The Colorado county sheriff’s office whose deputy pulled over a University of Utah student during a traffic stop earlier this month — and let her go with a warning — has since discovered its information was secretly being shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, leading to the student’s federal detainment just minutes later.
An internal investigation by the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office in western Colorado found that messages from an encrypted Signal chat it had with state and federal law enforcement for drug interdiction efforts were being passed on — without its knowledge — to ICE agents “to extrapolate immigration information for the purposes of ICE enforcement.”
In a statement Tuesday, the office says it believes that’s how immigration agents were able to learn about 19-year-old Caroline Dias Goncalves’ status and location before arresting her on June 5.
“This use of information is contradictory to Colorado law,” the sheriff’s office said in its news release. “… Unfortunately, it resulted in the later contact between ICE and Miss Dias Goncalves.”
How immigration officers came to find Dias Goncalves, a nursing student at the University of Utah., shortly after that initial traffic stop had been a major question since she was detained on her way to Denver. She has been held in a federal immigration center in Aurora for nearly two weeks.
Molly Casey, the spokesperson for the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office, told The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday that the drug interdiction team in Colorado regularly shares information about every stop it conducts with a group of law enforcement officers from various agencies on Signal. The encrypted communication app automatically deletes messages.
The Mesa County deputy in this case, identified by the office as Alexander Zwinck, is a member of the sheriff’s office who serves as part of the larger drug interdiction team.
After his stop of Dias Goncalves, Zwinck messaged in the Signal group chat about his interaction, which Casey said is standard practice — even in cases not involving drugs. She said she did not know specifically what the deputy wrote and directed The Tribune to submit a public records request.
ICE, though, Casey said, is not technically part of the group chat.
But the chat does include agents from Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI — which falls under ICE’s jurisdiction and is considered the federal enforcement arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. HSI is supposed to separately focus on crimes like drug offenses and human smuggling, where ICE looks at cases involving legal status.
It appears the HSI agents, Casey said, shared information from Zwinck about Dias Goncalves with their ICE counterparts.
“That was pulled and used for purposes beyond what we were aware,” Casey said. “We were not aware that the group — that the messages being shared in there — were being provided to ICE. … They took her immigration status and used it.”
Colorado law, Casey noted, does not allow for officers to inquire about residency status. The state also prohibits its officers from sharing information with federal immigration authorities. It doesn’t appear, though, that federal officers are beholden to that.
Mesa County has left the Signal chat
The Mesa County Sheriff’s Office says it has since removed all of its employees from the Signal chat that is maintained by HSI. They had been a part of that drug interdiction effort for a least a decade, Casey said.
She declined to say if Zwinck’s role in the situation was being investigated or if he could face discipline.
Along with its statement, the office also released body camera footage from when Zwinck pulled over Dias Goncalves, which confirms what Dias Goncalves has recounted to her family about the stop in calls from the detention center.
The 19-minute video starts with Zwinck telling Dias Goncalves that she was driving too close to a semitruck on Interstate-70 near Loma. She hands him her driver license and registration, which he takes back to his patrol car, the video shows.
Several times during the video, Zwinck answers a radio. He tells dispatch that he’s having a hard time finding Dias Goncalves’ car in the system.
He later has Dias Goncalves join him and sit in the passenger seat of his patrol car, where he asks her questions about her car insurance. Zwinck also questions where she was born after he comments that she appears to have “a little bit of an accent.”
Her friends and family have told The Tribune that she does not have an accent.
Dias Goncalves tells Zwinck that she has lived in Utah for the past 12 years.
“Born and raised, or no?” he asks.
“Uh no, I was born in Brazil,” Dias Goncalves responds.
A relative of Dias Goncalves has told The Tribune that she originally came to the United States with her parents in 2012, when she was 7. The family had a six-month tourist visa, which they overstayed. They were afraid to return to Brazil, the relative said, after experiencing violence there, including being robbed and held as hostages by gangs several times.
The Tribune has agreed not to publish her relative’s name as he is in the process of applying for a visa. He said he fears he and his family might be targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for speaking out. The Tribune has verified his identity.
Dias Goncalves and her parents applied for asylum three years ago, the relative said, and that’s still pending.
Zwinck also asked her where she was going to school, and she responded at the University of Utah, where she’s studying nursing. He said that he first thought her driver license was a student ID.
A friend of Dias Goncalves’ remained on the phone during the entire stop. Dias Goncalves explained to Zwinck they’d been talking for the past two hours: “I just don’t like driving by myself.”
Caroline Dias Goncalves, who has been held at a Colorado immigration detention center since Thursday, June 5, 2025, according to her family. (Provided photo)“We’re going to take you.”
Dias Goncalves told her family that shortly after the traffic stop, she was pulled over by ICE agents a few miles down the road near Grand Junction.
“We’re going to take you,” Dias Goncalves said those agents told her, according to her relative. They didn’t cite a reason.
Her detainment comes as President Donald Trump has pushed his administration to crack down on illegal immigration across the country, including increasing quotas for ICE arrests.
Messages from The Tribune to the ICE media office have not been returned. But the immigration center in Aurora has confirmed that Dias Goncalves is there. A national ICE detainee locator also shows her status as “in ICE custody” in Colorado.
The Tribune spoke to her relative on Monday. He said the family is working with an attorney in Denver to try to get Dias Goncalves out on bond. She has an initial court appearance set for Wednesday.
He said each time she’s been able to call her family from the center, she’s been crying.
For two days after her June 5 arrest, he added, her family didn’t know what happened. Dias Goncalves wasn’t allowed to call them until the following Saturday. They had been tracking her phone and noticed her location froze in Aurora.
Attending school on scholarship from a “Dreamer” organization
Friends and family are trying to raise money to cover legal costs. They launched a GoFundMe campaign, which reads: “Caroline has always followed the law, passionately pursued her education and dreamed of a future full of opportunity.”
She has been attending the University of Utah on a merit scholarship from a national “Dreamer” organization that provides funding for students who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DREAM program. That was established by former President Barack Obama in 2012 to protect young immigrants from deportation who were brought to the United States by their parents outside of the legal immigration system.
Trump has previously sought to end the DREAM program.
Gaby Pacheco, the president of TheDream.US — the organization that has supported Dias Goncalves’ scholarship — released a statement about Dias Goncalves’ arrest, saying: “Is this really the path forward? Does detaining young students make America safer? Absolutely not.”
The organization also mentioned the recent and similar detention of another DREAM scholar, Ximena Arias Cristóbal, in Georgia. Arias Cristóbal has since been released after more than two weeks being detained; she testified about her experience to a U.S. Senate committee earlier this month.
“What happened to me is not rare — it’s part of a growing pattern that is both scary and un-American,” she said.
Arias Cristóbal also released a statement through TheDream.US in support of Dias Goncalves.
“It hurts to know that Caroline is now experiencing that same fear and isolation,” she said.
And the organization put out a comment that Dias Goncalves made in its annual survey. In that, she said: “I want to succeed, have a family, make a change living in America.”
This story was reported by The Salt Lake Tribune where it first appeared on June 17, 2025.
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