Twenty-four hours after she was released from immigration detention, Jeanette Vizguerra stood on the steps of a federal courthouse in downtown Denver on Tuesday and pledged to keep fighting the crackdown that still threatens to remove her from the country.
Her attempts to regain her freedom, even temporarily, had galvanized supporters since she was detained in March and became one of Colorado’s highest-profile arrestees in President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation push. A chance at bail came only after a federal judge intervened in her case last week.
“The victory belongs to everyone — everyone who contributed in different ways, who did all kinds of different jobs,” Vizguerra told supporters through a Spanish translator. “And I will keep struggling. The struggle goes on.”
For months, backers of the longtime immigrant-rights activist have organized regular vigils outside the Aurora detention center where Vizguerra had been held. On Tuesday, those supporters greeted her with long hugs, tears, chants, incense and a brass horn.
They chanted “Free them all!” and, in Spanish, “Yes we can” as Vizguerra urged them to set aside political differences and unite to oppose immigration arrests and deportations.
When Vizguerra left detention, she said she first wanted to hug her children, thank the Virgin Mary and reconnect with her community. She said her release “represents a new stage in my life.”
“Those nine months that I spent in detention were not days that are lost in detention,” said Vizguerra, a native of Mexico who’s lived in the United States for most of the past 28 years. “I documented dozens upon dozens upon dozens of cases of people who were arrested in Colorado by ICE without a warrant. I want to say to the people who are still in detention, to the women who were in my pod with me, to the men that are still in detention: Don’t give up. Keep fighting.”
Vizguerra’s temporary release was the result of a prolonged legal fight, waged by several prominent immigration attorneys who took on the case pro bono against U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement.
A U.S. District Court judge last week ordered federal officials to provide her with a bail hearing. After that was convened late in the week, an immigration judge on Sunday ordered her released on $5,000 bail.
She will remain out of custody while her attorneys contest ICE’s attempts to deport her and while a separate legal challenge also plays out in federal court.
Vizguerra is in the country without legal status, and ICE and lawyers representing the federal government have argued that she was arrested to comply with a removal order that had been reinstated after Trump returned to office. She has been arrested by immigration authorities before and had agreed to return to Mexico in 2012. She reentered the U.S. the next year, she said Tuesday, to return to her family.
Vizguerra told reporters that she has a check-in appointment with ICE in January, which she said she will attend. She was released without any monitoring devices, like an ankle bracelet.
Her attorneys have argued that Vizguerra was targeted by ICE agents. She’d risen to national prominence during Trump’s first term, when she’d sheltered in a church and was included on a TIME Magazine list of 2017’s most influential people.
Federal officials sought a warrant to arrest her within 10 days of Trump’s return to office in January. When Vizguerra was arrested in March, administration officials celebrated her detention on social media, and one agent allegedly told her they had “finally got you.”
ICE officials sought to block journalists from attending Vizguera’s bail hearing last week, an abrupt departure from what are typically open court proceedings. The warden of the detention center told reporters and one of Vizguerra’s lawyers that media and other observers were prohibited from watching because of the attention the case had received. (Officials eventually relented and allowed media into the courtroom.)
While Vizguerra’s release represents a victory for her family, legal team and supporters, it also illustrates the steep hill that many immigrants who lack proper legal status face in contesting their detentions and deportations.
Even with a team of lawyers, Vizguerra was detained for more than nine months. Most immigration detainees are not represented by lawyers, and as ICE sought to prevent many from requesting bail earlier this year, a growing number accepted deportations as a means to escape detention.
Her job now, Vizguerra told reporters later, will be advocating for those still detained and investigating the conditions of the privately run Aurora facility. The detention center and others like it treat people “like products,” she said.
“If there’s something different about my case, it’s just that people don’t have the resources to pay for an attorney, the resources to access bond,” Vizguerra told supporters. “Their cases are not much different than mine. This administration is seeking … to trap and detain and deport every single one of us.”
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