A Denver judge has rejected Gov. Jared Polis’ attempt to dismiss a lawsuit that has blocked certain state employees from complying with a federal immigration subpoena.
Instead, District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones ordered outside attorneys representing Polis to provide a full response to the lawsuit by next week. He affirmed that a former state employee and a nonprofit law firm both had standing to sue the governor in a challenge of his May decision to turn over sensitive personal information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Scott Moss, who was then a state employee, had alleged that cooperating with ICE would violate state laws, including a new law that Polis signed at nearly the same time he decided to comply with the subpoena.
The judge’s ruling, issued last week on the day before Thanksgiving, is a blow to Polis’ attempt to both end the litigation and give ICE some records about the sponsors of undocumented and unaccompanied children. In June, a few weeks after the lawsuit was filed, Jones had blocked some state employees from complying with the subpoena.
Though he didn’t specifically block Polis from otherwise turning over the records, Jones indicated that doing so in any way would violate state laws that generally prohibit state and local employees from providing personal information to ICE.
After the June ruling, Polis’ attorneys moved to dismiss the case and said they now planned to turn over only some of the records to ICE. They argued that Moss, who left state employment during the summer, no longer had standing to sue and that Towards Justice, a nonprofit law firm that’s also part of the litigation, had no legal eligibility, either.
But Jones ruled otherwise last week and rejected Polis’ motion to dismiss. The governor’s response to the allegations in the suit are due by Dec. 10.
The state hired private attorneys to represent Polis at public expense after the Colorado Attorney General’s Office said it had a conflict because it had earlier provided legal advice to the governor in the matter.
“Governor Polis has spent well over $100,000 in taxpayer money trying to make this case go away so that he can continue collaborating with ICE behind closed doors,” Laura Wolf, the attorney representing Moss in the case, said in a statement Monday. “We are encouraged by the court’s ruling, and we will continue to fight for the rights of every person placed at risk by Governor Polis’s efforts to facilitate immigration enforcement in violation of Colorado law.”
Shelby Wieman, a spokeswoman for Polis, said in a statement that the governor is “committed to protecting Coloradans against human trafficking.”
“While he disagrees with the decision, he respects the opinion regarding standing and cannot comment further on pending litigation,” Wieman wrote Monday.
In its subpoena, ICE said it wanted information on the sponsors of unaccompanied children so it could check on them as part of an alleged criminal investigation. Neither the agency nor Polis’ office has provided any evidence that such an investigation exists, and Jones previously noted that the governor seemingly took no steps to confirm that ICE is legitimately investigating trafficking before he decided to cooperate with the agency. The subpoena references federal law related to immigration enforcement.
Wieman has previously not responded to questions about whether the state is using any of its own resources to check on the children.
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