Jeanette Vizguerra is not an unfamiliar name. She’s been in the headlines for nearly a decade — from her defiant decision to take sanctuary in a Denver church basement in 2017, to her recognition on the TIME100 list that same year, to her repeated battles with ICE in the years since. But 2025 has shifted her struggle into something darker, something that feels less like bureaucracy and more like persecution.
She is a grandmother, a janitor-turned-union-organizer, a business owner, and a nationally recognized advocate for immigrant rights. Yet the government insists on reducing her to a “convicted criminal alien,” a phrase ICE spokespersons spit out with bureaucratic detachment, as though a mother of four can be boiled down to a file number. That’s the story they want to tell — but it’s not the real one.
The real story is that Jeanette Vizguerra has spent nearly three decades in Colorado, raising children who are U.S. citizens, organizing for fair wages, caring for other people’s homes, and becoming an anchor in her community. She embodies the American Dream far more than the men in suits who shout about “illegals” on cable news. That is why the Trump administration — in both terms — has singled her out. She is outspoken, she is visible, she is effective, and she refuses to be silent. That makes her dangerous, not to her neighbors, but to the machinery of fear that needs to criminalize immigrants to keep functioning.
FROM 2017 TO 2025: A THROUGHLINE OF RESISTANCE
Back in 2017, her children rehearsed what to do if ICE came knocking: one would film, one would call friends, one would hide in the bedroom. It was a ritual born of terror, the kind of “emergency plan” most families write for tornadoes or fires — not for federal agents. That was the America of Trump’s first term.
By 2019, she had again retreated into sanctuary. By 2020, she was still fighting — through visa applications, petitions, appeals.
And now, in 2025, she is once again behind locked doors, not in the church basement she once chose for safety, but in an ICE detention center in Aurora. This time, she is not hiding from the government — she is being held by it. Six months and counting, in what her lawyers call a violation of her Fifth Amendment rights.
WHY IT’S DIFFERENT THIS TIME
The cruelty has sharpened. Early in Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security ripped up the “sensitive locations” policy that once made churches, schools, and hospitals off-limits. That was the rule that gave Jeanette the space to breathe in 2017. In 2025, that protection is gone. ICE can come into the sanctuary now. ICE can come anywhere.
Her arrest — at a Target parking lot in Denver, in front of colleagues and neighbors — was deliberately humiliating, a message that no place is safe. The mayor of Denver called it “Putin-style persecution.” He’s right. This isn’t about public safety. This is about silencing dissent.
That’s why her lawyers say she’s a political prisoner. And it’s not hyperbole. She is being punished not for violence, not for threats, but for her organizing, for her visibility, for daring to be a woman who stood up and said: “I’m not leaving.”
THE HUMAN COST
Her family is fractured. Her children, once trained to record ICE raids with trembling hands, are now adults trying to hold their family together as their mother’s health deteriorates behind barbed wire and corporate logos. She’s been put on a restricted gluten-free diet that leaves her half-starved. Her blood pressure has spiked. Friends fear the private prison operator, GEO Group, can’t or won’t provide proper care.
Her daughter, Luna, calls her the rock of the family. Her community calls her a leader. The government calls her a criminal. Which one sounds true?
WHY WE CAN’T LOOK AWAY
Because Jeanette Vizguerra’s story is America’s story. She’s lived here for nearly 30 years. She’s raised American children and cleaned American homes. She’s paid taxes. She’s fought for better wages. She’s built community. She’s exactly the kind of person politicians hold up when they wax poetic about “hard-working immigrants.”
And yet, she’s in a cell.
If this country can cage Jeanette Vizguerra — a mother, a grandmother, a TIME100 honoree — simply because she spoke out, what does that say about the rest of us? About the activists marching in the streets? About the journalists reporting uncomfortable truths? About the people who dare to question the state?
It says that none of us are safe if she isn’t.
This story is bigger than Jeanette. It’s about whether speaking out in America makes you a leader or a target. It’s about how quickly the government will shred its own rules to break those who refuse to bow. It’s about what happens when ordinary people are treated like enemies for daring to demand dignity.
We’re telling her story the way the big outlets won’t: with rage, with clarity, with the receipts in hand. If you want this kind of truth — raw, human, unfiltered — then stand with us. Subscribe to Closer to the Edge. Because when the state can cage Jeanette Vizguerra, none of us can afford to look away.
 | A guest post by
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We say her name.
Thank you for telling this story to the wider world. The US is becoming a very unattractive place. As for the so-called Christians who support Trump, this harassing behaviour bears no resemblance to the impoverished Jesus who spent his life living with and supporting the sick, the poor and the dispossessed. He would turn over the gold-leafed tables of Trump's greedy, sycophantic elite bros.