U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have repeatedly violated a November court order requiring them to follow the law when making warrantless arrests in Colorado, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
In a 60-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote that ICE had continued making the arrests without first determining if an immigrant lacking permanent legal status was likely to flee. that is required by both federal law and Jackson’s prior order restating ICE’s obligations under that statute.
Because the agency had “failed” to train its agents properly, he ordered ICE officials in Denver to provide warrantless arrest guidance to all of the field office’s deportation officers, who now number more than 200 in strength.
Jackson found that ICE had “uniformly” failed to follow his order requiring better documentation of arrests. He ordered the agency to provide even more records so that he and the attorneys who sued ICE over its arrest practices last year could monitor its progress. ICE’s failure to better document its arrest practices “confounds effective oversight,” Jackson found.
“When the Court issues an injunction, ‘itap to be followed,’ ” he wrote.
While ICE can conduct warrantless arrests, federal law — and Jackson’s order — requires ICE agents to determine that an immigrant is both likely in the country illegally and is likely to flee before a future court date.
The ruling comes nearly six months after Jackson first found that ICE wasn’t following federal law. In late November, the judge sided with attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and two other law firms that had sued ICE last fall and ordered the agency to follow its own guidance and federal law.
The ACLU and the other attorneys, who represented immigrants arrested by the agency, then alleged that ICE wasn’t following Jackson’s order. They pointed to several additional arrests, as well as a collection of ICE arrest reports that didn’t document how ICE had reached a legal conclusion that an arrest was warranted.
As he did at the end of the hearing in March, Jackson criticized three agents who testified in his courtroom and who appeared to demonstrate little to no understanding of how to legally conduct warrantless arrests.
The judge wrote that one agent had a “shallow understanding” of his order. He said that though senior ICE officials had made some attempts to provide guidance to their teams in Colorado, the problem was that deportation officers “clearly do not know or understand” what’s required of them.
The ICE agents who testified appeared unaware of those requirements. At one point in the hearing, one agent sat silently for 30 seconds as he tried to recall what Jackson had already ordered him to do — until the judge finally intervened and told him he could just say he didn’t know.
In his latest ruling, Jackson required agency leaders to provide more training to deportation officers operating in the state and to give the attorneys suing the agency a running update on the implementation of that training. Any immigration agent who hasn’t been trained on the order within 45 days will be prohibited from making warrantless arrests, he wrote, and any agents hired after the order are prohibited from making the arrests until they’re trained.
He also ordered the agency to turn over a far larger batch of arrest reports and more details about those arrests. Though Jackson didn’t wade into the legality of ICE’s practice of issuing warrants in the field — oftentimes after agents have stopped someone — he did order agents to document when and how they obtain those field warrants.
“Without more robust compliance measures in place, they could resume violating (the prior order) with impunity,” he wrote. “Perhaps most importantly, the Denver Field Office has hired dozens of new officers since the (order) was issued and is likely to hire more. The evidence at the hearing did not instill confidence that these officers will be properly trained on the (order) and comply with it.”
A message sent to ICE representatives was not immediately returned Tuesday morning.
Hans Meyer, a Denver immigration attorney who’s part of the legal team that sued ICE, praised Jackson’s decision in a statement Tuesday afternoon.
“The scope of ICE’s lawlessness is breathtaking and includes ICE agents making warrantless arrests and then trying to justify the arrest by issuing a warrant after-the-fact, refusing to document the details of a warrantless arrest, and completely misunderstanding or ignoring the requirements of federal law and federal court orders,” he wrote.
The lawsuit — and subsequent attempts to enforce Jackson’s order — come as ICE has dramatically increased its presence out of the Denver field office, which covers both Colorado and Wyoming. The number of deportation officers here has more than doubled to roughly 200, and immigration arrests in Colorado surged during President Donald Trump’s first year in office.
