Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested an activist illegal migrant who dodged capture for years — dating to the Obama administration — by hiding out in churches in the Denver area, The New York Times reported.
Mexican national Jeanette Vizguerra, 53, was arrested on Monday in the parking lot of a Target store in Denver where she worked, according to the report. Vizguerra spent 15 years evading ICE, first crossing the Texas border illegally in 1997, an ICE official told media outlets.
"We finally got you," an ICE agent told Vizguerra, who was arrested while on break, according to the Times.
Now, she awaits deportation at a detention facility in Aurora, Colorado.
"We've known about her for years and she's gone through the whole immigration process," former Denver ICE chief John Fabbricatore told the New York Post.
In a post to X, Fabbricatore said Vizguerra should have been deported in 2009.
"The Biden administration kept me from deporting Jeanette Vizguerra 4 years ago. … She hid in a church the first time Trump was President. She is a criminal, hates Trump, and is an open-borders, abolish-ICE advocate. Bye!!!!"
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston called Vizguerra's arrest a "Putin-style persecution of political dissidents."
Not so, says ICE.
"Vizguerra is a convicted criminal alien from Mexico who has a final order of deportation issued by a federal immigration judge. She illegally entered the United States near El Paso, Texas, on Dec. 24, 1997, and has received legal due process in U.S. immigration court," an ICE spokesperson said in a statement.
Vizguerra first appeared on ICE's radar in 2009 after getting pulled over in Denver and found with a fake Social Security card. Two months after that, she was pulled over without a valid license and insurance but was given the opportunity by an immigration judge to self-deport, which she failed to do, the Post reported. The Obama administration paused a deportation order in 2013.
Fast forward to 2017, during the first Trump administration, when Vizguerra made national headlines by moving into a church basement with her three youngest children to avoid capture and deportation. Years later, the Biden administration gave her a one-year reprieve from deportation in 2021, according to the Times.
Time magazine named Vizguerra one of its Top 100 influential people of 2017.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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