By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Jeanette Vizguerra understands all too well the injustice inherent in the US immigration system. Last Monday she was arrested outside her workplace in Colorado by ICE agents who were reportedly “laughing in her face” as they took her to the Aurora ICE jail run by the for-profit GEO Group. As this goes to print, she remains locked up, facing deportation.

For almost 30 years Jeanette Vizguerra has built a life in this country, becoming a well-known organizer and activist for immigrant rights and other social justice causes. Her arrest signals a clear trend targeting activists as part of President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign.

Jeanette and her husband and six year-old daughter fled Mexico in 1997 after he was threatened with murder at gunpoint. They settled in Colorado. There she worked as an SEIU labor organizer, volunteered with the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and founded the activist organizations Dreamer’s Mothers in Action-Colorado, Abolish ICE Denver, and Sanctuary4All. She did all this while working numerous jobs and giving birth to and raising three more children, all born in the US.

In 2009 she successfully fought deportation following a routine traffic stop. Then, in 2017, during the first Trump administration, she was targeted for deportation, and took sanctuary in a Unitarian church in Denver, living there with her three young children. She received a stay of removal, but then, upon its expiration in 2019, returned to sanctuary. She received additional deportation stays during the Biden administration, but those have expired, leaving her vulnerable to Trump’s deportation crusade.

At a rally on Tuesday, as high winds drove a mix of freezing rain and snow into the crowd of close to 100 supporters rallying outside the walls of the GEO ICE jail in Aurora, Colorado, Jeanette managed to address the crowd by phone from inside. Her daughter Luna held the phone up to a microphone:

“I’m hopeful I’m going to be able to leave here and continue my fight and for others, because inside here there are many injustices. There are a lot of women whose cases are not being reviewed, and I’m going to try to help them, even being here in detention.”

To those who know Jeanette, it comes as no surprise that she was actively organizing inside the prison walls.

“The reason why they might be targeting Jeanette, she’s long been a leader,” Jennifer Piper of AFSC said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “She was among the first in the country to make her deportation case public in 2009 and really exposed the cruelty of our deportation machine, which is vast in the United States. No matter who the administration was, Jeanette has always stood and will continue to stand for justice and for dignity for all people.”

Piper says there’s increasing fear among immigrants of the Trump administration “disappearing” people.

Margaret Cargioli, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, speaking on Democracy Now!, described the case of an LGBTQ asylum seeker from Venezuela. Only after he failed to arrive at an immigration hearing on Monday did she learn that he had been sent by ICE to El Salvador’s notorious supermax “Terrorism Detention Center,” or CECOT. Watchdog groups in El Salvador report at least 350 people have died in prisons there since 2022, and torture is reportedly common inside CECOT.

“We are seriously concerned for his well-being, his safety….There was no order of deportation. There was no order of removal. He was sent there unlawfully. He still has a pending immigration court hearing. It’s coming up very soon. And he has a right to seek asylum. What happened here is extremely unusual and concerning.”

The Trump administration has invoked the more than two century old 1798 Alien Enemies Act, last used during WWII, to send over 130 Venezuelans alleged to be members of the “Tren de Aragua” gang, without evidence, to CECOT.

Trump is using the extreme right-wing government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as a brutal detention contractor. As with many of Trump’s executive actions, this is being challenged in court. Trump’s open defiance of Judge James Boasberg’s court order halting use of the 1798 law to round up migrants is pushing the United States into a constitutional crisis.

The detentions, deportations and disappearances are stoking fear in the immigrant community, which is certainly one of its main objectives.

One who remains undaunted is Jeanette Vizguerra.

“Over her entire case, her entire fight…her struggle and her leadership, her community have made the impossible possible,” the AFSC’s Jennifer Piper said.

Jeanette Vizguerra should be an example to citizens and non-citizens alike.