Denver’s top immigration enforcement official said he was reassigned to Virginia effective earlier this week, amid a broader shakeup among the ranks of the federal agency tasked with arresting and deporting millions of immigrants without legal status.
Robert Guadian, the now-former head of the Denver field office for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confirmed Thursday, while testifying remotely in federal court as part of a lawsuit alleging that ICE has conducted waves of warrantless and illegal arrests in the state, that he has been relieved of his duties in Colorado. He said he had been reassigned to the ICE’s field office in Virginia, which also oversees Washington, and that his reassignment became effective last Sunday.
Guadian, who took over Denver’s federal immigration enforcement operations shortly before President Donald Trump took office, did not provide a reason for his reassignment. He is among a dozen ICE field directors to be reshuffled by the Trump administration and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this week.
All of those officials will be replaced by other ICE personnel or by Customs and Border Protection officials, sources told The Associated Press. The installment of Border Patrol officials likely indicates a greater integration of that agency into ICE at a time when the patrol has been accused of using heavy-handed tactics in its immigration enforcement elsewhere in the U.S.
Guadian’s confirmed departure came as he defended ICE’s embattled tactics in Colorado. A group of law firms, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, sued the agency in October, arguing that ICE increasingly has arrested and detained undocumented immigrants without probable cause to do so. Federal immigration authorities have surged arrests in recent months and have moved to keep immigrants detained, which, attorneys have argued, is part of a broader effort to increase deportations.
On Thursday, the law firms began a hearing in which they asked a judge to declare ICE’s practices to be unlawful and to order the agency to establish that arrestees represent a flight risk before they’re detained indefinitely.
Four former detainees, including a University of Utah student whose June arrest triggered a state investigation, testified in court Thursday, on either side of Guadian’s testimony. All four said ICE officers arrested them and sent them to Aurora’s detention center without first determining if such treatment was necessary to ensure they didn’t flee the state. All four said their lives were upended by their detentions, which ranged from a few weeks to more than three months.
Refugio Ramirez Ovando, a Grand Junction father who has been in the U.S. for 20 years, wept so much when asked about the hardship his family suffered during his detention that U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson called a brief recess. Ramirez was arrested on the way to work in May. Although ICE agents told him he wasn’t the man they were looking for, he still was sent to Aurora. He said his four children received mental health diagnoses as a result of the stress caused by his arrest.
“I’m the only breadwinner,” Ramirez testified through an interpreter. “My wife doesn’t work, so I’m the only one who provides for the family. We had savings, but due to the legal issues, we had to borrow money. And then all the money we had saved ran out. And we had a truck, but we had to sell that so my family had something to live on.”
Guadian testified that ICE has focused on arresting “the worst of the worst” in the state and that he wasn’t aware of the circumstances surrounding Ramirez’s arrest. He said that although warrantless arrests had happened, they were still legally sound and were less numerous than targeted arrests of immigrants with criminal backgrounds.
“(ICE agents) know who we’re going after, and we’re going after the worst of the worst: people that are threats to public safety,” he said.
ICE data previously analyzed by The Denver Post shows that most immigrants arrested by the agency have not been convicted of a crime and that the proportion of ICE arrestees with prior or pending criminal convictions has decreased as Trump’s immigration crackdown has continued. ICE’s internal detention data has also shown that 70% of detainees in Aurora are listed as “non-criminal.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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