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.
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.
