For almost a year, immigrant advocates and attorneys have complained that federal agents are repeatedly detaining people in Colorado without warrants that would give them permission to take people into custody.Now they have alleged in federal court filings that the behavior of some Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents working in Colorado goes far beyond simply detaining people without a judge's authorization: Lawyers claim they are abusing them too and regularly violating Constitutional protections. In 48 pages of testimony filed in the U.S. District Court for Colorado, American Civil Liberties Union lawyers and immigration attorneys allege that ICE agents are still not complying with a preliminary injunction issued earlier this year by a federal judge requiring them to get arrest warrants in most cases before taking people into custody.And in five declarations filed with the court, immigrants identified by their initials furnished details about violent ICE detentions and arrests even when they were complying with their orders.In each case, the allegations made by immigrants would surely lead to internal affairs investigations and review by citizens commissions if the acts described were committed by police in Colorado’s cities. But it’s not clear in any of the cases whether the Department of Homeland Security is aware of the allegations or has taken any action to investigate them. A spokesman for ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A declaration signed Aug. 14 by an immigrant identified as D.B.D.J said that federal agents broke his window when they approached him at a 7-11 store as he was grabbing breakfast on the way to work earlier this summer.“Both men were yelling at us. I do not remember exactly what they were yelling besides open the door. I opened the door and while opening it, the man that was banging on my window broke it, the man grabbed the front of my shirt and I put my hands up,” D.B.D.J wrote in court documents. “He grabbed my left hand and put it behind my back, he then pulled me down from the front of my shirt to the ground. I put my right hand down to blunt the fall but the officer grabbed it and pulled it behind my back too. I felt a lot of pain.” Last November, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson issued a preliminary injunction, ordering the federal government to comply with its own rules surrounding so-called warrantless arrests, which are prohibited unless the immigrant is deemed a flight risk or a public safety risk. Advocates and attorneys say that since President Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term, immigration agents have wholly ignored that restriction, detaining people wherever they can find them, no matter whether they have a warrant, and no matter whether the person is a flight risk or has a history that would point to a public safety risk. In May, when both sides were brought back to court, Jackson ordered the Trump administration to train every ICE officer who conducts arrests and detentions in Colorado on his preliminary injunction order and that the federal government produce monthly reports on their detentions and arrests to ensure compliance.But the lawyers allege in filings this week that ICE agents in Colorado have continued to grab people off the street without warrants and are at times breaking windows, racially profiling and assaulting immigrants.The number of people taken into detention by ICE in Colorado reached its second highest level of Trump’s second term in July, when 467 people were taken into custody, according to data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. That organization, affiliated with the University of California Berkeley and UCLA, uses Freedom of Information requests and lawsuits to obtain data from the federal government.The month with the largest number of immigration detentions in the state was July, 2025, when 536 were taken into custody. But the number has been climbing steadily this spring and summer, from 247 in March to 467 in July, the data shows.“Defendants (the federal government) make warrantless arrests under the guise of field warrants; Defendants do not accurately report to plaintiffs the number of relevant arrests made … Defendants’ June, July and August (reports) included evidence of ICE agents detaining, handcuffing and arresting individuals without conducting a flight risk analysis,” ACLU lawyers said in the court documents. “Defendants’ document production shows that ICE routinely arrests people in this manner.”Advocacy attorneys say the government is out of compliance with the preliminary injunction and the required filings ordered by the judge earlier this year. They said, in court documents, they are missing documentation for at least nine individuals and ICE has produced “incomplete sets” of documents for some 20 or so people who may have been detained without a field warrant this summer. They also said that since the enforcement order in May, only 10 of the people they were tracking remain in ICE custody in Colorado.The declarations from immigrants also indicate that violent arrests occur regularly outside the view of cell phone cameras and protesters who have documented ICE abuses across the country.S.N., who is 18, said in court documents he’s been in the United States since April 2023 and entered with his family on parole from Venezuela. He had a work permit, was the captain of his high school soccer team and worked on the weekends at SONIC and helped his mother deliver food. He was arrested by ICE when he was helping deliver food to an apartment in Aurora. ICE officers swarmed the hallway. He put his hands on his head and officers pointed long guns at his chest. An officer grabbed him and shoved him against the wall and handcuffed him.“I was yelling that I was only there delivering food and that I did nothing wrong. I asked them if they were blind because the food I had delivered was right there. Then an officer punched me in the face and I felt extremely dizzy,” he said, according to court documents.S.N. said that the officers “asked if I was Mexican because of my clown tattoo,” and I told them no. They then accused S.N. of being a member of a Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua. He said he was not.“While in the car to Centennial, I asked the driver if they had something to stop the bleeding from the punch … they said no,” S.N. wrote. “They said that I belonged in Venezuela.”The next step in the case is not outlined in the documents, but the case remains open in U.S. District Court.Related coverage: