Woman who had sought protection from deportation in Colorado churches is detained, advocates say

A woman who gained prominence after she took refuge in churches in Colorado to avoid deportation during the first Trump administration has been detained, immigration advocates said Tuesday.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether Jeanette Vizguerra had been taken into custody.

Vizguerra, a mother of four, was arrested Monday at a Denver-area Target store where she worked, said Jordan Garcia of the American Friends Service Committee, who has been in contact with Vizguerra’s lawyer and family.

Vizguerra has been trying to gain a visa given to crime victims that allows them to remain in the United States since she left sanctuary in churches in 2020, Garcia said.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston blasted the Trump administration for the reported arrest of Vizguerra, an immigration and labor activist. Johnston, who defended Denver’s sanctuary city policies in Congress earlier this month, called on people to demand that ICE release Vizguerra and give her due process rights.

“This is not immigration enforcement intended to keep our country safe. This is Putin-style persecution of political dissidents,” he said in a statement.

News of Vizguerra’s detention prompted a protest outside an ICE detention center in the Denver suburb of Aurora, where her family said she is being held. Buses left the facility in the morning, raising fears that she would be deported, but her family said Vizguerra was still there later in the day.

“We hope ICE will work with her attorney to release her immediately,” the family said in a statement included in an update from the American Friends Service Committee.

Vizguerra’s lawyers said ICE is attempting to remove her based on an order that was never valid. Petitions challenging her detention have been filed in both Denver’s federal court and the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“If ICE proceeds with trying to remove her without legal authority, it sends a chilling message about the agency’s disregard for due process and the rule of law,” one of the attorneys, Laura Lichter, said in a statement.

Vizguerra, who came to Colorado in 1997 from Mexico City, has been fighting deportation since 2009 after she was pulled over in suburban Denver and found to have a fraudulent Social Security card with her own name and birth date but someone else’s actual number, according to a 2019 lawsuit she brought against ICE. Vizguerra did not know the number belonged to someone else at the time, it said.

The lawsuit, which she later dropped, alleged that ICE did not have a valid order to deport her after she pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count in that case because it says she voided it by agreeing to self-deport to Mexico. ICE wrongly tried to revive that order after Vizguerra was arrested for reentering the United States later, the lawsuit said.

She began living in churches in 2017 to avoid being deported under the first Trump administration after a hold on her deportation was not renewed. She was given a two-year stay of deportation after two members of Colorado’s congressional delegation, Sen. Michael Bennet and then-Rep. Jared Polis, who is now Colorado’s governor, introduced what are known as private bills to give her a path to become a permanent resident. Such delays have sometimes been extended for years as lawmakers reintroduce the measures aimed at helping individual immigrants, but few of the measures ever become law.

After that stay was not renewed in 2019, Vizguerra again entered church sanctuary but then left in 2020, according to a timeline provided by the American Friends Service Committee.