Federal immigration agents arrested a Utah college student driving through Grand Junction in early June after they learned about her from local law enforcement — a situation that Colorado laws are designed to prevent.
The federal agents identified the 19-year-old, who was born in Brazil, for immigration enforcement after a Mesa County Sheriff’s Office deputy pulled her over for a traffic stop on Interstate 70 near Fruita on June 5. The deputy shared information about her in a group chat that included members from several law enforcement agencies, including federal agents, the sheriff’s office said in a statement Monday.
The group chat was part of a region-wide drug interdiction effort, the sheriff’s office said, and deputies regularly shared information about suspects in the chat. But the federal agents in the chat used that information to target suspects for immigration enforcement, according to the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff’s office said in a statement that its deputies did not know the information in the group chat was being used for federal immigration enforcement.
Federal agents arrested the woman after the initial traffic stop a few miles down the road in Grand Junction, according to a statement from the sheriff’s office and reporting by The Salt Lake Tribune. She was let go from the traffic stop, which was for following a semitrailer too closely, with a warning.
Colorado law prohibits local law enforcement officers from carrying out immigration enforcement and largely blocks local police agencies from working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Mesa County Sheriff’s Office pulled its deputies from the group chat after the woman’s arrest, spokeswoman Molly Casey said.
“We have learned that the federal representatives within the communication group began using the material collected for drug interdiction efforts to extrapolate immigration information for the purposes of ICE enforcement,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. “This use of information is contradictory to Colorado law and was initially intended for the purpose of reducing illegal drug trafficking in Colorado.”
The driver, Caroline Dias Goncalves, a 19-year-old University of Utah student, was detained by federal agents and transferred to ICE’s detention facility in Aurora, the Tribune reported last week.
Dias Goncalves immigrated to the United States when she was 7 and overstayed a tourist visa with her family, the newspaper reported. She and her family have a pending application for asylum, according to the Tribune.
The sheriff’s office released body-worn camera footage of the traffic stop on Monday. The footage shows Deputy Alexander Zwinck telling Goncalves that she was following a truck too closely, and that the truck had to “brake check” her. He asks about where she is going and how long she’s owned her car.
Goncalves then accompanied Zwinck back to his patrol car while she and the deputy tried to track down the right registration and insurance paperwork, the body-worn camera footage shows. The deputy asked her about her trunk, which was damaged, and her plans for the weekend.
“Where are you from? You’ve got a little bit of an accent,” Zwinck asked Goncalves.
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“Born and raised, or no?” the deputy asked.
“No, I was born in, oh my gosh, I always forget — down in, I was born in Brazil,” Goncalves answered. “And my parents moved to here.”
Casey declined to say exactly what information the deputy shared in the group chat and directed The Denver Post to file an open records request for that information. But she said sharing information in the group chat was routine.
“Every time an individual is stopped during drug interdiction efforts, they use the chat to provide the information as to who they stopped,” Casey said. “It’s normal for drug interdiction efforts. It’s nothing that is new.”
Since 2019, Colorado lawmakers have passed laws that block ICE officers from arresting people at or around courthouses, stop probation officers from giving people’s personal information to federal immigration authorities, prohibit sheriffs from entering into agreements to house ICE civil detainees, and bar local jails from holding inmates solely at the request of ICE.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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