New legal filings allege federal immigration agents operating in Colorado have acted illegally and violently at times amid a summer surge in arrests — including one recent incident where an 18-year-old’s face was repeatedly slammed into the pavement in a 7-Eleven parking lot.
Attorneys say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to violate both a court order and federal law limiting agents’ use of warrantless arrests. The Thursday filings in U.S. District Court in Denver include photos of the injured teenager and descriptions of other violent arrests, and they come as its enforcement efforts in recent months.
Immigration arrests had dipped nationally after federal agents killed two protesters in Minneapolis earlier this year, sparking a public outcry. But they began to tick up again in May and surged in July. ICE agents arrested 495 people in Colorado last month — a 93% spike from March, according to a Denver Post analysis of arrest data from the Deportation Data Project, which is based at the University of California, Berkeley and at UCLA.
In the case of the arrested teenager, who was detained in early August, agents pulled him and another man out of a truck in the 7-Eleven parking lot. They shoved the teenager to the ground, breaking his wrist, giving him a black eye and cutting his face so badly that he couldn’t see, the teenager wrote in a court declaration.
“While on the ground I turned my head to look at D.B.D.J. and I saw the officer beating him, pounding his face against the pavement,” the truck’s driver, identified as J.D.B., wrote in his own declaration. D.B.D.J. are the initials for the 18-year-old, who, like others, is not identified by his full name in the documents.
A federal judge in Colorado has already twice ordered ICE to follow the law when conducting warrantless arrests. The escalating legal dispute over the practice and the overall detention increase, unfolding both in Colorado and nationwide, demonstrate that while ICE has scaled back its high-profile public surges since the Minneapolis killings, the Trump administration has not abandoned its plans to arrest and deport millions of immigrants without proper legal status.
After his confirmation this spring, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised quieter but more effective enforcement, and the agency has not reverted to the intense city-by-city surges that colored the first year of Trump’s second term.
Even still, ICE now appears closer than ever to meeting a recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests.
“They took a lot of heat for the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and Mullin came in to try to say, ‘Look, we’re going to go lower profile’ … but clearly they want to keep ramping up the deportation machine,” said Tim Macdonald, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which jointly filed the new documents alleging a continuation of warrantless arrests. “They have all the money in the world, and what that means is they’re going out and rounding people up.”
Indeed, July in Colorado saw the second-most arrests of any month since President Donald Trump returned to office early last year. Nationwide, it was the most arrest-heavy month of his second term, with 49,571 people arrested, up 70% since February.
“The enforcement mechanisms are just as insidious, but they’re just a little bit more sophisticated in the sense that they’re being masked better — and the ways in which they’re profiling noncitizens or targeting people are more hidden,” said Hans Meyer, a Denver immigration attorney who is also part of the legal team suing ICE over the warrantless arrests. “Thatap to nullify a political defense about all of the horrible things that ICE has been caught doing on video.”
Facing judicial scrutiny
Meyer and other attorneys, including at the ACLU, allege that some of the new arrests are illegal.
That allegation has become something of a legal merry-go-round. U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson ordered ICE in November to follow federal law, which requires ICE to establish that a person does not have proper legal status and is likely to flee before agents can arrest them without a warrant.
Jackson then reiterated that order to ICE and chastised its agents in the spring, after the ACLU coalition said agents were still arresting people without following the court’s order. Three agents who testified in court showed little understanding of Jackson’s prior order, and Jackson said they didn’t “have a clue” about what they should be doing.
In an unsigned statement to The Denver Post, the Homeland Security Department said agents use reasonable suspicion to investigate immigrants’ legal status and probable cause to make arrests; the statement did not address accusations of violent arrests.
But now the attorneys are again accusing the agency of ignoring Jackson, including in several allegedly violent encounters.
Macdonald said arrest reports reviewed by the legal team show an “alarming” trend. The latest filings describe instances of agents rapidly and forcefully arresting immigrants before the agents went through the procedures that Jackson — and federal law — required.
In other cases, the attorneys accused the agency of issuing field warrants after someone had already been arrested or including “falsehoods” in the warrants.
