Arash Jahanian

Held After the Reason Ended

Saul Cisneros's daughter paid the $2,000 bond a court had set. The El Paso County jail kept him anyway — first for days, then for months — because immigration authorities had sent forms no judge had signed.

Cisneros entered the county jail in November 2017 on two misdemeanor charges. Four days later his daughter posted bond, and state process no longer authorized his confinement. The sheriff's office placed him on an immigration hold anyway, after receiving an ICE detainer and an administrative warrant.

Those documents were requests issued inside the executive branch, not warrants approved by a judge. No judge had ordered Cisneros held after the state basis for his custody ended.

Arash Jahanian and Mark Silverstein filed a state-court class action for Cisneros, another named detainee, and everyone who would be held on the same basis afterwards.

A Fax Cannot Make a New Arrest

The sheriff argued that federal paperwork had transformed his prisoners into ICE detainees.

The plaintiffs answered that custody does not change by fax. A local jail that keeps a person after bond has made a new arrest, and needs lawful state authority to do it.

The court entered a preliminary injunction in March 2018 and later certified a class. Cisneros's daughter posted bond a second time, and he left custody almost four months after he had entered it.

In December 2018 the court entered summary judgment and a permanent injunction. The sheriff had a clear duty to release people who had posted bond, completed a sentence, or otherwise resolved the state basis for custody. The practice had violated the Colorado Constitution's protections against unreasonable seizure, its right to bail, and its guarantee of due process.

The ruling reached well past two men. Nearly two hundred people had been subjected to ICE holds in the El Paso County jail during 2017, and more than forty-six could be sitting under one on an ordinary day.

From Injunction to Statewide Law

In May 2019 Colorado enacted House Bill 19-1124, prohibiting state and local officers from arresting or detaining anyone solely on a civil immigration detainer. The statute also limited probation officers' disclosure of personal information to federal immigration authorities.

The rule Jahanian had won for one county was now the law in all of them, and the court of appeals dismissed the pending appeal as moot because the statute had codified the release rule. Litigation and legislation had arrived at the same boundary from opposite directions: suspected civil removability does not create local criminal custody.

Cisneros's own compensation claim went on separately, and ran into governmental immunity. Sheriff Bill Elder argued that the statutory waiver covering jail operations reached negligence but not an intentional tort like false imprisonment. In March 2022 the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously rejected the distinction: the statute did not sort covered injuries by the defendant's state of mind.

El Paso County then made a $25,000 offer of judgment. Cisneros accepted, and the federal court entered judgment for him on March 16, 2023 — a classwide injunction, a statewide statute, a unanimous state supreme court ruling and, at the end of it, compensation for one man held after his daughter had already paid.

Two Years Before the Complaint

Jessica Hernandez was seventeen when Denver police killed her in 2015. She was unarmed and preparing to enlist in the Coast Guard.

Jahanian represented her parents with the Rathod | Mohamedbhai team, and the case never became a lawsuit. For two years they worked alongside a family in grief while negotiating in a city where the death was a political event, and they resolved it in April 2017 before a civil complaint was ever filed.

Denver agreed to pay $999,999 and to carry out a series of policy, training and community commitments.

The City acknowledged that Hernandez's death had prompted revision of the rule governing gunfire at moving vehicles, and agreed that under the new rule officers could not shoot where the vehicle itself was the only deadly threat. Denver also committed to training its officers on the revised policy. The family could designate a representative to take part in a broader use-of-force policy review. The City agreed to a community meeting with Latino and LGBTQ residents, and to help if the family established a nonprofit in Hernandez's memory.

One term addressed what happens after force is used. Denver accepted limits on proactively releasing unrelated background information about people shot by police — on whether the government's first public description of a killing would concern the encounter or redirect attention somewhere else.

Jahanian has called it the greatest challenge and the greatest reward of his legal career: systemic change without divisive litigation, and Jessie's memory honored.

A Cure That Was Being Rationed

Chronic hepatitis C can progress to cirrhosis, liver failure, cancer and death. By 2017 direct-acting antivirals could cure more than ninety percent of patients.

Colorado's prison system held more than 2,200 people living with the disease, and rationed the cure. Eligibility depended on how far the illness had already advanced, on completing substance-use programming first, and on a clean disciplinary record.

Jahanian joined Mark Silverstein, Sara Neel, Christopher Beall and a Fox Rothschild team in a federal class action against the Colorado Department of Corrections, arguing that custody made the State responsible for care meeting the community standard.

The settlement finalized in September 2018 committed $41 million across two fiscal years — $20.5 million each — to treat every prisoner with chronic hepatitis C, and dismantled the gatekeeping. Sobriety programming could no longer be a prerequisite. A disciplinary violation could no longer disqualify a patient. And nobody had to wait for their liver to get worse first.

