Lawyers for detained immigrant advocate Jeanette Vizguerra argued to a federal appeals court that immigration authorities made a procedural mistake back in 2013 when they first tried to deport her back to Mexico.
And because of that mistake, they argue, those immigration authorities can’t deport Vizguerra now.
In a short but dense, six-page motion filed with the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Vizguerra’s lawyers lay out her long odyssey through the nation’s complicated immigration system.
A fateful traffic stop
After about a dozen years living without legal authorization in the U.S., Vizguerra, a native of Mexico, was first nabbed by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement after she failed to have a drivers license and was found with a made up social security number during a traffic stop in 2011.
If it happened today, she would likely have a state-issued driver's license available to non-citizens, and might not even need a social security number to work.
But Colorado was different then. And within months, ICE threatened to deport her, but gave her 60 days to leave the U.S. voluntarily.
That’s where things got complicated.
Vizguerra briefly returned to Mexico to visit a sick relative. When she returned, ICE detained her and, according to attorney Laura Lichter, they told her they were reinstating an alleged removal order from 2011.
In reinstatement proceedings like that, according to Lichter’s filing, the notice, the opportunity for Vizguerra to challenge it, and a final determination, was out of sequence and therefore, her lawyers argue, invalid.
The form is called an I-871, and the sequence with which the Department of Homeland Security informed Vizguerra that she has the right to make a written or oral statement contesting her deportation wasn’t followed.
Her lawyers said as a result the entire process was “upended” and they’re asking the appeals court to invalidate the entire reason their client is in deportation proceedings now.
ICE for the first time Wednesday acknowledged they had detained Vizguerra, who remains in custody at the GEO Detention Facility in Aurora. They argue she has already received her due process and will stay incarcerated pending her removal from the United States.
“Vizguerra is a convicted criminal alien from Mexico who has a final order of deportation issued by a federal immigration judge. She illegally entered the United States near El Paso, Texas, on Dec. 24, 1997, and has received legal due process in U.S. immigration court,” an ICE spokesperson said, in a statement.
An activist recognized for her work and her stay in sanctuary
Vizguerra is an activist who has spent more than a decade simultaneously trying to obtain U.S. citizenship and criticizing the U.S. government for its failed and complex immigration system.
At one point during the first Trump administration, she decamped to a church to live to avoid prosecution and deportation.
She was named one of Time Magazine’s people of the year in 2017 for her outspoken advocacy and community organizing in keeping immigrant mothers with their American-born children.
ICE took her into custody Monday while she was on a lunch break at a metro area Target where she works.
Swept up in a deportation crackdown
President Donald Trump and ICE officials have said they are determined to remove violent gang members who are not lawfully in the U.S.
But immigrants like Vizguerra with minor or non-existent records have also been swept up in the crackdown. A former ICE official acknowledged Tuesday that agents there have long wanted to deport Vizguerra because of her visibility and willingness to criticize U.S. policies.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday against Attorney General Pam Bondi and a number of other top Department of Homeland Security and ICE officials, Lichter said that there is no legal reason for Vizguerra to be in detention right now.
She is not a public safety risk, and her criminal record comes from a charge of entering the United States illegally.
Lichter alleges Vizguerra hasn’t been properly placed in removal proceedings, nor has she been issued a final administrative order of removal.
“Flash forward to March 17, 2025 when immigration officials detained Ms. Vizguerra, advising her that it was executing a reinstated order. But where is that reinstated order? It cannot be the order dated July 24, 2013 because that order had been issued in error,” the Tenth Circuit filing said. “If there has been another, procedurally correct reinstatement order … Ms. Vizguerra has never been served with such an order.”
Tim Macdonald, the legal director for the ACLU of Colorado, said the organization is supporting legal action against ICE on behalf of Vizguerra. No hearings have yet been scheduled on the petition in either district court or the court of appeals.
“We’re deeply concerned about what appears to be a prominent targeting of an advocate. Someone out there talking about the horrors of our immigration system. She is a mother and started nonprofits, volunteering in the community,” he said. “She is not a threat and a narrative that they’re spinning that they’re going after dangerous criminals — that is proven by this action not to be true.”
