Immigrant advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado sued three Trump immigration officials over arrests of immigrants in Colorado they say violate federal law.
The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court for Colorado, was brought on behalf of four people who were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including a 19-year-old University of Utah student, Caroline Dias Goncalves, who spent 15 days in the ICE detention center in Aurora after a traffic stop.
It alleges that immigration officials are arresting and detaining people without determining probable cause or flight risk -- and making assumptions about their citizenship status based on accent and skin color -- in order to meet the Trump administration's high demand for arrests. The lawsuit asks a judge to stop that action.
"They are scrambling to fill arbitrary quotas set by the Administration, causing chaos and terror in neighborhoods throughout Colorado. This lawsuit seeks to enjoin Defendants' ongoing pattern and practice of flouting federal law in connection with their mass immigration arrests in Colorado," the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit was brought by ACLU of Colorado, Meyer Law Office and Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray. It names Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Acting Director of ICE Todd Lyons and Director of ICE's Denver Field Office Robert Guadian as defendants.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Federal statute requires that federal immigration agents have probable cause to arrest a person they think is in the country illegally and deem the person a flight risk before they can obtain a warrant. The lawsuit alleges that those steps did not happen in the cases of the four detained people.
"Regardless of the color of our skin, the language we speak, or the neighborhoods we live and work in, the law protects us from these types of warrantless arrests," Kenzo Kawanabe, partner at Olson Grimsley, said in a statement. "Each of us is protected from being rounded up and arrested in mass raids meant to meet arbitrary government quotas."
ICE agents arrested Goncalves in June after being tipped off by a Mesa County sheriff's deputy who pulled her over for a traffic stop. That deputy had asked her about her immigration status and accent. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser filed a complaint against that deputy for violating a state law that prohibits coordination between local law enforcement and ICE. The deputy resigned.
Refugio Ramirez Ovando, 43, another of the plaintiffs, was arrested on his way to work at a construction concrete company in Grand Junction in May. He was detained for three months, and an ICE agent later admitted they arrested him by mistake in an effort to find someone else.
A 36-year-old asylum seeker identified in the lawsuit as J.S.T. was arrested during a February raid at an Aurora apartment complex. J.S.T. was leaving the complex to head to work when he was arrested and he was detained for four weeks.
A 32-year-old man identified in the lawsuit as G.R.R. was waiting at a Colorado Springs nightclub to be a designated driver for a friend when he was arrested. He was detained for over six weeks.
The lawsuit describes similar experiences of people in Colorado who have been arrested and detained since Trump took office in January. It seeks class-action status.
"These agents indiscriminately arrested people, including people with pending immigration applications, no criminal history, established residences in the community, steady employment, family in the United States, and other community ties contradicting any purported flight risk. And agents targeted high-density locations like apartment complexes and nightclubs where many Latine people lived or gathered but conducted no individualized analysis about their status or likelihood of escape," the lawsuit says.
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