ICE officers mistook Colorado father for someone else, official says, but arrested him and children anyway

DENVER — Immigration authorities mistakenly identified a Durango father when they pulled him over earlier this week, a senior enforcement official said Friday, but agents still arrested the father and his two children in an incident that quickly sparked protests in the Colorado mountain town.

Gregory Davies, Denver’s third-ranking official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified about the incident in court Friday morning during a hearing in a lawsuit challenging ICE’s arrest practices in Colorado. He had previously said ICE officials research and surveil their targets using multi-agent teams before they try to arrest them.

But he acknowledged that the ICE agents didn’t know they were pulling over Fernando Jaramillo-Solano, who is Colombian, when they stopped him and his 12- and 15-year-old children on their way to their Durango school Monday morning.

“It’s my understanding that the father was mistaken for somebody else when (ICE) encountered him,” he said.

He said Jaramillo-Solano and his children were then arrested anyway, without warrants. While that is allowed in certain circumstances, the lawsuit asserts that ICE has done so too often, without meeting the requirements.

The Durango father and his two children have been transported to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas. The Denver Post located the father using ICE’s detainee locator. That database does not provide information on minors, but Davies testified that the family members were all transported to Texas.

It’s legal for ICE to arrest people without a warrant. But agents have to determine that the person is in the country illegally and that they’re likely to flee if they’re not arrested. Four people detained by ICE in Colorado this year filed the lawsuit at issue in Friday’s hearing, alleging that ICE arrested them and others without first determining if they were likely to flee.

They’re asking a judge to intervene and declare ICE’s alleged arrest practices to be illegal.

Davies was in court Friday as a witness to defend against that lawsuit, as part of a two-day hearing seeking a prohibition on the allegedly illegal arrests. Lawyers representing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, have argued that federal policy — reiterated in an Oct. 22 memo — requires officers to follow certain procedures to ensure their arrests are lawful.

Because of that policy, they said Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson doesn’t need to enter an order prohibiting a practice that ICE already regulates.

But the attorneys who filed the lawsuit have argued that ICE agents have consistently ignored that policy and continue to do so, even after the recent memo from ICE’s top legal advisor. Kenzo Kawanabe, one of the attorneys on the case, pointed to the arrests in Durango, along with the immigration arrest of a Douglas County teacher and her family last week, to allege that ICE still wasn’t following the law or its own stated policies.

Davies testified that ICE typically wouldn’t arrest immigrants who had active immigration proceedings and were actively participating in them. When Kawanabe pointed out that Jaramillo-Solano and his children had an open asylum application, Davies said he didn’t consider asylum applications to be the same as other immigration court proceedings.

The Douglas County teacher arrested this week, Marina Ortiz, was at a routine immigration appointment when she was arrested, according to the charter school where she worked in Parker. The school has also said that Ortiz was legally authorized to live and work in the U.S.

Ortiz was arrested with her family, too, according to her school. She is being detained in the same Texas detention center as Jaramillo-Solano, according to the ICE database.

The Durango detentions spurred demonstrations in the southwestern Colorado city earlier this week and some clashes with federal authorities. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation announced Thursday that it would investigate an incident in which a federal agent threw a protester’s phone and pushed her to the ground outside the local ICE field office.

The four immigrants who filed the lawsuit all testified in court Thursday, saying their lives had been thrown into chaos because of detentions this year ranging from a few weeks to nearly 100 days. Two said they’d had to move in with family members after their arrests. Another said his family has gone into significant debt to pay for his legal defense.

The federal court hearing was set to end Friday afternoon, though it was unclear if Jackson would rule immediately or issue a decision in the coming weeks.

But he provided an indication of his thinking Friday morning.

He said the four immigrants involved in the lawsuit had provided “substantial evidence … that what the plaintiffs call unlawful arrests have been occurring in Colorado.” He also noted media interviews of Robert Guadian, who was the top ICE official in Denver until earlier this week, in which Guadian said ICE would arrest anyone in the country illegally.

Guadian testified Thursday that ICE conducted targeted operations against the “worst of the worst,” meaning immigrants with criminal histories.

Because of those comments, and others given by top Trump administration official Stephen Miller, Jackson said it was it was “reasonable to infer” that the four immigrants’ cases were not isolated arrests but were “part of a practice and policy that has been followed in Colorado by ICE.”

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