In one July 2 arrest, the lawyers wrote, ICE agents pulled over a man and showed him a warrant through his car window. But the warrant was for somebody else, not the driver.
“I told the officers that I am not the person on the warrant,” the man, identified by the initials G.B.R., wrote in a declaration attached to the legal filings. “They said we don’t care, you are arrested.”
His car window was then shattered and he was pulled from the vehicle, the declaration says. He wrote that his hands were cuffed so tightly that the cuffs cut into his wrists and that agents did not ask him questions about his personal life — which would’ve helped establish if his arrest was necessary — until after he was transported to an ICE facility.
Another 18-year-old, who filed a declaration under the initials S.N., said he was delivering food to an apartment building in Aurora when ICE agents raided it. He was pulled into the apartment by its occupants and then, following agents’ commands, opened the door.
He was handcuffed and, as he protested that he was only delivering food, an agent punched him in the face, he wrote.
Agents accused him of being a Venezuelan gang member and did not ask him questions about his personal history until they’d placed him in a vehicle. He wrote that he entered the country at age 14 and was preparing for his senior year in high school, where he played varsity soccer, when he was arrested. As he was being driven to an ICE field office in Centennial, the teen asked the driver if he “had something to stop the bleeding from the punch the officer gave me above my right eye.”
“They said no,” he wrote. “They said that I belonged in Venezuela.”
In a separate declaration, D.B.D.J. — the teenager whose wrist was broken — said an ICE agent arrested him after breaking through a car window on Aug. 4. The agent pulled him out and shoved him to the ground, he said.
Pictures attached to the filing show the teenager with a black eye, cuts on his forehead and a cast on his right arm. In an apparent violation of the court order, the agent did not ask him any questions other than his name and birthdate before driving him away, the declaration says.
He was later taken to the hospital, and ICE agents gave him Tylenol for the pain. He was not asked questions about his personal history until he arrived at the detention center in Aurora, according to the document.
Expanding enforcement
Using government data published by the Deportation Data Project, The Post identified an Aug. 4 arrest appearing to match D.B.D.J.’s description and a June 19 arrest appearing to match S.N.’s description. ICE records indicate that neither had prior criminal histories and that both were arrested because of their immigration status. Using other information from the declarations, The Post was unable to definitively link the other people who filed declarations to specific criminal histories.
As has consistently been the case since the Trump administration began its arrest-and-deport program last year, the majority of those arrested and detained by the agency have never been convicted of a crime. The latest data released by the Deportation Data Project show that between April 1 and Aug. 5, for instance, fewer than a third of the 1,573 people arrested in Colorado had a prior criminal conviction. For those with prior convictions, the most common charges were driving under the influence, assault and immigration violations.
The Post analyzed the data by eliminating duplicates and, for the purposes of analyzing prior criminal histories, by examining only those arrests that resulted in a detention stay, which provides more personal information about arrestees.
In the month before Trump returned to office in January 2025, immigration arrests hovered a little over 8,000, a figure largely made up of immigrants transferred from city or state jails and prisons and turned over to ICE.
But during Trump’s first year back in office, the numbers started climbing as the administration loosened restrictions on whom ICE could arrest — and where it could carry out arrests — while it also infused the agency with billions of dollars approved by Congress.
Some apprehensions that occurred during the recent arrest surge came from ICE activity at airports.
Meyer, the Denver attorney, said he represents a number of clients who were arrested at Denver International Airport and had no prior criminal history. Those arrests are part of . The New York Times reported in December that ICE officers were arresting people subject to deportation orders with the help of information that airlines provided to the Transportation Security Administration.
Those efforts now appear to also target people with expired visas, a far larger group than those with deportation orders. It includes a 27-year-old Ecuadorian woman who lives in California and was arrested while attempting to board a plane at DIA last month.
As ICE arrests have increased, so, too, has the number of people housed in Aurora’s privately run detention center. According to the Deportation Data Project, the facility’s daily population peaked in January at 1,451 detainees. It then dipped through the spring, only to rebound in recent weeks.
The facility hit 1,441 detainees on July 26, the highest total under Trump other than the January peak.
The Associated Press and the New York Times contributed to this story.
