Immigrants testify to warrantless ICE arrests in Colorado

DENVER (CN) — During a federal hearing on Thursday seeking a preliminary injunction limiting immigration officers’ use of warrantless arrests, an immigrant from Mexico who had lived in Colorado for two decades testified to his three-month detention earlier this year.

“I believe we have the opportunity to have our case heard in a court of law and not just get picked up randomly,” Refugio Ramirez Ovando said, speaking through a Spanish interpreter.

Ovando was detained in Grand Junction on his way to work just after 6 a.m. on May 19. He was detained for three months before immigration officials released him. Although an immigration judge granted his application for permanent residency on Aug. 18, he says he remains fearful of being re-arrested.

“An immigration judge gave me a green card, but up to and including today, I still don’t have the card with me,” Ovando testified. Today, he carries the same identification he carried on the day of his arrest, he said.

Ovando and three other named plaintiffs filed a class action against U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem on Oct. 9, challenging the government’s practice of carrying out warrantless arrests against immigrants without first assessing if they had violated an immigration law or posed a flight risk.

Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson scheduled two days of testimony on Ovando’s motion for a preliminary injunction.

In Ovando’s complaint, attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union estimated Colorado is home to 169,000 immigrants without legal status — roughly 3% of the state population.

In the complaint, Ovando claims ICE agents have increased warrantless arrests against Latino people to meet increased detention quotas set by the Donald Trump administration, aiming to detain 3,000 people daily.

“Masked military ICE agents with flak jackets and long rifles are terrorizing communities across Colorado so they can make arbitrary government quotas,” said attorney Kenzo Kawanabe on behalf of Ovando and the proposed class.

ICE agents are allowed to carry out warrantless arrests if they find that the individual likely violated an immigration law and poses a risk of flight.

“The reality is they don’t do the flight risk assessment,” Kawanabe, of Denver law firm Olson Grimsley, said. “The forms have no information because they haven’t asked about employment, family ties, how long they’ve been in the community. That’s why these policies don’t effectuate in the real world.”

In June, ICE entered a settlement to end the Northern District of Illinois case Castañon Nava v. ICE , which also challenged warrantless arrests. Under the agreement, the agency’s principal legal advisor, Charles Wall, instructed ICE agents to ensure probable cause to support an immigration violation and flight risk for making a warrantless arrest.

Testifying remotely from Washington D.C., ICE’s former Denver field office director, Robert Guadian, said he was unfamiliar with the settlement because he received policy updates daily. Guadian also claimed he knew nothing about the named plaintiffs’ arrests, and that he did he review the officers who detained them ahead of the hearing.

During examination, Guadian claimed most of ICE’s arrests in Colorado were targeted investigations supported by warrants for arrest or removal.

“We know where they live. We’ve got their photo,” Guadian said. Although he told the court the agency does not detain all immigrants encountered, he could not recall what percentage of people are let go or subjected to warrantless arrests.

Jackson asked U.S. Attorney Nicholas Deuschle why the government didn’t simply agree to follow the policies the agency had already promised to follow, thus resolving the case.

“My question is a practical question," said the Barack Obama appointee. “Why won’t the government just stipulate to do what they said they would do?”

Deuschle countered that the government need not enter any agreements prior to hearing the plaintiffs’ evidence, and that the plaintiffs lacked standing to support the future relief sought.

Jackson pressed Deuschle on whether any plaintiff existed who could challenge the agency’s warrantless arrests if warrants were simply issued after their detainment, nullifying the question.

“What kind of a country is it if people can’t bring before a court their grievance? If ICE is ignoring these policies, there has to be something they can do about it,” Jackson said.

Jackson asked whether certifying the proposed class might create standing for the named plaintiffs who had been subjected to warrantless arrests. Deuschle said he had only prepared to rebut the proposed injunction and was not ready to argue class certification.

To represent the proposed class, the plaintiffs called two unnamed individuals with pending asylum cases as well as Caroline Dias Goncalves, a Utah nursing student who was detained for more than two weeks after being pulled over for trailing too closely to a tractor trailer while driving through Colorado to visit a friend.

Since her arrest, Dias Goncalves said, “I’m scared to do things.” After losing a job during her detention, she had to move back in with her parents, and reduce her college load to a single online class. Dias Goncalves said she agreed to be a plaintiff in the case, “because I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.”

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