DENVER (AP) — A woman who gained prominence after she took refuge in churches in Colorado to avoid deportation during the first Trump administration has been detained, immigration advocates said Tuesday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether Jeanette Vizguerra had been taken into custody.
Vizguerra, a mother of four, was arrested Monday at a Denver-area Target store where she worked, said Jordan Garcia of the American Friends Service Committee, who has been in contact with Vizguerra's lawyer and family.
Vizguerra has been trying to gain a visa given to crime victims that allows them to remain in the United States since she left sanctuary in churches in 2020, Garcia said.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston blasted the Trump administration for the reported arrest of Vizguerra, an immigration and labor activist. Johnston, who defended Denver's sanctuary city policies in Congress earlier this month, called on people to demand that ICE release Vizguerra and give her due process rights.
“This is not immigration enforcement intended to keep our country safe. This is Putin-style persecution of political dissidents,” he said in a statement.
News of Vizguerra's detention prompted a protest outside an ICE detention center in the Denver suburb of Aurora, where her family said she is being held. Buses left the facility in the morning, raising fears that she would be deported, but her family said Vizguerra was still there later in the day.
“We hope ICE will work with her attorney to release her immediately," the family said in a statement included in an update from the American Friends Service Committee.
Vizguerra's lawyers said ICE is attempting to remove her based on an order that was never valid. Petitions challenging her 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 in a statement.
Vizguerra, who came to Colorado in 1997 from Mexico City, has been fighting deportation since 2009 after she was pulled over in suburban Denver and found to have a fraudulent Social Security card with her own name and birth date but someone else's actual number, according to a 2019 lawsuit she brought against ICE. Vizguerra did not know the number belonged to someone else at the time, it said.
The lawsuit, which she later dropped, alleged that ICE did not have a valid order to deport her after she pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count in that case because it says she voided it by agreeing to self-deport to Mexico. ICE wrongly tried to revive that order after Vizguerra was arrested for reentering the United States later, the lawsuit said.
She began living in churches in 2017 to avoid being deported under the first Trump administration after a hold on her deportation was not renewed. She was given a two-year stay of deportation after two members of Colorado's congressional delegation, Sen. Michael Bennet and then-Rep. Jared Polis, who is now Colorado's governor, introduced what are known as private bills to give her a path to become a permanent resident. Such delays have sometimes been extended for years as lawmakers reintroduce the measures aimed at helping individual immigrants, but few of the measures ever become law.
After that stay was not renewed in 2019, Vizguerra again entered church sanctuary but then left in 2020, according to a timeline provided by the American Friends Service Committee.
File - Jeanette Vizguerra, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in a church to avoid immigration authorities for the past three months, smiles after leaving the church early Friday, May 12, 2017, in downtown Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)
File - Jeanette Vizguerra, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in a church to avoid immigration authorities for the past three months, speaks after leaving the church early Friday, May 12, 2017, in downtown Denver.(AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)
A key adviser warned President John F. Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that the agency behind it, the CIA, had grown too powerful. He proposed giving the State Department control of “all clandestine activities” and breaking up the CIA.
The page of Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s memo outlining the proposal was among the newly public material in documents related to Kennedy's assassination released this week by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. So, too was Schlesinger's statement that 47% of the political officers in U.S. embassies were controlled by the CIA.
Some readers of the previously withheld material in Schlesinger's 15-page memo view it as evidence of both mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA and a reason the CIA at least would not make Kennedy's security a high priority ahead of his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. That gave fresh attention Thursday to a decades-old theory about who killed JFK — that the CIA had a hand in it.
Some Kennedy scholars, historians and writers said they haven't yet seen anything in the 63,000 pages of material released under an order from President Donald Trump that undercuts the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was a lone gunman. But they also say they understand why doubters gravitate toward the theory.
“You have this young, charismatic president with so much potential for the future, and on the other side of the scale, you have this 24-year-old waif, Oswald, and it doesn't balance. You want to put something weightier on the Oswald side,” said Gerald Posner, whose book, “Case Closed,” details the evidence that Oswald was a lone gunman.
Critics of the Oswald-acted-alone conclusion had predicted that previously unreleased material would bolster their positions. One of them, Jefferson Morley, the editor of the JFK Facts blog, said Thursday that newly public material is important to “the JFK case.” Morley is vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination.
Morley said that even with the release of 63,000 pages this week, there is still more unreleased material, including 2,400 files that the FBI said it discovered after Trump issued his order in January and material held by the Kennedy family.
Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.
“It was the first big event that led to a series of events involving conspiracy theories that have left Americans believing, almost permanently, that their government lies to them so often they shouldn’t pay close attention,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century"
Morley said Schlesinger's memo provides the “origin story” of mutual mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA.
Kennedy had inherited the Bay of Pigs plan from his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, and had been in office less than three months when the operation launched in April 1961 as a covert invasion to topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Schlesinger's memo was dated June 30, 1961, a little more than two months later.
Schlesinger told Kennedy that all covert operations should be cleared with the U.S. State Department instead of allowing the CIA to largely present proposed operations almost as accomplished tasks. He also said in some places, such as Austria and Chile, far more than half the embassies' political officers were CIA-controlled.
Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said most American diplomats now are “non-CIA,” and in most places, ambassadors do not automatically defer to the CIA.
“CIA station chiefs also have an important function for ambassadors, because the station chief is usually the senior intelligence officer at a post," Neumann said, adding that ambassadors see a CIA station chiefs as providing valuable information.
But he noted: “If you get into the areas where we were involved in covert operations in supporting wars, you’re going to have a different picture. You’re going to have a picture which will differ from a normal embassy and normal operations.”
Schlesinger's memo ends with a previously redacted page that spells out a proposal to give control of covert activities to the State Department and to split the CIA into two agencies reporting to separate undersecretaries of state. Morley sees it as a response to Kennedy's anger over the Bay of Pigs and something Kennedy was seriously contemplating.
The plan never came to fruition.
Sabato said that Kennedy simply “needed the CIA” in the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies like Cuba, and a huge reorganization would have hindered intelligence operations. He also said the president and his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wanted to oust Castro before JFK ran for reelection in 1964.
“Let’s remember that a good percentage of the covert operations were aimed at Fidel Castro in Cuba,” Sabato said.
Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who is writing a book about JFK’s presidency, discounts the idea of tensions between the president and the CIA lasting until Kennedy's death. For one thing, he said, the president used covert operations “avidly.”
“I find that the more details we get on that period, the more it appears likely that the Kennedy brothers were in control of the intelligence community,” Naftali said. “You can you can see his imprint. You can see that there is a system by which he is directing the intelligence community. It's not always direct, but he’s directing it.”
Associated Press writer David Collins in Hartford Connecticut, contributed to this report.
FILE - Secret servicemen standing on running boards follow the presidential limousine carrying President John F. Kennedy, right, rear seat, and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, left, as well as Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie, in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963. (AP Photo/Jim Altgens, File)
FILE - In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, the limousine carrying mortally wounded President John F. Kennedy races toward the hospital seconds after he was shot in Dallas. (AP Photo/Justin Newman, File)
FILE - Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harvard University historian and President John F. Kennedy's former personal assistant, holds a brief lecture as his book "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House" was presented to Italian public on Jan. 24, 1966 in Rome. Sitting at left is Italian journalist and author Luigi Barzini Jr. who introduced Schlesinger to the audience. (AP Photo/Gianni Foggia, File)
FILE - This Nov. 22, 1963 file photo shows President John F. Kennedy riding in motorcade with first lady Jacqueline Kenndy in Dallas, Texas. (AP Photo, file)
