DENVER (AP) — A woman who gained prominence after she took refuge in churches in Colorado to avoid deportation during the first Trump administration has been detained, immigration advocates said Tuesday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether Jeanette Vizguerra had been taken into custody.
Vizguerra, a mother of four, was arrested at a Denver-area Target store where she worked while she was on a break on Monday, said Jordan Garcia of the American Friends Service Committee, who has been in contact with Vizguerra's lawyer and family.
Vizguerra has been trying to gain a visa given to crime victims that allows them to remain in the United States since she left sanctuary in churches in 2020, Garcia said.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston blasted the Trump administration for the reported arrest of Vizguerra, an immigration activist herself who has worked as a building cleaner and union organizer. Johnston, who defended Denver's so-called sanctuary city policies in Congress earlier this month, called on people to demand that ICE release Vizguerra and give her due process rights.
“This is not immigration enforcement intended to keep our country safe. This is Putin-style persecution of political dissidents,” he said in a statement.
News of Vizguerra's detention prompted a protest outside an ICE detention center in the Denver suburb of Aurora, where her family said she is being held. Buses left the facility in the morning, raising fears that she would be deported, but her family said Vizguerra was still there later in the day.
“We are relieved to know our mom is still inside the detention facility and appreciate her calls being restored. We hope ICE will work with her attorney to release her immediately," the family said in a statement included in an update from the American Friends Service Committee.
A document challenging Vizguerra's detention was filed in federal court Tuesday by a lawyer for her but the full filing was not available to the public.
Vizguerra, who came to Colorado in 1997 from Mexico City, has been fighting deportation since 2009 after she was arrested in suburban Denver for not having a driver's license or current vehicle registration. She also had a forged identify document, which Vizguerra has said had a Social Security number made up of digits from her birth date, not one that belonged to an actual person.
She began living in churches in 2017 to avoid being deported under the first Trump administration after a hold on her deportation was not renewed. She was given a two-year stay of deportation after two members of Colorado's congressional delegation, Sen. Michael Bennet and then-Rep. Jared Polis, who is now Colorado's governor, introduced so-called private bills to give her a path to become a permanent resident. Such delays have sometimes been extended for years as lawmakers reintroduce the measures aimed at helping individual immigrants, but few of the measures ever become law.
After that stay was not renewed in 2019, Vizguerra again entered church sanctuary but then left in 2020, according to a timeline provided by the American Friends Service Committee.
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