In the six months since beloved immigrant rights activist Jeanette Vizguerra-Ramirez was detained outside a Target, her family, friends and fellow reformers have protested weekly outside the ICE detention center in Aurora.
“Every single Monday. Since March 17,” said Jennifer Piper, who has fought for human rights alongside Vizguerra for 22 years.
“I can’t overstate the harm to her, to her children and to our communities that the administration has targeted her in this way for standing up for human rights over so many years,” said Piper, with the nonprofit American Friends Service Committee. “It’s urgent that she be free so she can be safe, so she can be the mom she wants to be and so she can do her life’s work, which is to advocate for human rights.”
Supporters of Vizguerra, who once took refuge in a Denver church to avoid deportation and in 2017 was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, gathered outside the detention center again this week. Along with praying, chanting and singing, the group learned from Vizguerra’s legal team that, after more than six months of fighting her detention and deportation in court, her attorneys are making a fresh attempt to win her release.
Now that Vizguerra has been held for longer than 180 days, her legal team can file a motion for leave that forces the federal government to justify her detention. The legal maneuver is more straightforward than the complex motions filed in the case so far, which have included arguing that Vizguerra’s right to free speech was violated because she was targeted for speaking out against the Trump administration.
Her attorneys want U.S. District Judge Nina Y. Wang to schedule a bond hearing, which could lead to Vizguerra walking out of the detention center.
Vizguerra has said she can hear the singing and chanting every Monday outside the center, and most weeks, she has been able to use a detention center phone or video screen to call her family in the crowd.
“I do have hope,” Vizguerra said in an emailed statement from the American Friends Service Committee. “I trust that the authority of the federal court will deliver justice and my freedom. I will keep speaking out as I always have, and organizing from inside these walls, following my conscience and my values to break this system that destroys families, including my own. I will continue my fight until I achieve dignity for my people.”
Without the income Vizguerra contributed to her family, they are suffering financially and may lose the Denver apartment where they have lived for years, Piper said. Her youngest daughter, who is 14, is suffering psychologically without her mother, Piper said.
Vizguerra is housed in a section of the detention center that holds about 500 people, yet there are just four visitation stools where people can talk on a phone to detainees on the other side of glass, Piper said. Visiting time is just three hours each day, from 7-10 a.m.
“They make it really hard for the kids to visit,” said Piper, who visits Vizguerra weekly.
“Most high-profile” arrest in Colorado since Trump took office
Vizguerra has been locked up in the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement detention center since she was taken into custody on her lunch break from Target on March 17. Federal authorities had said they planned to deport her to Mexico, but Vizguerra’s attorneys won a court ruling to temporarily block deportation until Vizguerra could have the case heard in court.
After months in detention, Vizguerra is suffering mentally, physically and financially, her attorneys wrote in a May 29 motion requesting her immediate release. Vizguerra’s absence has “put an unbearable emotional and financial pressure on the family,” and strained the mental health of her children, the youngest of whom is in high school. Being locked up also has exacerbated Vizguerra’s intestinal issues and given her migraines and back pain, along with “re-traumatization due to her deep grief about her family separation and her inability to fight for her community.”
Her attorneys argued that reissuing her prior deportation order from years ago was not sufficient under the law to justify her detention. They also claimed that Vizguerra was targeted because she has publicly criticized the immigration policies of the Trump administration in violation of her rights to free speech.
As the grandmother was chained around the waist outside Target, an ICE officer said, “We finally got you,” according to court filings from Vizguerra’s attorney Laura Lichter.
“As the ICE officers forced her into a truck, they were laughing,” court records said.
Just a day earlier, Vizguerra had spoken out against the Trump administration during a protest outside the state Capitol in Denver.
“Ms. Vizguerra-Ramirez’s arrest is undoubtedly the most high-profile in the State of Colorado since President Trump took office in January 2025,” her attorneys wrote in a July court filing asking for her release. “Plain clothed undercover ICE officers approached Ms. Vizguerra-Ramirez, surrounded her, placed her in handcuffs and shackles, and took her out of the public sphere. Targeted arrests, scattered across the country, mirror one another, suggesting that officers operated from the same playbook.
“Put another way, Ms. Vizguerra-Ramirez’s case helps demonstrate a nationwide trend where ICE targeted political activists to silence their speech and send a message that if you make your opposition to U.S. government actions known, you will be next.”
Trump officials celebrated her capture
Following her detention, Denver immigration officials posted a photo of Vizguerra in shackles on X, formerly Twitter, and the photo was reposted by the national ICE account with the caption: “Despite her being featured in national media for years, we arrested her in public March 17. A high-profile status does not exempt a person from immigration law.”
Former ICE Denver director John Fabbricatore posted screenshots of Vizguerra’s Facebook page in which she was critical of Trump. And Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, posted on X that under Trump, authorities will arrest “illegal aliens regardless of if they were a featured ‘Time Person of the Year.’ If you come to our country illegally, we will deport you, and you will never return.”
Dozens of protestors have joined Vizguerra’s family outside the ICE detention center in Aurora during the past six months. Singing and chanting, they have called for her release. At one vigil in April, Vizguerra was able to call her daughter’s cellphone from inside detention and speak to the crowd.
In 2020, Vizguerra organized an 89-day camp outside the detention center to protest unhealthy conditions. She also helped start three advocacy organizations, Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition, Sanctuary for All and Abolish ICE Denver.
Defendants in the case are the warden of the ICE detention center in Aurora, ICE Denver field office interim director Ernesto Santacruz, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Fighting deportation since 2009
Vizguerra entered the United States illegally in El Paso, Texas, in 1997, according to federal officials. In 2009, she was pulled over in Arapahoe County and authorities found that she had used documents that included a false Social Security number. The mother of four, including three children born in the United States, has been fighting deportation efforts ever since.
The arrest led to a conviction in Arapahoe County for driving without a license and not having insurance.
A year and a half later, in 2011, a federal immigration judge denied her application to remain in the country, but agreed to a “voluntary departure,” meaning Vizguerra agreed to leave the United States, according to ICE. But Vizguerra did not leave then.
In 2012, she returned to Mexico because her mother died. She was picked up by Border Patrol agents in 2013 as she tried to return to her family in the United States, crossing the border in Candelaria, Texas, according to ICE. Entering the U.S. illegally after a judge has ordered removal from the country is a felony, but Vizguerra ended up pleading guilty to a lesser charge, a misdemeanor, and was sentenced to one year of probation.
The previous order that she be removed from the country was reinstated, however.
Vizguerra was granted a stay of deportation until 2015, and when the application for another stay was denied in 2017, during the first Trump administration. She took sanctuary in the First Unitarian Society church in Denver for three months instead of reporting, as ordered, to ICE.
She was denied applications to stay in the U.S. multiple times from 2019 to 2021, until she was eventually given a one-year stay of deportation, which was renewed.
Colorado’s Democratic members of Congress stepped in to help Vizguerra avoid deportation, including introducing 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’s last stay of deportation expired in February 2024, ICE said, leading to her arrest in March.
Last spring, several Democrats, including Gov. Jared Polis, called for her release.
“Jeanette is a mother and grandmother, has spent decades 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,” Polis said the day after her detention.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston called Vizguera’s arrest part of a“Putin-style persecution of political dissidents.”