On the last days of September 2025, a flurry of lawsuits, protests, and mounting public scrutiny have put the Trump administration’s immigration detention policies under the national spotlight once again. From the heart of Colorado, where prominent activist Jeanette Vizguerra fights for her freedom, to the courtrooms of New York and Virginia, a confluence of legal and humanitarian battles is reshaping the debate over immigration enforcement in the United States.
On September 30, 2025, Capitol News Illinois reported that new lawsuits tied to former President Trump’s immigration actions are continuing to develop, many of them zeroing in on state government roles and the evolving landscape of federal immigration policies. These legal maneuvers are not occurring in a vacuum—they are unfolding amid a broader push by federal agencies to expand detention capacity and accelerate deportations, drawing sharp criticism from advocates and civil rights groups alike.
One of the most high-profile flashpoints in this ongoing saga is the case of Jeanette Vizguerra, a Mexican immigrant and nationally recognized activist who has spent the past six months detained at the Aurora ICE detention center in Colorado. On September 29, 2025, Vizguerra addressed her supporters via video call from inside the facility, her voice conveying both exhaustion and resolve. “It’s wrong to keep me detained,” she told the crowd gathered outside, according to Westword. “For the first time in my activism, I’m very tired. I feel my health is deteriorating. I don’t want to be separated from my children, from my family. I need to be out with them, and I want to be out with my community.”
Vizguerra’s legal team filed a motion that same day, arguing that her ongoing detention violates her First Amendment rights and demanding either her immediate release or a bond hearing. The filing contends that Vizguerra’s arrest—carried out by ICE agents outside her workplace in March—was retaliation for her outspoken criticism of both ICE and President Trump. Her story is one of resilience: after arriving in Denver nearly three decades ago, she has faced repeated deportation threats, famously taking sanctuary in a church in 2017 and earning a spot on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people later that year. Even while incarcerated, she was honored with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in May 2025.
But Vizguerra’s fight is about more than her own freedom. On September 29, she also called for a nationwide boycott of ICE detention center commissary and phone services, aiming to hit the corporations profiting from these facilities where it hurts most—their bottom line. “Imagine how much they can profit,” she said, noting that phone calls cost about $5 and that detainees are forced to spend between $70 and $120 a week on “horrible” commissary food because the cafeteria offerings are “inedible.” With the Aurora facility alone holding upwards of 1,400 people, and ICE seeking to expand its national detention capacity to 100,000 beds—including 4,000 in Colorado—the stakes are enormous. “Every day, phone and video call and commissary companies gain millions and millions of dollars,” Vizguerra told her supporters. “I’m calling on each detainee. Here we have power, it doesn’t matter that we’re detained, to take money away from these corporations by not buying phone or video calls or commissary.”
Supporters rallied outside the Aurora facility for about an hour, their protest just one of many actions unfolding across the country as legal challenges mount. On October 1, 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with its Virginia and North Carolina affiliates, filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit seeks to force ICE to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August, which demanded records about the agency’s plans to expand immigration detention across Virginia and beyond. The request was prompted by ICE’s May 28, 2025, call for “available detention facilities” in the area covered by its Washington, D.C. Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Field Office—a move widely interpreted as a precursor to further expansion.
The ACLU’s legal action follows a series of earlier lawsuits aimed at prying open details of ICE’s nationwide expansion plans, all part of the Trump administration’s stated goal to deport 11 million immigrants from the United States. According to the ACLU, prior FOIA litigation has already revealed key information about which current and prospective facilities are under consideration across the Midwest, South, and West Coast. But the lack of transparency has only fueled concerns about the conditions inside these centers and the broader implications for immigrant communities.
Those concerns have become more urgent in recent weeks. Media reports cited by the ACLU have documented inhumane conditions at the Washington, D.C. ERO Field Office in Chantilly, Virginia, where dozens of immigrants have been held since President Trump’s federal takeover of the capital. Detainees there, according to reports, have received only one meal a day and have been denied access to their lawyers—a situation that has drawn condemnation from advocates and attorneys alike. Sophia Gregg, senior immigrants’ rights attorney at the ACLU of Virginia, minced no words in her assessment: “The Trump administration’s determination to rip families apart has created a humanitarian crisis in ICE facilities. ICE's solution to the dangerous, rapidly degenerating conditions in its existing facilities can’t be to replicate those conditions in new facilities that it builds in secret. ICE must be transparent and follow the law – not violate people’s civil rights and civil liberties to advance an inhumane political agenda.”
The legal and humanitarian battles are not limited to Virginia and Colorado. Weeks before the latest lawsuit was filed, the Trump administration opened new ICE detention centers at a maximum-security prison in Louisiana and at the Fort Bliss military base in Texas. These moves, according to reporting by The New York Times and The Washington Post, are part of a larger strategy to ramp up detention capacity nationwide, with ICE currently detaining about 60,000 people and aiming to increase that number to 100,000 in the near future.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, seasoned journalists like Jerry Nowicki and Hannah Meisel of Capitol News Illinois continue to track the ripple effects of these federal policies at the state level. Their reporting underscores how state governments are being drawn into the legal fray, whether through litigation, oversight, or the day-to-day realities of supporting—or resisting—federal immigration enforcement efforts.
As October begins, the intersection of law, activism, and policy has rarely felt more urgent. With new lawsuits, mounting protests, and ever-expanding detention centers, the future of America’s immigration system remains in flux—caught between the courts, the streets, and the lives of people like Jeanette Vizguerra, who refuse to let their voices be silenced.
