Jose Hermosillo. Credit : Courtesy of Grace Hernandez NEED TO KNOW Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, was wrongfully detained for 10 days in ArizonaHomeland Security officials insist he was arrested because of what he told officials, which his attorney deniesHermosillo, who has some cognitive disabilities, was released after his family produced his birth certificate A 19-year-old U.S. citizen was wrongfully detained by the Department of Homeland Security for 10 days in April while visiting his girlfriend’s family in Arizona — though whether that was because of his own actions remains the subject of dispute. Jose Hermosillo has “lived in New Mexico his whole life,” lawyer Homero Torralba tells PEOPLE in this week's issue, so the whole thing initially seemed to his family to be some kind of mix-up. “Mistakes can be made,” Torralba says. “I understand that. I'm sure everybody can understand that.” But what happened to the young father, a restaurant worker in Albuquerque whom Torralba says has some cognitive disabilities, was something the attorney has never seen in his 34-year career. In April, Hermosillo and his girlfriend, Grace Hernandez, were visiting her family in Tucson, Ariz., when he decided to walk to a convenience store, Torralba says. That’s when Torralba says the teen was approached by law enforcement and allegedly asked — along with a racial slur — if he had entered the country illegally. When Hermosillo said “no,” Torralba says, the officer “[kept] telling him that he is.” Hermosillo is easily swayed, Torralba says: “He can be told, ‘Hey, you're not a citizen. You're here illegally.’ " The case has made headlines amid the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration which, though it was a key part of his successful 2024 presidential campaign, has stirred major debate. Hermosillo later told Torralba that while he was behind bars, "he sat in his cell and he was getting picked on by the other inmates and he didn't know how to combat that. He knew he didn't want to get in a fight. He didn't want to get in any trouble, and he was subjected to quite a bit of verbal abuse." "His words to me were, 'I've never been so scared in my life,' " Torralba says. Documents from Homeland Security paint a different picture of what happened to Hermosillo and indicate that he was willingly interviewed by an immigration officer — after reportedly going to a Border Patrol station — and said he was from Mexico and entered the U.S. illegally the day before, for work. Torralba denies that. He notes that Hermosillo's understanding of Spanish isn't strong, though the official documentation shows he was interviewed in Spanish, and that the complaint against him mistakenly said he was encountered by officials in Nogales, Mexico, not Tucson. "That is impossible," Torralba says. (A Border Patrol spokesman told The Arizona Republic that that was an accident.) Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center, where Jose Hermosillo was held in April. David Taylor All parties agree on what happened next: Hermosillo was taken into custody on April 8 and released April 17, without charge, only after his family showed his birth certificate. In a statement to PEOPLE, a senior Department of Homeland Security official says the arrest “was the direct result of Hermosillo’s own actions and statements." "The narrative being pushed ... is false," the official says. Torralba says Hermosillo was finally released "in essence to the streets" around 2:30 a.m. local time on April 17. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement in April that her office had reached out to immigration officials about the incident, calling it “wholly unacceptable.” Now, however, the state attorney general’s office tells PEOPLE they aren’t investigating the incident. Meanwhile, Torralba says he is considering legal options — including claiming a federal civil rights violation. He believes some of law enforcement's behavior "seems to be fueled by cruelty. ... it's just cruel because of what's going on in our national debate and things like that about immigration." Take PEOPLE with you! Subscribe to PEOPLE magazine to get the latest details on celebrity news, exclusive royal updates, how-it-happened true crime stories and more — right to your mailbox. The ordeal devastated Hermosillo's family, who were worried that their son would be deported despite his citizenship, Torralba says. “For those few days, they were just going bananas,” he says. “It was very just daunting for them.”