A Jacksonville woman pleaded guilty to resisting arrest after punching a Florida Highway Patrol trooper and kicking an immigration officer in mid-January.<\/p>\n
Jennifer Susan Cruz, 41, faces up to 20 years in federal prison when sentenced, the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office said.<\/p>\n
Cruz was initially arrested on 14 local charges<\/a> on Jan. 13, including resisting an officer with violence, according to Duval County jail files. The U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office then filed federal charges of assaulting officers during an immigration operation.<\/p>\n Federal immigration officers, aided by the Highway Patrol, were looking to \u201cadministratively arrest\u201d people who were in the United States illegally, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorneys Office.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Cruz\u2019s arrest report, a trooper stopped her pickup after seeing her \u201cholding a cellular phone and recording,\u201d then tailgating a marked patrol car \u201cin a manner that interfered with her ability to safely operate the vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n The trooper stopped Cruz in a parking lot at Beach Boulevard and Art Museum Drive and found that her license had been suspended, but she drove away before being boxed in by police cars nearby, the report said.<\/p>\n Cruz refused to give up her keys when ordered out of the truck, then said \u201cshe was ready to fight, making a threat toward law enforcement,\u201d the report said. When a trooper tried to get her keys, Cruz hit her in the face, then tried to kick another officer. She then kicked a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement<\/a> agent as she was put in the back of a cruiser, the report said.<\/p>\n No sentencing date has been set, the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Jacksonville woman pleaded guilty to resisting arrest after punching a Florida Highway Patrol trooper and kicking an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117],"class_list":["post-311939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}