Federal immigration authorities on Monday detained Jeanette Vizguerra, a Colorado immigrant rights activist whose efforts to avoid deportation over the past decade made national headlines.
Vizguerra, who hid in a church for three years during the first Trump administration, was picked up during her work break at Target and taken to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Aurora, according to the faith-based nonprofit American Friends Service Committee.
ICE didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Colorado Sun on Tuesday.
Vizguerra’s detention comes after at least two other high-profile immigrant activists or university leaders were taken into ICE custody, including Brown University professor Rasha Alawieh and former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.
It also follows the Trump administration’s attempts to deport immigrants without hearings or other usual protections, including invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime measure that allows the country broader authority to conduct mass deportations. The administration claimed the United States is at war with the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. The move was struck down by a federal judge on Saturday.
A GoFundMe organized by Vizguerra’s family said she was detained Monday outside of the Target store where she works.
“My mom has fought relentlessly for her community and it is time for all of us to now come together and show all the support for her like she has done to us,” one of her daughters wrote on the GoFundMe.
Vizguerra’s family and friends were unsure Tuesday morning whether she was still at the privately run detention center in Aurora, after receiving conflicting reports. She called her daughter from the detention center Monday, after she was picked up during her work break, but then on Tuesday, the facility told Vizguerra’s attorney that she was no longer there, said Jordan Garcia, program director for American Friends Service Committee.
“There was a bus that left this morning to go to DIA,” Garcia told The Sun. “She may be on the bus or at DIA, but we don’t have confirmation on that from ICE.”
Then on Tuesday afternoon, relatives heard she was still in Aurora.
After nearly 30 years in the United States, Vizguerra, 53, was still involved in a years-long legal battle to stay in the country. Her visa application had been denied and she was appealing. This week, her attorneys asked in federal court for a writ of habeas corpus, a request that authorities bring her to court for a hearing, and argued there was no legal grounds to detain her while her immigration case is ongoing.
In the filing in U.S. District Court in Denver, Vizguerra’s attorneys argued that she had not been placed in removal proceedings and that reissuing her prior removal order from years ago was not sufficient under the law to justify her detention. It named the detention center warden, ICE Denver field office interim director Ernesto Santacruz, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi as defendants.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who recently testified before a congressional committee investigating Denver’s status as a so-called sanctuary city, said Vizguerra’s detention was an “abuse of power” and exposed the “great lie of the Trump administration.”
“Let’s be clear about what happened today. This is not immigration enforcement intended to keep our country safe. This is Putin-style persecution of political dissidents,” Johnston said. “Jeanette Vizguerra is a mother of U.S. citizens. She works at Target. She’s the founder of a local non-profit. This is not about safety. This is about political theater and political retribution. This doesn’t make this country safer. It makes this country lawless, which is the most unsafe thing any president can do.”
Vizguerra was prepared for the possibility
Her friends and family were shocked by Vizguerra’s detention, but she had prepared for the possibility it would happen.
“Jeanette has been very cautious in the last few years and that felt very important to her,” said Garcia, who is in touch with her family. “She did make a plan with her lawyers if something like this were to happen. She had that plan with her attorneys and her family.”
Her daughters believed she was targeted in part because she recently spoke out in the media against Trump policies. “We believe she is being targeted as the result of her activism,” Garcia said. “The ICE officers who detained her mocked her and were incredibly rude.”
Immigrants and immigrant rights supporters have been buzzing Garcia’s phone since her deportation, asking how to help.
“This is really scary,” he said. “They are saying, ‘If this could happen to Jeanette, it could happen to any of us.’ It’s a scary time, but people are not going to be intimidated by this. This is the reason we stick together. We do our best to make sure we are there for each other in these scary times.”
Vizguerra was first targeted for deportation in 2009 after being pulled over in Arapahoe County. She returned to Mexico voluntarily in 2012 to visit her dying mother, returning to the U.S. in 2013.
In 2017, the First Unitarian Society church in Denver allowed her hide in its building. Vizguerra, a housekeeper who was accused of using a made-up Social Security number, lived in the sanctuary for more than three years before deportation proceedings were halted by the Biden administration.
During her deportation fight, Colorado’s Democratic members of Congress introduced legislation to prevent her from being targeted by immigration agents, which resulted in a two-year reprieve. That reprieve ended in 2019 and wasn’t renewed.
Vizguerra has been featured in many local and national news articles and was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2017.
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Read more“Right now, we’re living in a climate of great anxiety; people are panicked,” Vizguerra told the bilingual newsletter La Ciudad in November after Donald Trump was reelected. “I really felt this when people began to realize that former President (Donald) Trump had won. My social networks, especially my profile, which I use precisely for this purpose, were flooded with messages. People, not only from Colorado but from all over the country — even outside the country — started asking: ‘What are we going to do if Donald Trump fulfills his threats of mass deportations?’”
Vizguerra first entered the U.S. unlawfully from Mexico in 1997 after, according to AFSC, her husband was threatened at gunpoint. She has four children, three of whom were born in the U.S. She is also a grandmother.
Vizguerra, who organized an 89-day camp outside the Aurora detention center in 2020 to protest unhealthy conditions, helped start three advocacy organizations, Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition, Sanctuary for All and Abolish ICE Denver.
Her detention Monday set off panic and anger in the immigration community.
“ICE’s attempt to deport Jeanette is an attack not just on her, but on every immigrant who has stood up to fight for dignity and justice,” said Raquel Lane-Arellano with the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. “Jeanette has spent decades building community and standing up for others.”
The coalition said it feared Vizguerra would be moved out of state “because of her strong activist ties in Colorado.”
“We demand her immediate release and an end to ICE’s unjust targeting of immigrant leaders,” Arellano said.
Several Colorado lawmakers also called for her immediate release.
Gov. Jared Polis, who as a member of Congress was among those who brought legislation seeking to shield Vizguerra from deportation, was unaware Tuesday morning of her arrest until informed about it by a Colorado Sun reporter.
“I had not heard that,” he said, appearing shocked and vowing to look into the situation.
Later on Tuesday, the governor said through a spokesperson that he had previously met with Vizguerra and that he is continuing to urge Trump and ICE “to focus their actions on violent offenders and be more transparent.”
“Jeanette is a mother and grandmother, has spent years in our country, helping the community, has a job, has no history of violence, is not a threat to the community, and above all else, deserves due process pursuant to the law,” the spokesperson said. “The state has not seen any transparent accounting of ICE operations in our state and has not been notified beyond press reports of the apprehension of Ms. Vizguerra.”
Four Colorado Democrats in Congress — Diana DeGette, Joe Neguse, Jason Crow and Brittany Pettersen — compared Vizguerra’s arrest to a “shredding of the Constitution” and called Trump’s “disregard for the law” outrageous.
“Due process is foundational to our democracy, and the abrupt nature of Ms. Vizguerra’s detention, without transparent justification, exemplifies a troubling pattern of civil rights violations and disregard for due process under this administration,” they said in a joint statement. “This will only further erode the essential legal protections that ensure fairness and justice for all individuals, regardless of their immigration status.”
Sen. John Hickenlooper, also a Democrat, said his office is “going to do everything we can” to help her. The federal government should be going after criminals, “rather than looking at someone who’s really a community activist,” he said.