March 18, 2025 10:32 AM UTC

High-Profile ICE Arrest Could Backfire On Trump Administration

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• by: Colorado Pols

We woke up this morning to news that a well-known local immigrant rights activist, named by TIME Magazine as one of America’s 100 most influential figures when she first made headlines early in Donald Trump’s first administration, has been arrested by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Aurora–reportedly acting without a deportation order. Morgan Whitley reports for FOX 31:

Community members gathered outside the Aurora Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility after a well-known immigration activist was reportedly taken into custody.

According to the American Friends Services Committee, a nonprofit that supports immigrant rights, Jeanette Vizguerra was taken into custody by ICE on Monday.

The AFSC said “ICE acted without a valid deportation order and without notifying Ms. Vizguerra or her lawyers” when she was taken into custody Monday. The rights group said in a Tuesday press release that it appears ICE is “readying to possibly deport her even though the agency knows they don’t have a valid deportation order.”

Jeanette Vizguerra’s arrest drew swift condemnation this morning from both of Colorado’s U.S. Senators:

The legally dubious arrest of Vizguerra changes the debate over the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda in important ways. Represented up until now as an operation targeting violent migrant gang members and other undocumented immigrants who turned to crime in the United States, Vizguerra defies all of those tropes as a mother and community leader who has been the country for decades–seemingly exactly who Rep. Gabe Evans was talking about when he said the crackdown on undocumented immigrants should focus on “gangsters, not grandmas.”

But as Kevin Beaty writes for Denverite, Vizguerra’s lack of conformity to the criminal stereotype of immigrants promoted by Trump is what made her a target eight years ago:

She was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 most influential people” in April 2017. Actress America Ferrera wrote her blurb on the list.

“Jeanette moved to the U.S. to be a janitor, working as an outspoken union organizer and building her own company before becoming an advocate for immigration reform — a bold and risky thing for an undocumented immigrant,” Ferrera wrote at the time…

When she took sanctuary in February 2017, Hans Meyer, her attorney at the time, said her resistance was the result of “the brutality and the stupidity of Trump’s immigration enforcement plans.”

Then-U.S. Rep. Jared Polis joined Vizguerra’s supporters in calling for a reprieve in her case. At the time, he said she was being targeted by a “rogue ICE agent” with a personal vendetta against her.

Vizguerra’s arrest yesterday appears to be the long-awaited resolution to said vendetta–no longer in the personal case of the ICE assistant local office director who went after Vizguerra in 2017 and has since retired, but the Trump administration itself embarrassed by the national attention focused on the case all those years ago. The lack of due process in Vizguerra’s arrest is no oversight, but apparently now the administration’s explicit policy of taking irreversible action first and letting the courts sort out later if the action was legal–and even then with no guarantee the administration will abide by a court’s ruling.

With this arrest, the moral foundations of Trump’s immigration crackdown have been undermined. The only purposes served are political. And the only people happy about it are those who desired revenge against Vizguerra for making Trump look bad all those years ago. That is, needless to say, a small number of people.

For the rest of America, this broken promise is how opinion begins to flip.