Federal immigration agents in Colorado continue to arrest people because of the color of their skin, in violation of a federal judge’s order, lawyers representing immigrants allege.
In a 98-page amended complaint filed Wednesday, lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and two Denver law firms say immigration agents are still targeting and detaining people without first determining their immigration status or their flight risk, citing recent immigration raids near Vail, among others.
The conduct, the lawyers argue, violates a Nov. 25 preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson in Denver calling such arrests “unlawful” and restricting how federal immigration agents can make arrests in Colorado. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement still has not reimbursed three plaintiffs for the bond money they paid to get out of detention, another violation of Jackson’s order, the complaint said.
Defendants Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and Robert Hagan, director of ICE’s Denver field office, have already appealed Jackson’s preliminary injunction.
Now the immigrants’ lawyers are asking Jackson to intervene again.
“Permanent class-wide injunctive relief is necessary to protect Coloradans from defendants’ disregard for the limits of their authority,” the lawyers wrote, citing a recent order from a federal judge in Minnesota identifying 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases since Jan. 1.
The lawyers from the ACLU, the Meyer Law Office and Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray LLC sued the Trump administration in October with four original plaintiffs who had all been arrested and detained by ICE agents in Colorado.
One of the plaintiffs is Caroline Dias Goncalves, a 19-year-old University of Utah student who was brought to the U.S. as a child. She was arrested by ICE in June, after a Mesa County sheriff’s deputy pulled her over in Fruita and asked about her accent and immigration status. She spent 15 days in ICE’s Aurora detention center and paid $2,000 for her bond, according to the ACLU.
In their amended complaint, the lawyers added as a plaintiff the East Colfax Community Collective, a Denver-based organization that helps people and small businesses at risk of being displaced. ICE has arrested at least three members of the organization at their apartments, all dark-skinned asylum seekers originally from countries in Africa. At least one of those members remains in ICE’s Aurora detention center, according to the complaint.
In his preliminary injunction, Jackson, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2011, ordered immigration officers to stop making warrantless arrests in Colorado unless the arresting officer determines before the arrest that there is probable cause that the person is in the U.S. in violation of immigration laws and there is probable cause that the person will escape before a warrant can be obtained.
After a warrantless arrest, immigration officers must document on a specific form their evidence of a person’s flight risk, the order said.
The lawyers presented evidence that ICE officers in Colorado are not following the order.
On Christmas Eve, ICE officers arrested an asylum seeker from Venezuela, called R.J.R.P. in the complaint, without a warrant while he was driving to work, using their vehicles to box him in on the side of the road. He has no criminal record and lived near his sister and young daughter, according to the complaint. He remains in custody at the Aurora detention center.
In late December, ICE stopped a car with three men in it who were on their way to a job fixing gravesites at a cemetery in Bennett and arrested them without a warrant, the complaint said. The driver and one of the passengers had lived in Colorado for 25 years, and none of the men had criminal history, according to the complaint. The driver and one of the passengers remains at the Aurora detention facility. One of them has two daughters who are U.S. citizens, one of whom lives at home and relies on him financially while she attends college, the complaint said.
Most recently, in raids near Vail on Jan. 21, ICE agents boxed in the car of two brothers and their cousin as they were driving to work. The agents pulled the men from the car and arrested them without a warrant and without asking any questions, according to the complaint.
From Nov. 25 to Dec. 31, the complaint said lawyers for the Trump administration identified at least 58 forms filled out by immigration officers after warrantless arrests in Colorado.
The Trump administration lawyers turned over to lawyers for the immigrants a random third of these documents, 90% of which did not document any flight risk analysis, according to the complaint.
Tim Macdonald, legal director at the ACLU of Colorado, said he is “deeply concerned” about the continued warrantless arrests.
“ICE has continued to thumb their nose both at the law and court orders,” he said. “It appears to be an agency that has gone rogue, completely off the rails.”
Immigration arrests in Colorado have skyrocketed since President Donald Trump took office a year ago.
ICE arrested at least 3,522 people in Colorado between Jan. 20 and Oct. 15, 2025, according to the most recent data obtained from ICE and published by the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law’s Deportation Data Project, up from 843 during the same period in 2024.
Most of those arrested by ICE in Colorado did not have prior criminal convictions, according to the data.
By comparison, 37% of those arrested by immigration agents in Colorado between Jan. 20 and Oct. 15, 2025, had prior criminal convictions, down from 61% in 2024.