Activist who took sanctuary in a church during first Trump term detained

Jeanette Vizguerra, a prominent Colorado advocate for immigrants who took shelter in a church for months during the first Trump administration, was detained by immigration officials on Monday, local officials and advocates said.

Vizguerra was being held Tuesday at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Aurora, Colorado, according to the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. Nearly 100 activists held a vigil overnight outside the facility calling for her release, the group said, and local leaders criticized the Trump administration for locking up a mother and grandmother who has been in the community for decades.

“This is not immigration enforcement. This is Soviet-style political persecution of political dissidents under the guise of immigration enforcement,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement Tuesday.

“This does not make our community safer in my mind. I think it makes it more lawless.”

A message left for U.S. immigration officials was not immediately returned Tuesday evening.

Fox News reported that ICE confirmed it had “arrested” Vizguerra, a Fox reporter wrote on X, and that it has “a final order of removal (deportation order) via a (Department of Justice) immigration judge.”

Colorado Public Radio reported Tuesday that Vizguerra’s attorney Laura Lichter asked a federal judge to take over her case and release Vizguerra immediately, arguing the federal government didn’t have the authority to take her into custody.

Lichter didn’t immediately return a call for comment.

Vizguerra, 53, came to the United States from Mexico in 1993, according to the news site Denverite. According to media reports, she’s had many interactions with immigration officials over the years as she sought legal status and obtained multiple stays of deportation.

She was also pulled over in 2009 for a traffic violation and convicted of falsifying a Social Security number, which she said she planned to use to secure a part-time job, the Washington Post reported in 2017.

She has long been an activist for migrants, but gained a national profile in 2017 when she sought sanctuary in a Denver church for nearly three months. Vizguerra was named one of the 100 most influential people that year by Time magazine.

Hundreds of houses of worship in the United States had declared themselves sanctuaries for migrants – part of a movement that began in the 1980s for people fleeing civil war in Central American countries.

She again sought shelter in a church in 2019.

The Trump administration has said it would no longer exempt “sensitive locations” such as churches or schools from immigration enforcement raids.

Jordan Garcia, a family friend and an advocate with the American Friends Service Committee in Colorado, said Tuesday that Vizguerra had talked with her children on Tuesday and “is doing OK. She’s concerned about her family.”

She had kept a slightly lower profile as an activist in recent years, Garcia said, “as she was going through her own legal process.” And she understood she was a likely target of the incoming Trump administration, Garcia said.

“Any activist with a profile knows that’s a possibility. She did take the time to make a plan with her family and her lawyer. She knew this was a possibility,” he said. “That’s the reality many immigrants are facing.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) in a statement said that he had met Vizguerra and that her arrest was improper.

“I continue to urge President Trump and ICE to focus their actions on violent offenders and be more transparent with states they are operating in,” he said in the statement.

Nearly 200 Colorado community organizations and local leaders, including dozens of local and state elected officials, signed a statement calling for Vizguerra’s release.

“ICE had no reason to detain her - this cruel and unnecessary action is causing irreparable harm to her family and community,” the statement read. “It is clear she is being targeted for her community organizing and critiques of the deportation system as well as her outspoken defense of human rights.”