DENVER, Colorado — A federal judge in Denver grilled the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Denver field office under oath on Monday, November 9, over his directive to immediately re-arrest immigrants freed by court order — and the official, Nathan Rasper, confirmed the instruction was his, that it has been stopped, and that he did not know about a court agreement meant to guarantee automatic releases.
U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney summoned Rasper to her courtroom after learning that detainees freed on habeas corpus orders were being taken back into custody almost immediately, in some cases after being transported from the privately run Aurora detention facility to ICE's Centennial office and back again. She called the practice a due process violation. “It has instilled a new level of fear in that facility that I find completely inappropriate and needs to be addressed,” Sweeney said, describing filings from detainees who said “everyone is terrified” that their releases will prove illusory.
Source: Focal News (Denver hearing report, Nov. 9)
Rasper, a 20-year ICE employee who became the Denver field office's acting director in mid-October, testified that he gave a verbal instruction to re-arrest people released by judges after hearing from colleagues in Minnesota that courts there had allowed immediate re-arrests. He said he consulted ICE's principal legal advisers and believed the agency had authority to act after correcting “paperwork errors” on arrest forms. He did not personally review the case of Ramon Quintero Alvarez — the Wyoming man whose October 27 release and immediate re-arrest started the inquiry — before the re-arrest, he testified.
Sweeney asked Rasper whether he was aware of an October 8 memorandum of agreement between the federal trial court and the U.S. Attorney's Office that provides for automatic release of petitioners when the government declines to defend their continued detention. Rasper said he was not. “Frankly, I am unclear how anyone can argue with a straight face that what you believed was appropriate and could lawfully occur,” Sweeney told him. “Releasing somebody momentarily is not releasing somebody at all.”
How this hearing came about
The confrontation built over two weeks. As Awaaz Punjab reported on November 7, Sweeney opened the inquiry at a November 4 hearing in Quintero Alvarez v. Baltazar, ordered Alvarez released that day, and barred ICE from detaining him again unless the government proved by clear and convincing evidence at a bond hearing that he was a flight risk or a danger. Assistant Field Office Director Nichole Black testified on November 4 that she received a “direct order” to re-detain habeas releasees with “some kind of criminality,” an instruction she traced through Deputy Field Office Director George Valdez to Rasper. On Monday, Rasper characterised Black's account as an “overly compressed” version of his instruction, while confirming the instruction itself and confirming that he stopped the re-arrests after Sweeney's initial hearing last week.
The government had earlier identified 14 petitioners who were arrested again after being released, in response to Sweeney's order to identify every Colorado case since October 27 in which ICE detained someone within 12 hours of a court-ordered release; a November 5 order directed officials to supply the exact dates and times. On Monday, Sweeney again ordered the government to produce a list of everyone released under habeas orders and subsequently re-arrested. The ACLU of Colorado intervened, arguing the list was incomplete and that more re-arrests may have occurred.
Source: The New York Ledger / Fox News Digital
The hearing also exposed friction between ICE and federal prosecutors. After an unnamed ICE spokesperson suggested to news outlets that prohibiting immediate re-arrests amounted to “sabotage,” Kevin Traskos, chief of the civil division at the U.S. Attorney's Office, told Sweeney his office had not known the statement would be submitted and had not been provided with it. For its part, the Department of Homeland Security has maintained that ICE complied with lawful court orders and that a judicial release order does not permanently shield individuals from immigration enforcement.
Other Colorado judges have already moved
Sweeney is not the only judge on the Denver court reacting. Judge Gordon P. Gallagher amended a release order on November 5 to clarify that ICE could re-arrest a petitioner only on a final order of removal. The next day, Judge Philip A. Brimmer told ICE it “may not re-detain petitioner without advance notice to this Court.” Separately, Judge Nina Y. Wang is examining ICE's practice of imposing its own conditions of release on habeas petitioners that do not stem from judges' orders, and has given the government until Tuesday, November 10, to produce the directives ICE has issued on the topic.
Sweeney said she had invited Alvarez to attend Monday's hearing, but he was not present. “Who can blame him?” she said, adding that he likely “has no faith that he will not be picked up again, even despite two court orders trying to guarantee that for him.” She also offered the hearing's one concession to the agency: “I think the only bright spot in all this is that the process was brought to our attention fairly quickly and looks to have been in place for about a week and was then stopped.”
Why this matters beyond Colorado
Colorado's federal trial court has faced a flood of habeas corpus petitions from immigration detainees over the past year, pushing filings to unprecedented levels as detainees challenge bond denials, the adequacy of bond hearings, and conditions ICE has imposed on release. Habeas is the main legal route by which a detained immigrant — including Punjabi and other South Asian detainees held at facilities like Aurora, which is operated for ICE by the private GEO Group — can ask a judge to order release. A practice under which a judge's release order can be undone at the facility door makes that route meaningless in practice, which is precisely the judge's objection: the legal question now is not whether the re-arrests happened, but what consequence follows for the officials who ordered them.
Judge Sweeney will issue a written order deciding whether to initiate contempt proceedings, and the government must produce the complete list of habeas releasees who were re-arrested. In the parallel case, Judge Wang's Tuesday deadline requires the government to hand over ICE's directives on release conditions. No date for the written order was announced in court.
What happens next: Sweeney's written order will decide whether contempt proceedings begin — the step that would convert Monday's admissions into formal findings against named officials. The ordered list will fix the number of people affected, which the ACLU of Colorado says is larger than the 14 identified so far. Until the written order lands, the re-arrests remain stopped, on Rasper's own testimony, and release orders from the Denver court carry the additional protections Judges Gallagher and Brimmer wrote into theirs last week.