This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to go through widespread, additional training on how to conduct legal arrests and detentions of undocumented immigrants after finding that Colorado ICE officers haven’t been following the law.
Senior U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson ordered in a 60-page ruling that ICE develop training within two weeks on what the law is in arresting and detaining undocumented immigrants — including assessing flight risk and properly filling out warrants when they stumble upon someone they weren’t looking for.
Jackson also told the Trump administration that every ICE officer who conducts arrests in the state will have to go through training on his order within 45 days or they must halt so-called “warrantless” arrests.
The ruling, a further enforcement order on a preliminary injunction that Jackson granted last year, comes after Trump administration attorneys acknowledged that they weren’t following the proper protocols in taking people into detention.
But they were working on it, they said, and acknowledged that new ICE agents aren’t fully trained compared to their predecessors.
The warrantless arrests lawsuit was filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union and a handful of private immigration attorneys representing clients who were arrested and detained by ICE without going through probable cause assessments for flight risk or risks to public safety. The clients represented in the case had all been living in the United States for years, had no criminal records, and had families and businesses and homes established here.
ACLU attorneys argued that ICE was wantonly abusing its warrantless arrests powers — which are allowed by federal law but must be accompanied by justification and fall within a narrow scope.
Mostly, Jackson has agreed with the ACLU. In Tuesday’s ruling, he ordered the federal government to pay the plaintiffs' fees, as well.
In multiple days of hearings on this case last year and this spring, ICE officers and leaders in Colorado’s field office testified to Jackson that they didn’t really read their emails, they didn’t really understand all of the rules in making warrantless arrests and that generally they were unaware of what was required of them.
