Court Cases

After learning about Claudia Valdez's detention on an ICE detainer, the ACLU of Colorado sent a draft complaint to Arapahoe County. Within a few weeks, the county agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $30,000 to compensate Valdez for her detention.

This lawsuit was originally filed on behalf of five persons, each of whom was unjustly arrested and imprisoned—up to 26 days in one case—in a “mistaken identity” arrest.

On January 8, 2004, the ACLU filed this lawsuit and asked for an emergency order to stop Weld County law enforcement authorities from pursuing a criminal investigation and prosecution of Thomas Mink, the publisher of The Howling Pig, an Internet-based publication that features satiric commentary on issues of public concern to the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) community.

This class action, filed July 19, 2006, alleges that prisoners in the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, are subjected to a pervasive pattern of disproportionate and excessive force carried out by deputies’ misuse and abuse of pepperball guns, restraint chairs, tasers, electroshock belts, and pepper spray. The jail has no written policies that limit deputies’ use of the first four of these devices, and the suit alleges that the one-page policy on pepper spray is insufficient as written and widely violated in practice.

In this legal action, ACLU lawyers accuse officers of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of engaging in racial and ethnic stereotyping. They carried out an immigration roundup that violated the Fourth Amendment rights of dozens of Denver-area Spanish-speaking residents and resulted in the illegal arrest and illegal search of United States citizens and legal immigrants who had done absolutely nothing wrong.

In this case, the ACLU asserts that the Denver Police Department (DPD) violated the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act when it refused to disclose any documents from the file of its investigation of the African American clients’ complaints of racial profiling arising from a traffic stop in February 2009.