Immigration agents who were involved in leaving “death cards” in the abandoned cars of arrested immigrants have been removed from field work and placed on office duty, a senior official in Denver’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office said Wednesday.
Gregory Davies, the assistant field office director, testified in federal court that an investigation into the incident was still underway by ICE’s . Davies was in court for a broader hearing about ICE’s practice of warrantless arrests and whether the agency has violated a November court order regulating that practice. The hearing began Tuesday and reconvened Wednesday morning.
ICE has been investigating the incident since late January, when a Colorado immigrant-rights advocacy group alleged that ace of spades cards -- branded with the address and phone number of an ICE detention center -- were left behind in cars after their occupants had been pulled over and arrested near Eagle-Vail.
The people were arrested during "fake traffic stops," said Alex Sánchez, the head of the advocacy group Voces Unidas. The cards were similar to those left on the bodies of dead Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War.
"The officers involved are no longer in the field," Davies said Wednesday. "They're in the office."
It's unclear how many agents were removed from the field because of the incident. On Tuesday, Davies testified that four agents had been removed from street-level work in part, he said, because they weren't properly documenting warrantless arrests as required by a November court order. But he said the officers were put on desk duty "not solely" because of the documentation issue.
Davies testified that there are roughly 200 ICE deportation officers working in Colorado and Wyoming, more than double the total at the beginning of last year, when President Donald Trump returned to office.
Davies' testimony was the first time an ICE official has commented on the investigation since the agency confirmed it was looking into the cards incident more than six weeks ago. Representatives of ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, have not responded to recent requests for updates from The Denver Post.
The incident drew national attention and condemnation from federal lawmakers from Colorado.
Eight people were arrested in the traffic stop operation, Sánchez previously said. Davies testified Wednesday that ICE averages between 15 and 25 arrests per day in the Denver field office's area of operations, which includes Colorado and Wyoming.
