Federal lawyers urged a U.S. District Court judge in Colorado to reject Jeanette Vizguerra’s challenge of her detention in a new filing this week, arguing that she hasn’t sufficiently shown the government was retaliating against her activism when authorities arrested her.

The well-known immigrant-rights advocate was in the country without proper legal status, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were following a reinstated removal order, U.S. Justice Department attorneys wrote in the Tuesday filing. It responded to arguments by Vizguerra’s legal team in recent weeks that the government’s arrest of Vizguerra in March violated her First Amendment rights.

The federal attorneys counter that, as a noncitizen, Vizguerra can’t argue that her free-speech rights were violated during her arrest, detention and potential deportation from the country.

“The Supreme Court has determined that noncitizens cannot challenge the enforcement of a removal order based on a selective-enforcement theory,” the lawyers wrote, adding that Vizguerra “does not have a viable First Amendment retaliation challenge here.”

The filing was signed by acting U.S. Attorney J. Bishop Grewell and assistant U.S. attorneys Benjamin Gibson, Timothy Jafek and Kevin Traskos. Vizguerra’s attorney, Laura Lichter, didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Her attorneys initially filed an emergency petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which is a request to determine the validity of a person’s detention. U.S. District Judge Nina Wang in late March ordered ICE not to deport Vizguerra until her petition was litigated.

The new round of arguments comes over a month after Vizguerra was first detained outside her workplace, a Denver-area Target store, on March 17. She has been held at an ICE detention facility in Aurora.

Vizguerra first crossed the border from Mexico illegally in 1997, and she gained attention nationally for her advocacy after sheltering in two Denver churches to avoid deportation during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Vizguerra’s attorneys have pointed to several examples of what they considered to be retaliatory behavior by the government. Those include a post on X by the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, that said: “We will find, arrest, and deport illegal aliens regardless of if they were a featured ‘Time Person of the Year.’ ”

She was referring to Vizguerra being named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2017.