As a teenager, Jennifer Gutierrez Marquez sat in federal immigration court in Denver translating the proceedings from English to Spanish to help her undocumented parents along their path to becoming permanent U.S. residents.
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Now, the 25-year-old University of Denver graduate student frequents those same courtrooms, hoping the research she’s contributing to helps many more on their immigration journeys.
Gutierrez Marquez and three of her peers are research assistants under DU professor Rebecca Galemba, documenting what goes on during immigration court proceedings in Denver and at the Aurora detention facility as part of the Court Transparency Project.
Beginning last fall, they took shifts sitting through hundreds of immigration hearings, writing down what happened: which countries immigrants were from, how many had attorneys, what arguments U.S. Department of Homeland Security attorneys deployed, how judges responded, case outcomes and more. Then, the students showed up to bond hearings at the immigration detention facility and documented those outcomes, too.
They recorded government inefficiencies and legal decisions unlike any the immigration experts they were working with had ever seen. By recording their findings into measurable data, the researchers hope to expose a system they described as unjust and shine a light on a federal administration hostile toward immigrants.
“I went into this experience thinking the government is so inefficient, and it’s taught me the government is efficient in its inefficiencies,” Gutierrez Marquez said. “It’s really made me think of how policies are made intentionally to help block and postpone outcomes. We see so many heavy things, but judges have been picking up on us being there and are starting to realize they don’t want bad press, so even though we are not able to make direct changes to this inhumane system, just us being there is making an impact, and I remind myself that when it feels so heavy.”
The four young women, many carrying their own personal experiences with the immigration system, said documenting the already complex immigration legal system as it undergoes unprecedented changes has been revelatory, heart-wrenching and empowering.
During their six months of data collection, the DU researchers attended 450 initial hearings and 111 bond hearings at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Aurora that is run by The Geo Group. The researchers are still cleaning up data from their time at Denver immigration court.
Their findings confirmed what immigration attorneys, advocates and those impacted by the system have been seeing: thousands of immigrants being detained, denied bond and, in many cases, choosing to self-deport to escape seemingly endless detention, said Christina Brown, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Colorado Asylum Center.
An unidentified ICE spokesperson responded to a Denver Post request for comment via email, saying Homeland Security was working “rapidly and overtime” to remove immigrants from detention centers and send them back to their countries of origin.
No immigrant during the observed timeframe won a claim for any kind of relief, including by obtaining asylum or green card status through a family member with citizenship, which would have given them legal status to remain in the U.S., Galemba said.
In fact, 34% of detainees had already filed for relief, predominantly through asylum claims, and were detained anyway. In 29 cases, the respondents had pending relief but still requested voluntary departure or removal orders, the researchers found.
“A lot of them, around 95%, were people who expressly stated they could no longer stand to be detained and needed to leave,” said Ella Iveslatt, 22, a DU graduate and project manager of the court transparency research project. “That’s striking because you see people who have forms of relief available to them, but they’re just facing procedural exhaustion.”
The unidentified ICE spokesperson noted that detained immigrants “can obtain release at any time by requesting a free flight home and a $2,600 exit bonus.”
‘This detention system is being weaponized’
Brown has worked on the transparency project with Galemba for years. She is now providing legal consultation to the research students when they have questions about something they witnessed in court.
She said the DU data shows immigration detention is being used as a punishment for people who have decided to fight their case to stay in the U.S.
“It’s also being used as a way to deny people rights because when they are detained and can’t get out, they give up,” Brown said. “We have seen so, so much injustice happening in these cases, things I haven’t seen in 14 years of doing this work. Judges making the craziest decisions not based in law at all and getting away with it because people don’t want to stay detained through appeals, and before an independent court can look at it, they’re removed. You see how this detention system is being weaponized to make it so people who qualify for relief won’t go forward and will leave on their own terms.”
During nearly 75% of the observed bond hearings, the judges did not set bond, according to the DU team’s data, with judges claiming they did not have jurisdiction to do so in 46% of those cases.
In 12 cases, the judge did not have jurisdiction because Homeland Security failed to file the necessary paperwork — an — the researchers said. The number of governmental procedural errors, like unfiled paperwork or losing track of a detainee who was supposed to appear in court, was striking, Iveslatt said.
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“It’s weaponized incompetence,” Iveslatt said.
The ICE spokesperson said the I-286 form is necessary only when agents are making a custody decision. If immigrants are subject to mandatory detention, the ICE representative said, there is no need for an I-286 form.
The researchers found most people were not given the chance to provide evidence at their bond hearings as to why they should be released from detention because of bureaucratic confusion with paperwork and rapidly changing laws, the researchers said.
While immigration arrests have spiked, law enforcement agencies increasingly have detained people without any prior criminal convictions or charges.
During Trump’s first year back in office, 4,750 people without legal status were arrested by federal immigration authorities in Colorado — a near-quadrupling of the prior year’s arrest rate.
‘This work can be very draining’
Jasmine Salgado Simental had already heard about conditions within the ICE detention center from her father, who was detained in the Aurora facility when she was a child. She grew up hearing about maggots in his food and a guard taking her father’s identification card and cutting it in half in front of his face, she said.
Christopher Ferreira, a spokesperson for the GEO Group, which is contracted by ICE to run the Aurora facility, referred The Post to the federal agency when a reporter asked about the conditions within the detention center.
Salgado Simental grew up in Aurora with Mexican immigrant parents. When she walks into the ICE detention center, she said she’s often spoken to as if she’s in immigration proceedings herself. Looking around at detainees and their families, the 21-year-old said she realized it could easily be one of her loved ones on the other side of the court hearing.
She intends to go to law school and had aspirations to become an immigration lawyer, although this research project has made her wonder whether she might have more impact as a judge someday.
“This work can be very draining emotionally,” Salgado Simental said. “However, it is very rewarding.”
Brown is proud of the students working on this research project.
“I can’t even imagine going in and facing this head-on after having my own family members go through it,” Brown said. “What they are witnessing and the information they are collecting is difficult… I think they’re really strong and that’s what we need. We need people to find the strength in themselves to look at the injustice of this head-on and do something about it. That’s what they’re doing every day.”
Brown and the researchers hope this data is used to shine a light on a system that she said doesn’t get much oversight.
“Seeing data on what is happening and how many people are being harmed is really important to having the general public understand it,” Brown said.
The first time Leticia Madrigal Tapia attended court by herself, she came to document a hearing for longtime immigration activist Jeanette Vizguerra who spent nine months in the Aurora detention center last year as one of Colorado’s highest-profile arrestees in President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation push.
Unlike most proceedings, this hearing was crowded with media and supporters and the detention center asked people to leave — a departure from typical proceedings.
Madrigal Tapia was nervous as federal law enforcement ordered her to go, especially because she had recently obtained her U.S. citizenship.
“I was very scared,” Madrigal Tapia said. “It was a pretty heavy experience. Just going to a single hearing, you bear witness to just how inhumane people are treated there and the structural violence people are going through.”
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