Nine months after ICE picked her up on her lunch break outside a Target, immigrant rights activist Jeanette Vizguerra-Ramiez has a hearing before an immigration judge Friday that could result in her release.
Vizguerra’s supporters, who have held vigils every Monday outside the immigration detention center in Aurora, are hoping she will walk out of the facility following the hearing. A federal judge in Denver ordered Wednesday that immigration officials must bring Vizguerra to immigration court for a bond hearing, where they will have to prove she is a flight risk or a danger to the community in order to keep her locked up.
Vizguerra, who once took refuge in a Denver church to avoid deportation and in 2017 was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, asked for the bond hearing after she had been held for longer than 180 days. The legal maneuver, forcing the government to justify her prolonged detention, is more straightforward than other claims Vizguerra’s legal team had already made to try to win her release.
They have argued that Vizguerra’s right to free speech was violated because she was targeted for speaking out against the Trump administration. U.S. District Judge Nina Y. Wang, in her ruling this week ordering the bond hearing, said that while the allegations “raise serious First Amendment concerns,” she was not ready to rule on that claim. The judge could revisit the First Amendment issue depending on the outcome of Vizguerra’s bond hearing, however.
“This decision makes clear that immigration detention is not a constitutional blind spot,” Vizguerra’s attorney Laura Lichter said via email. “ICE cannot warehouse someone for months and then claim no court can ask why. Taking someone’s liberty requires justification, and that justification must withstand constitutional scrutiny.”
Vizguerra has been locked up by U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement since she was taken into custody on her lunch break from Target on March 17. Federal authorities had said they planned to deport her to Mexico, but Vizguerra’s attorneys won a court ruling to temporarily block deportation until Vizguerra could have the case heard in court.
One of Jeanette’s daughters, Tania, thanked a swarm of volunteers, many of whom gathered weekly outside the detention center for the past nine months and donated money to cover legal costs. The legal team has worked mostly pro bono on Vizguerra’s behalf. Another of Vizguerra’s daughters recently joined the military.
“While we are strong like my mom, and will never give up, more than anything I never thought that we’d face Christmas and New Year’s without my mom,” Tania said via email. “After nine months, our family has been left with a huge hole where my mom, Jeanette Vizguerra, has always been.”
Luna Baez, the second-oldest daughter of Jeanette Vizguerra, shares a live phone conversation with her mother with a crowd of 200 people during a vigil March 24, 2025, at the Aurora ICE detention center. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)Vizguerra entered the United States illegally in El Paso, Texas, in 1997, according to federal officials. In 2009, she was pulled over in Arapahoe County and authorities found that she had used documents that included a false Social Security number. The mother of four, including three children born in the United States, has been fighting deportation efforts ever since.
Her attorneys argued that reissuing her prior deportation order from years ago was not sufficient under the law to justify her detention. They also claimed that Vizguerra was targeted because she has publicly criticized the immigration policies of the Trump administration in violation of her rights to free speech.
Following her detention, Denver immigration officials posted a photo of Vizguerra in shackles on X, formerly Twitter, and the photo was reposted by the national ICE account with the caption: “Despite her being featured in national media for years, we arrested her in public March 17. A high-profile status does not exempt a person from immigration law.”
Former ICE Denver director John Fabbricatore posted screenshots of Vizguerra’s Facebook page in which she was critical of Trump. And Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, posted on X that under Trump, authorities will arrest “illegal aliens regardless of if they were a featured ‘Time Person of the Year.’ If you come to our country illegally, we will deport you, and you will never return.”
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