HOMESTEAD, Florida — A Lyft driver hired for a Halloween-night ride home in Miami-Dade County has been arrested and charged with a string of felonies after his passenger — a woman disabled by two strokes — told Homestead police he made sexual advances during the ride, exposed himself in the parking lot, and then followed her to her apartment and tried to force his way in. Kevin Adrian Narvaez-Cruz, 28, was arrested on Monday, November 2, and booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami, NBC 6 South Florida reported. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lodged a detainer against him, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Every charge is an allegation; Narvaez-Cruz is presumed innocent unless and until he is proven guilty in court.

Source: NBC 6 South Florida, via its November 2026 report and video summary

The woman's account, given to Homestead police and reported by NBC 6, is specific. She had booked the Lyft on Halloween night, Saturday, October 31, to get home from a friend's house in Miami-Dade County. 'When he picked me up, he started making sexual advances towards me,' she said. The driver, who spoke Spanish, used a translation app on his phone to offer to pay her for sex, she told police. 'I kept turning him down,' she said. 'We get in the parking lot, he exposed himself.' Awaaz Punjab is not naming the woman — she is the reported victim of an alleged sexual offence, and no report has published her name.

What happened at her door is the core of the felony case. When she made her way from the car to her apartment, the driver followed her and tried to enter with her, she said. 'He pushed me in, and I pushed him out and locked the door,' she told reporters. She then called police. Responding Homestead officers reviewed security footage that supported her claims, NBC 6 reported, and a neighbour's Ring doorbell camera footage also reportedly helped investigators — two independent video sources that detectives will be able to test against both accounts as the case proceeds.

The charges and where he is held

The charge list reported from his booking is: felony assault; felony burglary — the count that reflects the allegation that he pushed into the woman's home; lewd or lascivious battery on an elderly or disabled person, the Florida charge that covers the alleged sexual conduct against a victim whose disability is part of the allegation; kidnapping–false imprisonment; indecent exposure; and battery. He was booked into the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, Miami-Dade County's main pre-trial jail in Miami. The reports published by Thursday did not list a bond amount or a first court date, and Awaaz Punjab is not inventing one: those details come from the Miami-Dade clerk's filings and will be reported when they are on the record. Under Florida procedure the state must file formal charges and a judge must set the conditions of any release; a defendant in custody on an ICE detainer can remain held for federal immigration authorities even if a criminal bond is posted.

The ICE detainer — and the immigration history DHS gave for him

DHS provided Narvaez-Cruz's immigration history on Thursday. 'In November 2022, Border Patrol arrested Narvaez-Cruz after he illegally entered the country near El Paso, Texas. He was then released by the Biden administration,' a DHS spokesperson said, in a statement carried in Thursday's reporting. He is a citizen of Nicaragua, according to DHS. ICE has lodged an immigration detainer against him at the county jail. A detainer is a written request from ICE to a local jail: notify federal authorities before the person is released from criminal custody and, in the circumstances covered by federal regulation, hold the person briefly so ICE can take custody for removal (deportation) proceedings. A detainer is not itself a criminal charge and does not decide the Homestead case — the Florida felonies will be heard in state court on their own evidence — but it means that whatever happens in the criminal case, Narvaez-Cruz also faces a separate federal immigration process.

Lyft's response was immediate and permanent, according to NBC 6: the company has removed Narvaez-Cruz from its platform — described in its video summary as permanently removed — and is cooperating with investigators. That is the standard first step in rideshare cases: the platform holds the trip record, the pickup and drop-off data and the in-app messages and translation-app exchanges, if any were made inside the app, and police can obtain them by legal process. Rideshare safety background matters here for a practical reason: a booked app ride, unlike an unrecorded street pickup, leaves a data trail — driver identity, vehicle, route and timing — which is why investigators in this case could move from a Friday-night report to a Monday arrest with named charges.

Why this case matters beyond one ride: Miami-Dade is one of America's biggest rideshare markets, and its riders include large numbers of elderly and disabled passengers, immigrant families — including Punjabi and wider South Asian families across Florida — and late-night workers who depend on app rides precisely because they are recorded and traceable. An allegation that a driver used that trust against a disabled passenger, at her own front door, is the scenario the platform safeguards are built to prevent, which is why the prosecution will turn on the video evidence: the parking-lot security footage and the neighbour's doorbell recording either support the woman's account or they do not, and both sides will build their cases around them.

What happens next: Narvaez-Cruz remains in the county jail facing the Florida charges while the ICE detainer sits on his file. The state attorney's office must decide on formal charges from the arrest counts, a judge will address bond and release conditions at a hearing whose date had not been published in the reports available on Thursday, and ICE's removal process runs in parallel rather than instead of the criminal case. If he is convicted, sentencing follows Florida law for each count; if he is acquitted or charges are dropped, the detainer means release from the jail would still not necessarily mean release to the street. Awaaz Punjab will report the formal charging decision and the first court date when they are filed.