Judge found ICE materially violated Colorado injunction restricting warrantless immigration arrests

On May 12, 2026, Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson of the District of Colorado ruled in Ramirez Ovando v. Noem that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement materially violated a November 2025 preliminary injunction barring warrantless immigration arrests without an individualized, pre-arrest determination of flight risk. The injunction followed a class-action lawsuit filed in October 2025 alleging ICE routinely arrested people in Colorado without the required findings.

Following a two-day evidentiary hearing that began March 10, 2026, Judge Jackson's 60-page order found that ICE agents continued making warrantless arrests -- including of people with no criminal history, longtime residents, asylum seekers complying with legal processes, and U.S. citizens' children -- without conducting the flight-risk determinations the injunction required. The court heard testimony from named plaintiffs with deep community ties that agents made no effort to assess flight risk before arresting them without a warrant; agents sometimes obtained "field warrants" from supervisors after the fact rather than before the arrest, a practice the judge found impermissible, and training on the injunction's requirements was, in her assessment, insufficient.

As a remedy, Judge Jackson ordered ICE to develop a compliant training program within two weeks and complete training of all authorized officers within 45 days, barred untrained officers and new hires from making warrantless arrests, and required ICE to submit monthly documentation of trained-officer lists, training materials, and arrest records. She also ordered ICE to pay the plaintiffs' attorney fees. ACLU of Colorado legal director Tim Macdonald said the ruling establishes that "ICE is not above the law and cannot continue to violate the law."