Updated at 3:46 p.m. on Nov. 25, 2025
A federal judge has ordered immigration agents to stop making warrantless arrests in Colorado based on suspected violations and to begin following federal law prohibiting detentions without first determining whether a person is a risk to run and avoid deportation hearings.
The 66-page ruling Tuesday by Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson of Colorado is a comprehensive rejection of a tactic regularly used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to meet quotas set by the Trump administration.
Unless reversed on appeal, it is likely to place a severe restriction on ICE’s operations in Colorado. Jackson noted statistics showing most of the growth in the number of people detained in Colorado resulted from making “collateral” arrests of people without warrants while looking for other people, such as the father and children in Durango, picked up while ICE looked for someone else.
“Defendants shall not effect warrantless arrests in this District unless, pre-arrest, the arresting officer has probable cause to believe that the individual is in the United States in violation of United States immigration laws and probable cause that the person being arrested is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained,” Jackson wrote. “Mere presence within the United States in violation of United States immigration law is not, by itself, sufficient to conclude that a person is likely to escape before a warrant for arrest can be obtained.”
The ruling resulted from a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Trump administration. Lawyers argued that ICE agents have routinely violated people’s federal rights by detaining them in Colorado, sometimes for months, without any proof that the person is a flight risk.
Tim McDonald, Legal Director for the ACLU of Colorado, said the ruling is an affirmation that immigrants have legal protections.
"This is an important first step of requiring our own government to comply with the law, comply with due process, comply with the Constitution and stop terrorizing our communities," McDonald said.
Attorneys representing four immigrants who were detained for weeks by immigration officials argued over two days to a federal judge that Colorado-based immigration agents are not first assessing the likelihood that they will flee, which is required by federal law.
Federal law requires agents arresting people in violation of immigration laws to both have probable cause that those individuals are here in violation of those laws and that they would be a flight risk if they let them go.
Jackson found that each of those four plaintiffs suffered harm as a result of ICE’s actions, and he ordered them to be returned to the position they were in before they were picked up without warrants. That means refunding them any bail they paid to be released from detention, taking them off monitoring, and requiring no further removal proceedings — unless ICE gets a warrant first allowing them to be re-entered into immigration proceedings.
A representative of ICE referred a reporter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Among the four plaintiffs is Caroline Dias-Goncalves, a Utah college student who was pulled over by a Mesa County deputy for following a truck too closely. He let her go with a warning, and ICE grabbed her a few miles down the road, taking her to detention in Aurora without a warrant and without making any effort to determine whether she would really be a risk to flee to avoid immigration proceedings.
“Here, officers knew that Ms. Dias Goncalves, a 20-year-old visa overstay with no criminal history, had already cooperated with and provided her information to the deputy sheriff,” Jackson wrote. “Furthermore, she was not avoiding the immigration authorities; she had applied for asylum and recently obtained work authorization through USCIS. Under these circumstances, the mere fact that she was driving a car in a neighboring state was insufficient to conclude that she posed a flight risk.”
Dias-Goncalves lost a job and dropped classes as a result of her arrest. Jackson essentially ordered ICE to start over in her case, returning her to the status she held before she was pulled over.
Plaintiff J.S.T. was detained in Aurora on Feb. 5 during a much-publicized raid to get alleged gang members out of the community.
J.S.T., who used his initials in court because of his pending asylum claim, has been in the country for 15 years and was heading to work in Aurora that morning. He told the judge he doesn’t do drugs, is not involved in gangs and has no criminal record in Mexico or the United States. So, when he saw Drug Enforcement Administration vans in his apartment parking lot, he said he wasn’t worried.
But ICE agents blocked him in his vehicle as he tried to leave the parking lot.
He told the judge during the earlier hearing they never asked him whether he was involved in gangs or had guns and drugs. They didn’t ask him about family ties or his job or how long he’d lived in the apartment building. J.S.T. was detained for a couple of months and lost his apartment and all of his belongings, including his clothes and personal items, he said.
When he was finally released on bond with an ankle monitor, he had nothing left. He told the judge that if he would have received a notice to appear and had some advance warning before detention, he would have prepaid his rent and gotten a lawyer.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said, his voice breaking on the stand. “I’m scared. It’s changed my life very much. I had a stable life before, and now I have to start again from zero.”
Robert Guadian was, until recently, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Colorado. Guadian told the judge he was reassigned to a Virginia office in a nationwide shakeup of ICE offices.
Guadian said that his officers in Colorado were trained to take into account several factors before deciding to take someone in detention.
He said agents don’t just pick up and detain unauthorized immigrants without a strategy and that, even with so-called collateral arrests, which is a term when bystanders get swept up in arrests when they weren’t the intended targets, it all is purposeful.
“They do the job in the field, it’s difficult,” he said. “They weigh what’s in front of them to make a lawful arrest.”
Plaintiffs' lawyers brandished media reports and interviews given by Guadian, who has said repeatedly over the last nine months that they’ll pick up anyone they can who is in the country illegally. Guadian defended those statements, saying the media wasn’t nuanced in how they portrayed his sentiments. He also said he has always told his agents to make lawful arrests.
Living in the U.S. without authorization is a civil, not criminal, offense on first offense. Homeland Security officials have said since the start of the Trump administration that they are targeting for removal immigrants who committed crimes while here. But they have not said they would exclusively detain only those who committed or were accused of crimes.
Jackson also authorized the formation of a class of plaintiffs, including anyone in the state who has been detained without a warrant on a civil immigration complaint or may be detained in the future without a warrant.
Guadian acknowledged that the number of non-criminal people in detention across the country has jumped nationally from about 800 people at the end of the Biden administration to more than 16,000 people last month, without any pending criminal charges or criminal records.
Those percentages are mirrored in Colorado, according to numbers crunched by the University of California, Berkeley, according to testimony.
“Why won’t the government just stipulate they’ll do what they say they’ll do?” Jackson said. “We can work around your issues in the form of relief, a little bit. Why don’t you come up with something?”
The federal government declined, and the hearing went forward, leading to Tuesday’s ruling.
