National immigration activist Jeanette Vizguerra was granted a $5,000 bond on Sunday by an immigration judge after the judge took two days to think about it, her lawyers said.
Immigration judge Brea Burgie found over the weekend that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security failed to justify her continued detention, a long time labor and worker rights activist who has also been critical of federal immigration policies.
Vizguerra’s family says they will post the bond immediately, with the help from the immigrant “Freedom Fund” so that she can be released as soon as she is processed by federal immigration officials. That should be within 24-48 hours.
The judge also explicitly declined to impose electronic monitoring, which is usually in the form of an ankle monitor, finding it unnecessary given her past compliance and lack of criminal record, her lawyers said.
Vizguerra has been in federal immigration custody since March. She’d been living in Colorado since 1997 working cleaning, retail and moving company jobs and over the decades has made a name for herself nationally for criticizing America’s immigration policies.
She doesn’t have a criminal record, save for some tickets, and had been repeatedly granted permission to keep living in the U.S. with work authorizations -- that is, up until the first Trump administration. Her lawyers contend that she was picked up on her lunch hour at a Target store, two months into the second Trump administration, because of her record of criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
U.S. District Court Judge Nina Wang is looking at that First Amendment claim now, but she also ordered last week that Vizguerra have a bond hearing in front of an immigration judge. Vizguerra has been sitting in detention for nine months with no clear plan to freedom or bail.
She has American-born children, including a daughter serving in the U.S. Air Force and another daughter who is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, since she was brought to the U.S. as a child. Generally, to be held in civil detention under federal law, an immigrant must be found to be a flight risk or a danger to public safety. But in the last 11 months, federal judges across the country, including Colorado, have found that ICE has repeatedly rejected that law.
Vizguerra left Mexico City in the mid 1990s when she has said her then-husband was threatened at gunpoint. She arrived in Denver and cleaned office buildings, joined the SEIU union to fight for better wages and launched a cleaning and moving company.
She was first placed in removal immigration proceedings in 2009 for a traffic violation, which was a dirty license plate, according to her attorneys. After that, she had multiple stays granted and continued to work and raise her American-born children.
Her first application for another stay during the first Trump administration was denied and she moved into a church to avoid removal. Immigration enforcement has typically not entered houses of worship to detain and remove people. She received international attention for this, including being named one of the most influential people of the year by Time Magazine.
Her lawyers said on Friday that she told ICE at the time what she was doing and told them she was going to continue to drive to work every day. At that time, ICE left her alone and then eventually she was granted another stay with the help of politicians and a lot of media publicity about her story. Vizguerra continued to go to her immigration check-ins and continued to work up until her detention this year.
The bond order doesn’t resolve Vizguerra’s underlying challenges to her removal, which remain pending, her lawyer said.
