Federal judge rules ICE in Colorado violated order limiting warrantless arrests

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that immigration officers in Colorado have violated his order limiting when they can arrest people without a warrant.

U.S. District Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have violated his November order that barred them from arresting anyone without a warrant unless they had probable cause to believe a person is in the country illegally and likely to escape before officers can get a warrant. Since then, Jackson said ICE agents have violated the order by continuing to make warrantless arrests “without individualized, pre-arrest probable cause determinations of flight risk.”

The judge also ordered immigration agents who are authorized to make warrantless arrests to undergo training on the court’s orders and for the government to turn over records of such warrantless arrests. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado over so-called collateral arrests of people accidentally caught up in immigration enforcement actions.

The ACLU accuses U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of indiscriminately arresting Latinos to meet enforcement goals amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts and ignoring legal restrictions on who should be detained.

In his latest ruling, Jackson concluded ICE had failed to adequately train its deportation officers on the requirements of his November court order and is now requiring such instruction within 45 days.

He also found ICE had “uniformly failed” to follow documentation requirements for warrantless arrests under his court order.

ICE, which has appealed Jackson’s November decision, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s ruling.

“This is a profoundly important decision for the rule of law and the people of Colorado,” Tim Macdonald, legal director for the ACLU of Colorado, said in a statement. “The court made clear that ICE is not above the law and cannot continue to violate the law.”

In the last year, federal judges in Oregon, California and Washington, D.C., also have ordered immigration officers in their districts not to conduct arrests without a warrant unless there is a likelihood of escape.

Immigration officers generally get administrative warrants, which are documents issued by immigration authorities that authorize an arrest, before looking for someone targeted for arrest and deportation. At issue in the court cases is the arrest of other people without legal status that officers find, including while looking for the targeted people.

Such collateral arrests were banned during former President Joe Biden’s administration. ____ Former Associated Press reporter Colleen Slevin contributed to this report.