THE CHALLENGE

Jeanette Vizguerra is one of the most recognized voices for immigrant justice in the country — a Denver community leader, mother, and organizer who spent over 600 days living in sanctuary to avoid deportation and separation from her children, work that helped transform Colorado into a stronghold of grassroots immigrant resistance. In March of 2025, Jeanette was detained by ICE at her job in Denver and held at the GEO Group Immigration Detention Center in Aurora.

Jeanette’s detention was not an isolated incident — it was a targeted act of retaliation but the Trump Administration against a woman who has spent decades organizing, resisting, and protecting others from the violence of deportation. Her case made visible a pattern DJP has long worked to expose: the direct connection between mass incarceration and mass deportation, and the way for-profit prison corporations like GEO Group profit from the criminalization and detention of Black and Brown people. Jeanette’s voice was powerful, and that is precisely why she was targeted — a politically motivated attempt to silence someone who has repeatedly dared to speak truth to power.

OUR APPROACH

Denver Justice Project moved quickly to organize community support for Jeanette’s release, working in close collaboration with Aurora Unidos, the Denver Aurora Community Action Committee and others. We designed, printed, and helped distribute thousands of informational cards featuring a QR code linking to a webpage with details on Jeanette’s case and her GoFundMe legal defense fund, making it easy for community members to get informed and take action on the spot.

We co-hosted a vigil outside the GEO Group detention facility in Aurora, where Jeanette’s daughter addressed the crowd while Jeanette joined by video chat to relay her own message directly to the community supporting her. DJP’s then-Executive Director, Gianina Horton, spoke to the crowd about the inhumanity of the detention and deportation pipeline, naming the connection between for-profit immigration detention and the broader prison industrial complex — a link DJP has made a priority to highlight throughout this campaign. Alongside our coalition partners, we organized community members to show up weekly outside the GEO facility, led a sustained public awareness campaign, and advocated publicly for Jeanette’s release.

Upon her release, our work with Jeanette didn’t end — it evolved. We began working alongside her as she continued her own advocacy to expose the inhumane and torturous conditions inside GEO. We accompanied her to meetings in the community and with the ACLU of Colorado in February 2026, and in March, we joined her in a meeting with Governor Jared Polis. Jeanette is now a community defense contractor with Denver Justice Project, and we continue to work together advocating against the expansion of immigration detention capacity in Colorado.

THE IMPACT

Sustained community pressure, coalition organizing, and public advocacy helped secure Jeanette’s release from GEO — freeing a mother, community leader, and fierce defender of dignity and justice to return to her family and her life’s work. But the impact of this campaign extended beyond her individual release. By connecting Jeanette’s detention to the broader machinery of for-profit immigration enforcement, DJP and our partners helped a wider public understand her case not as an isolated injustice, but as a deliberate act of retaliation within a system built to profit from criminalization.

Jeanette’s freedom did not end our work together, and it did not end hers. She has continued to use her platform to expose conditions inside GEO, and DJP has continued to stand beside her — in community meetings, with the ACLU of Colorado, and in direct conversation with Colorado’s Governor. Her transition into a community defense contractor with DJP reflects what this work is ultimately about: not a single campaign with a single endpoint, but an ongoing, mutual commitment to the fight against immigration detention. Together, we continue our campaign to shut down for-profit immigrant detention centers, not only in Colorado but across the country.