Migrant who had sought protection from deportation in Colorado churches is detained, advocates say
An illegal migrant once named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People for taking refuge for years in a Colorado church to avoid deportation has been arrested by immigration agents, her family said.
Jeanette Vizguerra, a 53-year-old Mexican mom of four, was taken into custody Monday in the parking lot of the Target store in Denver where she worked – becoming the latest high-profile figure to be nabbed under President Trump’s migrant crackdown.
“We finally got you,” one agent allegedly told her when she was cuffed, Jordan Garcia, an immigrant ally with the American Friends Service Committee told the New York Times.
“Finally!” John Fabbricatore, a former ICE field director, also posted on X.
“The Biden administration kept me from deporting Jeanette Vizguerra 4 years ago… She is a criminal, hates Trump and is an open-borders, abolish-ICE advocate. Bye!!!!”
Vizguerra — who first hid out in the church when Trump was last in office — was put in a truck and hauled off to an ICE detention center in Aurora while on a break from her job, her daughter Luna Baez told CNN.
“The whole time she told me they were laughing at her,” Baez said of the agents who arrested her.
Vizguerra, a Mexican native who came to the US illegally in 1997, has been fighting deportation since 2009 after she was pulled over in Denver and found to have a fraudulent Social Security card with her own name and birth date but someone else’s actual number.
She claimed she didn’t know the number belonged to someone else at the time.
Fearing deportation under the first Trump administration, Vizguerra made national headlines when she and her three youngest children, who were born in the US, moved into the basement of a Colorado church in 2017.
They remained there, on-and-off, for the next three years.
The attention landed her on Time’s “World’s 100 Most Influential” list of people in 2017 — alongside Trump.
Since leaving the church in 2020, Vizguerra has been trying to get a visa given to crime victims that allows them to remain here.
Her husband was kidnapped in Mexico three times while working as a bus driver before they came to the US in the 90s.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston blasted the Trump administration over Vizguerra’s apparent arrest and demanded she be cut loose.
“This is not immigration enforcement intended to keep our country safe. This is Putin-style persecution of political dissidents,” he said in a statement.
Vizguerra’s lawyers said ICE is trying to remove her based on an order that was never valid tied to her 2009 arrest.
Petitions challenging her current detention have been filed in both Denver’s federal court and the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“If ICE proceeds with trying to remove her without legal authority, it sends a chilling message about the agency’s disregard for due process and the rule of law,” one of the attorneys, Laura Lichter, said.
With Post wires
