U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement must retrain its arresting officers in Colorado, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
In a 60-page order, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson in Denver also found ICE must beef up its documentation of warrantless arrests, turn more documents over to attorneys representing immigrants and pay for their attorneys fees.
Jackson found ICE agents in Colorado are violating his earlier order barring them from arresting people without a warrant without first determining they are a flight risk and living in the country undocumented.
“The Court finds that defendants have materially violated the Court’s (preliminary injunction) Order,” Jackson’s ruling said. “As discussed, ICE has continued to make warrantless arrests without individualized, pre-arrest probable cause determinations of flight risk in violation of (federal law) and the (preliminary injunction).”
The ruling is the latest development in an effort by immigration lawyers in Colorado to push back in court against the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy, which has resulted in a skyrocketing number of arrests and detentions, mostly of people who have no prior criminal convictions.
Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the Meyer Law Office and Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray LLC first sued the Trump administration in October with four original plaintiffs who had all been arrested and detained by immigration 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.
Jackson sided with the immigrants in November, when he put a preliminary injunction in place, recognizing people arrested by ICE without a warrant in Colorado as a class and limiting how federal immigration agents can make arrests in the state.
Lawyers for the immigrants asked Jackson to intervene in February, alleging ICE agents were still arresting people in Colorado unlawfully.
At a hearing in March, ICE agents struggled to answer basic questions about warrantless arrests and admitted they had not received training about how to comply with the court’s order limiting how they can arrest people in Colorado.
In his order, Jackson said ICE’s efforts to train agents on the rules of the preliminary injunction “have been insufficient,” and deportation officers have “an inadequate understanding of their obligations.”
Citing the case of Dionisio Castillo, 53, who ICE agents arrested at his construction job site in January while looking for someone else, Jackson said “arrests that ICE claims are made pursuant to field warrants are, in fact, warrantless.”
Castillo has lived undocumented in the U.S. for 30 years. Hehas no criminal history and has three children, who are U.S. citizens. He spent 48 days at the ICE detention facility in Aurora. His family had to pay a $2,500 bond for his release.
Now ICE must develop a complaint training program within the next two weeks, according to Jackson’s order. The agency must train every immigration officer currently authorized to make warrantless arrests in Colorado within 45 days. Arresting officers who are not trained within 45 days are prohibited from making warrantless arrests until they are trained.
At the March hearing, Gregory Davies, the then assistant field office director for ICE in Denver, said the Denver office has hired dozens of new officers recently and is making about 15 to 25 arrests per day even as training hours have been cut.
Each month, ICE must turn over to the lawyers representing the immigrants a list of officers who have been trained, training materials and a list of people arrested without a warrant, according to the order.
Jackson, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2011, declined to weigh in on the legality of ICE’s practice of allowing officers to obtain “field warrants” from their supervisors after arrests.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.