AURORA, Colo.—Jeanette Vizguerra is a union activist. She’s a member and organizer for Service Employees Local 105 in Denver and for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She’s a mother and a grandmother. And she’s an outspoken campaigner for the rights of migrants and undocumented people to live in the U.S. free of fear.
And she’s “a political prisoner” in the ICE detention center in Aurora, Colo., and has been there since St. Patrick’s Day, her daughter Luna says.
For her bravery, outspokenness, and heroism—which the country should emulate in combating ICE—Vizguerra received one of this year’s three Orlando Letelier-Ronni Moffett awards from the progressive Institute for Policy Studies think tank at a ceremony in D.C. on October 9.
Vizguerra migrated to the U.S. from Mexico in 1997. She came to national prominence during GOP President Donald Trump’s reign. Before that, she took Luna and her other children to D.C. to lobby lawmakers to legalize the millions of undocumented people now in the U.S.
ICE claims Vizguerra is in the U.S. illegally. When Trump returned to the White House, he unleashed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents. Vizguerra fled to a sanctuary in churches for months. She’d only emerge for errands and for her job at Target. It put food on the family’s table.
And Vizguerra kept speaking out and protesting, sometimes outside the church walls, other times relying on videos and other media. And on St. Patrick’s Day this year, she stepped out of the Target store’s door and ICE was there.
“We finally got you,” the agent said while nabbing Vizguerra. She was detained and sent to Aurora.
Her daughter and her lawyer, Laura Lichter, call Vizguerra a political prisoner, being punished by Trump and ICE for exercising her First Amendment right to free speech.
“In the context of what’s going on in immigration enforcement, as we’ve seen over the past several weeks, speech, conduct, being involved in protests, saying things that might not be popular seem to be the kinds of things that gets the attention of the authorities,” Lichter told a press conference after a hearing on Vizguerra’s jailing and the charges against her.
Vizguerra told her story to IPS in a video sent from the Aurora center to the crowd at the ceremony in D.C. It was in Spanish, so Luna stepped in to talk about her mother. National Domestic Workers Alliance founder AI-Jen Poo introduced Luna and her sister to the crowd, previewed the video, and lauded Vizguerra’s bravery in the face of danger.
“She should be here today accepting this award,” Luna said about her mother. “Instead, it is up to us now to speak for her. The support from around the country fuels her fight against this deportation…My mother is a human being who deserves her freedom.
“She deserves to be able to go out to eat, to go hiking, to go dancing, to have her life,” and care for her children and grandchildren, Luna said. Instead, Vizguerra sits in prison for her politics.
“She poses no real risk to anyone. This administration has no real reason to hold my mom captive.”
“And I say ‘captive’ because that’s what she is—a political prisoner. ICE is kidnapping individuals”—and not just Vizguerra—“for political gain.” One other ICE hold: Smart-TD member Kilmer Arego Garcia, of Laurel, Md., for alleged human smuggling in Tennessee and for alleged membership in a violent Latin American gang, MS-13, in New York.
Abrego Garcia was riding with a friend when he was “smuggling.” He’s not a gang member–he fled El Salvador to escape MS-13–and he’s never been to New York. Trump’s ICE deported him to a notorious prison in El Salvador by mistake, but eventually bowed to pressure and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and let him return. It still wants to deport him. He’s now in a Pennsylvania jail.
“We must move forward to address the violence this administration poses to our communities,” Luna urged. “If we look at history, change doesn’t come easily. It requires courage, risk, and disruption. We must continue to organize until my mom is free and until all are free.”
ICE violence has often manifested itself ever since Trump turned agents loose to gleefully beat, bludgeon, pepper-spray, tear-gas, injure, arrest, and sometimes “disappear” migrants, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, bystanders, other union leaders, and even news media members.
The fightback so far has been through the courts, with detainees and unions winning case after case at lower levels. But when migrants appear for regularly scheduled immigration court hearings, the Trump regime’s Justice Department drops the cases, the judges dismiss the defendants, they walk out the door—and ICE nabs them, sometimes violently.
Vizguerra has been in detention for more than 180 days in Aurora. The center is a private for-profit prison run by GEO, one of two big private prison firms that garner tens of millions of dollars holding migrants ICE detains—before ICE deports them.
“She hasn’t slept in her bed. She hasn’t had a home-cooked meal. She’s been put on a gluten-free diet where they feed her rice, beans, and turkey or a slice of ham,” Luna added. “Prior to that, she told me the meals would upset her stomach so severely she’d need medication.”
Medical care at the Aurora center is erratic, Vizguerra’s daughter said. “Her blood pressure spikes.” And all this is suffered by a woman “who has paid her taxes” for over 30 years in the U.S. There are thousands detained just like her mother is, too. And thousands of families are suffering, Luna adds.
Vizguerra was one of three honorees at the IPS ceremony, named in memory of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Letelier was the foreign minister under the elected President Salvador Allende’s Marxist government in Chile in the early 1970s. Allende was overthrown and killed in a Nixon-CIA coup masterminded by military chief Augusto Pinochet, who became a dictator. Letelier fled to the U.S.
Letelier became a fellow at IPS, and Moffitt was a top aide. In 1976, as their car rounded Sheridan Circle in D.C., a bomb pre-planted by the Chilean secret service/spy agency DINA blew it up. Both were killed, and Moffitt’s father, riding in the back seat, was injured. The bomb shook the entire neighborhood, and a plume of thick smoke rose over the car and curled around a nearby church spire.
Besides Vizguerra, the other two honorees with this year’s Letelier-Moffitt awards were the Detention Watch Network–the other U.S. winner–and the National Coordinating Roundtable of Organizations and Pensioners of the Republic of Argentina, which received the international Letelier-Moffitt award.
The network “organizes immigrants and communities to abolish detention centers in the U.S.,” like the one that houses Vizguerra. The Argentinians have “mobilized workers and ad retirees for 30 years to protect the rights to a dignified retirement,” IPS said.
With new right-wing Argentine President Javier Milei—whom Trump just hosted at the White House–imposing pension cuts, the Argentine roundtable “has emerged as a major opposition force, organizing massive demonstrations despite brutal crackdowns,” IPS added.
AFL-CIO International Affairs President Cathy Feingold introduced the Argentinians, and said their campaign against Milei’s cuts and similar fightbacks worldwide go hand-in-hand with the federation’s opposition to Trump, particularly his attacks on migrants and political critics—such as Vizguerra.
“We all know we are in the fight of our lives, in the face of an onslaught of cruel and terrifying attacks on dignity, on rights, and on democracy itself. All of us know this fight is here in D.C., it’s in our country, and it’s around the world,” said Feingold.
“It is a global fight against the bonds of the autocracies, because they are organizing across borders…We must build even stronger bonds among the labor movement, the feminists, the youth, and among democracy fighters all around the world. This has never been more important.”
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