Federal judge orders ICE agents in Colorado to follow law, stop ‘pattern’ of illegal arrests

A federal judge in Denver found Tuesday that federal immigration authorities have routinely carried out illegal arrests in Colorado, and he ordered them to better document detentions so their legality could be monitored.

The 66-page decision from U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson came three weeks after four immigrants testified that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had arrested them without warrants and without first checking to see whether they were likely to flee court proceedings — a check that’s required by law.

Jackson ordered Tuesday that ICE remove the ankle monitors on three of those people, one of whom is a Univerity of Utah student arrested in Mesa County in June. He also ordered the agency to refund the bail money that each paid to leave detention earlier this year, and he prohibited ICE from rearresting them without first obtaining warrants. (The fourth immigrant has received legal status and was not being monitored.)

Jackson ordered ICE agents to follow the law and check — as well as document — that each person they arrest without a warrant poses a flight risk.

The judge also ordered ICE to regularly turn over a random selection of arrest forms to the attorneys who filed the suit, including some with the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, so that they can monitor ICE’s compliance.

Hans Meyer, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit, hailed the decision.

“Our hope is that by forcing ICE to follow the law and creating accountability measures to do so, we hope that ICE will both comply and, hopefully, we’ll avoid the worst violations and excesses of immigration enforcement that we’ve seen unfold on national news on a daily basis since Jan. 20,” he said, referring to the day President Donald Trump returned to office. “That’s the ultimate purpose. That’s what we’re trying to deter.”

Representatives for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

During a late-October court hearing in the case, the four immigrants’ attorneys pointed to The Denver Post’s reporting about the surge in recent immigration arrests in Colorado, as well as to statements from senior federal officials indicating that they planned to arrest any person they encountered who lacked proper legal status.

In his order, Jackson noted that, without a court’s intervention, ICE’s pattern of illegal arrests was likely to increase.

“ICE has almost doubled its headcount in Colorado this year alone, is actively recruiting and hiring many more officers, and plans to open three additional detention centers in Colorado, nearly tripling its current capacity,” Jackson wrote. “On this record, plaintiffs have shown that, without the requested injunction, there is likely to be a substantial increase in the number of warrantless arrests made without probable cause of flight risk.”

ICE can conduct warrantless arrests. But agents must first determine that a person is in the country illegally and then find probable cause that they’re likely to flee. Tuesday’s ruling, an initial finding issued while the broader lawsuit plays out, does not prohibit ICE from making warrantless arrests of immigrants without proper legal status.

But it requires ICE agents to follow the steps necessary to ensure an arrest is warranted and legal.

Jackson declined to require that ICE agents undergo additional training, as the plaintiffs’ attorneys had requested, though he suggested he could revisit the question “should compliance with the order prove elusive.”

In practice, the order will likely most impact so-called “collateral” arrests, or detentions that occur when ICE arrests someone who wasn’t the target of an operation or was caught up in a larger arrest sweep. All four of the named plaintiffs were not direct targets of ICE: Two were arrested in broader sweeps, a third was pulled over because ICE thought he was someone else, and the fourth — the college student — was pulled over only after a Mesa County deputy alerted agents that she was driving on I-70.

If ICE determines that an immigrant is in the country illegally but doesn’t pose a flight risk, the immigrant can be released for the time being. The person may be arrested later — this time with a warrant — but the lapse in time would still prove beneficial, Jackson wrote.

Jackson noted the recent arrests of a Durango father and his two children as evidence. ICE arrested the father after initially mistaking him for someone else, but still kept him and his adolescent children detained. The family agreed to voluntarily return to Colombia earlier this month, though they remain in ICE detention, according to an agency database.

The man’s wife and children’s mother remains in Durango.

ICE attorneys had previously argued that it was following the law and that all four arrests identified in the lawsuit were legal. They said the four immigrants were unlikely to face rearrest and didn’t have any standing to file the lawsuit.

But Jackson disagreed. He noted that all four arrestees had suffered ongoing harm from their arrests.

Caroline Dias Goncalves, the University of Utah student, spent nearly three weeks in detention; she’s now moved in with her parents and dropped most of her classes. Another immigrant, identified only by his initials, has also moved in with a family member after losing his apartment. The family of a third arrestee, Refugio Ramirez Ovando, had to sell his truck and take on $20,000 in debt to pay for his legal defense.

“All the plaintiffs fear rearrest, and they and their families are suffering from emotional distress,” Jackson wrote.

The ruling is similar to previous court orders issued in Illinois. In response to a 2018 lawsuit, ICE had agreed to follow the law when it arrested people without warrants. But it declared that the settlement was over earlier this year and restarted its warrantless arrest practices.

That prompted a federal judge to reimpose the settlement.

After the settlement was reissued, ICE’s top lawyer sent a notice to every field office in the country, describing the proper way to conduct warrantless arrests. In October, the agency’s lawyers told Jackson that the new guidance should assuage concerns about future illegal arrests. But the agency refused to accept a court order requiring that its agents follow that policy, and the Durango arrests happened after ICE’s lawyers said the guidance was sufficient.

In his order, Jackson wrote that a senior Denver ICE official who testified on behalf of the agency, Gregory Davies, did not seem to understand the arrest policy he was supposed to oversee — namely, that ICE couldn’t arrest someone without a warrant if that person didn’t indicate they were likely to flee.

“His testimony does not imbue the Court with great confidence that ICE rigorously applies the individualized-flight-risk-assessment requirement,” Jackson wrote, “and instead supports plaintiffs’ contention that ICE has a pattern or practice of failing to make such determinations.”