool.

The majority of immigration-related arrests already arise out of traffic stops, said Renata Castro, an immigration attorney with offices in Coral Springs and Orlando, with state agencies becoming particularly “aggressive” when it comes to immigration enforcement.

“If you have probable cause or if you have just cause to stop somebody because of this violation, nothing is off limits during that stop,” Castro said. “Now you have established probable cause to stop the person and question them.”

By making the obscuring of a license plate a crime and not just an infraction, the new law also gives police more power to search vehicles and question or detain passengers in addition to drivers, according to Matthew Konecky, a defense attorney based in Palm Beach County.

“You’ve got an officer who is going ‘okay, now I can make an arrest here, we’re going to seize the car and everybody else has to step out of the car,'” he said. “Now we’re talking about maybe doing more intense searches on the passengers. ‘Oh, by the way, these people aren’t from here.'”

Cuellar, a U.S. citizen with a license, said he was the only person driving the day troopers stopped him. His father was in the process of getting legal status through his family, he said. During the traffic stop, he showed immigration agents the paper acknowledging his pending court date, but that did not stop the agents from taking him.

“My dad said his day was probably going to come,” Cuellar said. “We all knew, if the lawyer didn’t hurry up quick enough, or if he got denied. But didn’t think it was going to happen so soon.”