Immigration authorities mistakenly identified a Durango father when they pulled him over earlier this week, a senior enforcement official said Friday, but agents still arrested the father and his two children in an incident that quickly sparked protests in the Colorado mountain town.
Gregory Davies, Denver’s third-ranking official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified about the incident in court Friday morning during a hearing in a lawsuit challenging ICE’s arrest practices in Colorado. He had previously said ICE officials research and surveil their targets using multi-agent teams before they try to arrest them.
But he acknowledged that the ICE agents didn’t know they were pulling over Fernando Jaramillo-Solano, who is Colombian, when they stopped him and his 12- and 15-year-old children on their way to their Durango school Monday morning.
“It’s my understanding that the father was mistaken for somebody else when (ICE) encountered him,” he said during the federal court hearing in Denver.
He said Jaramillo-Solano and his children were then arrested anyway, without warrants. While that is allowed in certain circumstances, the lawsuit asserts that ICE has done that too often as part of a broader policy and without meeting legal requirements.
Agents have to determine that the person is in the country illegally and that they’re likely to flee if they’re not arrested. Four people detained by ICE in Colorado this year filed the lawsuit at issue in Friday’s hearing, alleging that ICE arrested them and others without first determining if they were likely to flee.
They’ve argued that the arrests are part of the Trump administration’s broader efforts to mass-deport immigrants without proper legal status.
The plaintiffs have asked a judge to intervene and declare ICE’s alleged arrest practices illegal, and they pointed to Jaramillo-Solano’s arrest as evidence that ICE’s alleged pattern has escalated in real time. All four testified this week, describing spending weeks in detention and having their lives upended after ICE arrested them. One man, identified only by his initials JST, said he lost “everything” after he was arrested near Aurora’s Whisping Pines apartments in February.
“I lost my apartment. I lost all the things I had, my clothing. I was left with nothing. I started from zero,” the man said through an interpreter.
Davies served as a government witness to defend against that lawsuit, as part of a two-day hearing seeking a prohibition on the allegedly illegal arrests. Lawyers representing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, have argued that standing federal policy — reiterated in an Oct. 22 memo — requires officers to follow certain procedures to ensure their arrests are lawful.
Because of that policy, they said this week, U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson doesn’t need to enter an order prohibiting a practice that ICE already regulates. The memo was issued in part because of similar litigation in Illinois.
Seeking an order restricting arrests
But the attorneys who filed the lawsuit have argued that ICE agents have consistently ignored that policy and continue to do so, even after the recent memo from ICE’s top legal advisor.
Kenzo Kawanabe, one of the attorneys on the case, pointed to the arrests in Durango, along with the immigration arrest of a Douglas County teacher and her family last week, to allege that ICE still wasn’t following its own policy.
During the hearing, Jackson repeatedly asked the Homeland Security Department’s attorneys if they would agree to a court order — requiring ICE agents in Colorado to follow the policy — and end the suit. But the attorneys refused because, they argued, the Colorado lawsuit was baseless and they shouldn’t be subjected to a court order to end litigation they believed was doomed.
The department’s lawyers argued that the four plaintiffs were unlikely to be arrested again and that ICE had no policy of arresting any undocumented immigrant unlawfully. Nor does the agency pursue every immigrant without legal status, they said — an assertion that contrasts with comments in interviews by both Stephen Miller, a senior White House aide, and Denver’s now-former top ICE official, both of whom told reporters that ICE did indeed intend to arrest anyone in the country illegally.
“What (plaintiffs) have done is take several instances of supposedly unlawful behavior, asserted there’s a policy underneath all of them, and said that they’re challenging that policy,” said Logan Brown, an attorney for the department.
Davies testified that the agency targets “criminal aliens” and “terrorists.” While its agents may arrest other people, he and another ICE official said, those arrests are “collateral” and aren’t the type of case that ICE prioritizes.
But the accounts of the four plaintiffs — a college student, a grocer and two men who work in construction — as well as testimony from two immigration attorneys and the incident in Durango painted a much different picture of ICE’s practices than those described by the agency’s lawyers and supervisors.
One man said ICE arrested him while looking for someone else. The college student, Caroline Dias Goncalves, was arrested only by chance, after a Mesa County sheriff’s deputy pulled her over in a traffic stop and then alerted ICE. The other two men were arrested in large-scale raids in Aurora and Colorado Springs and were later released.Judge expresses skepticism of ICE
Jackson, who declined to immediately issue an order Friday, said the plaintiffs’ arrests all appeared to have been unlawful, and he seemed inclined to agree that ICE was operating under a policy of mass arrests, regardless of the circumstances.
While Davies testified that his office had let two people go in recent days because they didn’t pose a flight risk, Jackson pointed to the Durango arrests and the Douglas County teacher’s detention. He also noted that Davies — a near-20-year veteran of the agency — didn’t appear to know the details of the policy, either.
“There’s a policy,” Jackson said of the ICE memo. “These guys just don’t follow it. They might not even know what it is. I think itap at least reasonable that the policy they really follow is what supervisors tell them to do, and what supervisors are telling them is, ‘Go arrest people, as many as you can get.’ ”
He also questioned how Goncalves could’ve posed a flight risk or represented one of the “criminal aliens” that ICE purports to pursue. Goncalves, a University of Utah student, was arrested by ICE in June and then held in detention for nearly three weeks. The Brazilian came to the U.S. with her family when she was 7 and has a pending asylum application, the Salt Lake Tribune .
She testified Thursday that she now lives at home, no longer has a driver’s license and is taking a significantly reduced course load because of the arrest.
The immigrants are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and local attorneys. To the lawyers, the Durango detentions represented a clear example that ICE was neither making targeted arrests nor following its own purported policy of only detaining those who pose a flight risk.
The incident spurred demonstrations in the southwestern Colorado city earlier this week and clashes with federal authorities. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation announced Thursday that it would investigate an incident in which a federal agent threw a protester’s phone and pushed her to the ground outside the local ICE field office.
On Friday, attorney Carly Hamilton testified that she’d spoken to Jaramillo-Solano’s wife, who wasn’t in the car and wasn’t detained; she was referred to using her initials to protect her privacy. The family had been seeking asylum because the woman had been tortured in Colombia and her previous husband was assassinated, Hamilton said.
Jaramillo-Solano’s wife told Hamilton that ICE agents had “beaten” her husband and children and kept them in a “dungeon”-like room in Durango, where the adolescents — a boy and girl — had to share a urinal with their father.
The man and children have been transported to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas. The Denver Post located the father using ICE’s detainee locator, which does not provide information on minors. Davies testified that the family members were all transported to Texas.
The Douglas County teacher, who was arrested with her family, is also detained in the same facility, ICE’s database shows.
Jackson said he would decide soon whether to issue an injunction against ICE to restrict its arrest practices.
