Judge Orders ICE to Retrain Officers After Warrantless Arrests in Colorado

Make no mistake: the federal government is lying to you about how it catches people in Colorado.

U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson didn’t just say ICE is messing up. He said they are violating the law. He ordered them to retrain their arresting officers. The order is 60 pages long. It is specific. It is binding.

The core problem? ICE agents are making warrantless arrests without checking if the person is actually a flight risk. They are skipping the individualized probable cause determination required by federal law and a preliminary injunction Jackson issued last November.

"The Court finds that defendants have materially violated the Court’s (preliminary injunction) Order," Jackson wrote.

That’s the short version. The long version is that ICE continues to grab people on the street, in cars, and at homes without warrants, ignoring the rules they were told to follow.

This isn’t a minor paperwork error. It’s a systemic failure.

The lawsuit began in October. Four original plaintiffs sued the Trump administration. They were all arrested and detained by immigration agents in Colorado. No prior criminal convictions. Just caught up in the net.

One of them is Caroline Dias Goncalves. She’s 19. A University of Utah student. Brought to the U.S. as a child.

Her arrest happened in June. A Mesa County sheriff’s deputy pulled her over in Fruita. The deputy asked about her accent. Then her immigration status. Then ICE took her.

She spent 15 days in ICE’s Aurora detention center. She paid $2,000 for her bond.

That’s $2,000 out of pocket for a student who hadn’t committed a crime. That’s what it costs to buy your way out of federal detention when the system decides to hold you without a warrant.

Jackson sided with the immigrants in November. He recognized people arrested by ICE without a warrant in Colorado as a class. He limited how federal agents could operate in the state.

He thought that would be enough.

It wasn’t.

Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the Meyer Law Office, and Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray LLC asked Jackson to intervene in February. They alleged ICE agents were still arresting people unlawfully.

At a March hearing, ICE agents struggled to answer basic questions about warrantless arrests. They couldn’t explain their own process. They couldn’t justify their own actions.

Now, Jackson has ordered ICE to pay for the immigrants’ attorney fees. He ordered them to beef up documentation of warrantless arrests. He ordered them to turn more documents over to attorneys.

But the retraining is the key.

ICE agents need to learn how to determine flight risk before they pull someone over. They need to learn how to document it. They need to learn how to follow the law.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation policy has resulted in a skyrocketing number of arrests. Mostly of people with no prior criminal convictions.

That’s the reality on the ground.

The ruling is a blow to the administration’s strategy. It forces transparency. It forces accountability. It forces ICE to stop treating Colorado as a free-for-all.

But will they actually do it?

The order is clear. The violation is material. The cost is on them.

Locals can expect more scrutiny. More lawsuits. More questions about why it took a 60-page order to tell federal agents to follow the rules.

The money will come from the federal treasury. The retraining will happen in Colorado. The arrests will stop — or at least, they’ll have to be justified.

Read that again.