Iván Darío Rico Molano, an Uber driver of Colombian nationality, was arrested by Border Patrol agents on Saturday, August 22, while transporting nearly 400 rolls of cinnamon from the bakery Roll and Dough that were to be sold at a farmers' market in Hollywood, Florida.
The detention left the business without its order and thinking that the driver had stolen it. According to a spokesperson from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to Local 10 News, agents intercepted a silver Kia Carnival around 8:50 in the morning on Interstate 95 heading south, near Sheridan Street, after a records check identified the vehicle owner as a foreigner without legal immigration status.
Iván Darío Rico Molano, a Colombian citizen driving the Uber, admitted to being in the country without authorization.
According to CBP, Rico Molano legally entered the United States in May 2021, but remained beyond the allowed period of stay. He was taken to the Dania Beach Border Patrol Station for processing.
The owner of the bakery, Julie Pierre, 21 years old, did not receive any notification regarding the incident.
Your business, Roll and Dough, operates from a shared kitchen in Sunrise and is known for its Japanese-inspired cinnamon rolls made with milk bread.
When the order did not arrive at the Yellow Green Farmers Market and he was unable to contact the driver, Pierre feared that the products — valued at approximately $3,000 dollars — had been stolen.
"The order never reached its destination; we couldn’t get in touch with the transport company, and no one, not even Uber, could tell us what had happened. As a 21-year-old running a small business on my own, I was scared, overwhelmed, and trying to recover lost workdays and thousands of dollars in products," Pierre wrote on Instagram.
Following instructions from Uber, Pierre filed a police report with the Sunrise Police Department, unaware that Rico Molano had been arrested by immigration agents.
The situation became clear on Thursday when detectives from that same department located a relative of the driver, who had picked up the vehicle with the five large boxes of rolls still inside and delivered them to the police station.
The products were recovered five days after the failed delivery, but by then they were already spoiled and had to be discarded.
Pierre then published a statement on Instagram retracting the accusation. “Based on what we now know, Iván did not intentionally steal our cinnamon rolls. We sincerely regret having described the situation that way before knowing all the circumstances,” wrote the bakery.
The statement also clarified that the arrest took place before the police report was filed, so the Roll and Dough report was not the cause of the driver's immigration status.
Uber has finally reimbursed the bakery for the full amount of losses, after initially offering only $100 for a ride that cost $205.
The case is framed within the intensification of immigration operations on Florida roadways, where CBP verifies the immigration status of vehicle owners through databases during traffic stops on interstate highways, including I-95 in Broward County.
Since March 2025, these operations have resulted in over 10,690 arrests in South Florida.
Este caso es uno de los muchos que reflejan el impacto de las operaciones migratorias en la vida cotidiana de los residentes en Florida. Sigue todos los detalles en nuestra sección de
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