A woman who became prominent after sheltering in a Colorado church to avoid deportation during the first Trump administration was detained, immigration advocates said Tuesday.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether Janet Vizguera was detained.
Vizguerra, a mother of four, said Jordan Garcia of the American Friends Service Committee, who is in touch with Vizguerra's lawyers and family, was arrested Monday at a target store in the Denver area where she worked.
Vizguerra is about to obtain a visa given to crime victims who will allow them to stay in the United States after leaving the sanctuary in 2020, Garcia said.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston blows up the Trump administration for the reported arrest of immigrants and labor activist Vizguera.
Johnston, who defended Denver's sanctuary city policy in Congress earlier this month, called on people to demand that Ice release Bizguera and grant her the right to a legitimate process.
“This is not an immigration enforcement aimed at keeping our country safe. It is Putin-style persecution of political dissidents,” he said in a statement.
News of Vizguerra's detention urged protests outside the Ice Detention Center in the Denver suburbs of Aurora, where her family said she was in detention.
The bus left the facility in the morning, raising fears that she would be deported, but her family said Vizguerra was still there later that day.
“We hope that Ice will work with her attorney to release her soon,” the family said in a statement included in the American Friends Service Commission's update.
Vizguerra's lawyer said ICE was trying to remove her based on an order that was not valid. The petition challenged her detention has been filed in both the federal courts in Denver and the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“If Ice tries to eliminate her without legal authority, it sends a horrifying message about the legitimate process and the agency's neglect to the rule of law,” one of the lawyers, Laura Richter, said in a statement.
Vizguerra, who came to Colorado from Mexico City in 1997, has been fighting deportation since 2009, when he was handed over in the suburbs of Denver and found himself holding a fraudulent Social Security card with his name and date of birth, but according to the 2019 lawsuit, there are real numbers for someone else.
Vizguerra said he didn't know that the numbers belonged to others at the time.
The lawsuit she later dropped claimed that ICE had no valid order to expel her after she pleaded guilty to a count of one misdemeanor in that case.
ICE tried to mistakenly revive the order after Vizguerra was arrested for later re-entering the US, the lawsuit said.
She began living in the church in 2017 to avoid being deported under the first Trump administration after her deportation establishment was not renewed.
She was given a two-year deportation stay after two members of the Colorado Legislature delegation, Sen. Michael Bennett and then rep. Jared Police, now the governor of Colorado, has introduced what is known as a private bill and gives her a path to becoming a permanent resident.
Such delays may be extended over the years as lawmakers reintroduce measures aimed at supporting individual immigrants, but to date, few have become law.
After the stay was not renewed in 2019, Vizguerra again entered the church sanctuary, but left in 2020, according to the timeline provided by the American Friends Service Committee.
