ICE has repeatedly violated Colorado court order restricting arrests of immigrants, lawyers allege

Seth Klamann, The Denver Post on Feb 6, 2026

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DENVER — Federal immigration authorities have repeatedly violated a court order by continuing to “indiscriminately” arrest people in Colorado without warrants and without first checking if they’re likely to flee, attorneys alleged in a new legal filing.

Lawyers representing four immigrants arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wrote this week that they’d determined the agency wasn’t following the restrictions by conducting interviews with detainees and reviewing federal arrest reports.

The attorneys said that when ICE detained several men near Vail last month, agents pulled them over and handcuffed them without warrants and without asking them any questions. ICE agents later left branded playing cards with information about its Denver field office in some of those men’s abandoned cars, alarming advocates.

The allegations come more than two months after U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson found that ICE was routinely conducting illegal arrests in Colorado as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown. Warning that ICE’s conduct would continue without a court’s intervention, he ordered the agency to take several steps to change the practice.

While ICE can detain people without warrants, federal law requires that they have probable cause to believe that the arrestee is in the country illegally and that the person is likely to flee before a future court date.

Jackson required ICE agents to document, in detail, their flight risk assessments in arrest reports and to turn over regular samples of those reports to the attorneys who filed the case.

In an amended complaint filed on Tuesday, the immigrants’ lawyers alleged that none of the arrest reports they’d reviewed showed compliance with federal law or the court’s order. Tim Macdonald, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which helped file the suit, said lawyers had seen no evidence that ICE was complying with the court’s orders.

Hans Meyer, a Denver immigration lawyer who is also part of the case, said ICE was “flipping the bird” to Jackson’s order.

“I interviewed all nine men who were picked up in those arrests,” Meyer said of the men detained near Vail last month. “Several of them were passengers in cars, for which there was no warrant for their arrests. ICE is going to continue to violate the court order, and try to cook the books, by ginning up some sort of pretext after the fact and try to cheat their way around the court order, rather than just following the law.”

Representatives of ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, did not immediately return messages seeking comment Friday.

Federal judges elsewhere have grown increasingly exasperated with ICE’s failure to comply with court orders.

Last month, a judge in Minneapolis ordered the acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, to appear in court, threatening to hold him in contempt for the agency’s violations of judicial orders issued during the ongoing crackdown in Minnesota.

Another judge in Minnesota accused the federal government of “an undeniable move … to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights,” according to Politico. The outlet identified judges in five other states that had similarly expressed frustration with ICE for failing to comply with previous court orders.

Macdonald said that he and the other atttorneys in the Colorado case will now seek another hearing in front of Jackson in hopes of presenting their new allegations and seeking enforcement of the previous order.

The new filing added the East Colfax Community Collective, a Denver metro nonprofit that works with the immigrant community, as a plaintiff. The group, also known as EC3, alleges that its members have been “terrorized” by ICE’s warrantless arrest practices. Several members of the group were arrested in last year’s high-profile raids at Denver-area apartment complexes.

Those arrests, the lawsuit alleges, were also illegal.

“EC3 member residents have been subjected to warrantless arrests without the probable cause required by law, continue to experience restrictions on their liberty pursuant to their unlawful arrest, and are at risk of and fear being subjected to the challenged practice in the future because they are among those the government has targeted for civil immigration arrest as they go about their daily business,” the lawsuit alleges. “Other EC3 members who have not already been swept up in ICE’s unlawful warrantless practices fear that they will be next.”

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