Quarterly reports ran through July 2020, giving class counsel and the court a way to measure the promise of universal treatment against the Department's actual performance. The agreement also provided $175,000 in fees and costs after more than 1,200 hours of legal work.

A Police Dog inside Public Housing

Alice Boatner, Billy Sparling, Michael Kealy and Christine Herrera lived at the Suites, a public housing complex in Longmont. In May 2017 police officers and a drug-detecting dog entered their homes at the invitation of the housing authority.

The residents had not consented and were given no opportunity to refuse. A lease clause permitting ordinary maintenance inspections did not authorize law enforcement to walk in with a K-9 looking for criminal evidence.

Jahanian worked with Rebecca Wallace, Mark Silverstein and cooperating counsel John Culver. The matter resolved before a complaint was filed — twice, because the police department and the housing authority bore different responsibilities and one agreement could not carry both.

The City paid $210,000 and agreed to publish an independent investigation, retrain officers on voluntary consent, hold a public forum, take residents' input on policy, and correct its earlier statements suggesting the residents had agreed to the entries. It also offered restorative-justice participation.

The Housing Authority paid $170,000 and supplied the admissions the police settlement could not: that public-housing residents retain privacy rights, that these four residents had not consented, and an apology. It accepted limits on later statements minimizing the searches and opened policy revision to resident input. Keeping those terms in the Authority's own agreement prevented the property manager's role from disappearing inside the City's check.

A Muffin, a Hoodie, and Forty Thousand Dollars

Omar Hassan finished a night shift and stopped at a Caribou Coffee in Aurora. He bought a muffin and sat down at a table wearing a hoodie, sweatpants and work boots. Two officers stood over him with their hands on their guns and ordered him to leave.

The coffee shop had received no complaint and had not asked police to remove anyone. Hassan alleged that an officer told him his kind of business was not welcome there.

Jahanian, Wallace and Silverstein filed a racial-profiling action, and Aurora paid Hassan $40,000. The City announced that payment alongside a separate $35,000 settlement in Dwight Crews's unrelated warrantless-entry and excessive-force case — but the clients, the incidents and the injuries were distinct, and announcing them together did not make them one thing.

Two Days

Greeley prohibited pedestrians from remaining on any median longer than necessary to cross. In practice that banned anyone who asked for help there, and anyone holding a sign.

Three plaintiffs used medians to request money for food and shelter. A fourth wanted to show political messages to passing drivers.

Jahanian, Silverstein, Rebecca Wallace and cooperating counsel challenged the ordinance in September 2019. The City stopped enforcing it immediately and did not oppose preliminary relief; the federal court entered a stipulated injunction two days after filing. Greeley repealed the ban the following month.

Asking for help is protected speech. For these plaintiffs it was also how they ate.

Twenty Lockers and a Religious Practice

The Fort Collins Mennonite Fellowship wanted to put up to twenty outdoor lockers in its parking lot, so that people experiencing homelessness could store documents, clothing and medication somewhere safe. The congregation understood that service as an exercise of faith.

Local land-use conditions made the program impractical, chiefly a requirement for constant onsite supervision. Jahanian and Silverstein represented the Fellowship with Brian Connolly and other cooperating counsel, invoking the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

The settlement allowed twenty-four-hour locker access and required security cameras, and replaced the constant-staffing condition with the availability of a Fellowship representative by telephone. A zoning dispute ended with a congregation able to carry out its ministry and unhoused neighbors able to keep their papers.

Kansas City

Jahanian grew up in Kansas City. He came to Denver in 2012, stayed for the mountains and the people, and has spent his career there.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina and Georgetown Law, where he studied under civil rights professors within sight of the Supreme Court and the Capitol, and clerked for Judge Wiley Y. Daniel of the District of Colorado. He was one of the attorneys in the Wyoming marriage equality cases. The Colorado Bar Association named him its Outstanding Young Lawyer in 2015, and he has been part of three separate teams that won the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association's Case of the Year award.

He litigated at Rathod | Mohamedbhai, then at the ACLU of Colorado, then as Director of Policy and Civil Rights Litigation at the Meyer Law Office, then as senior counsel at Denver Public Schools, where his principal responsibility was the district's long-standing consent decree covering English-language learners and their families.

In April 2024 he joined Colorado Legal Services as Advocacy Director for Denver — the organization that takes the case where an eviction turns out to be a clerical error, or a tax problem turns out to be a missing identification document. He is a former president of the Colorado LGBT Bar Association and former chair of the Denver LGBTQ Commission, and sits on the board of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado.

Jahanian's clients have secured remedies that govern the next detention, medical decision or request for help. In El Paso County, class certification extended the release litigation to people who would later be held on immigration detainers, and the statewide statute prohibited detention on that basis alone. In the prisons, quarterly reports tracked whether treatment reached patients with hepatitis C. In Greeley, an injunction stopped enforcement of the median restriction within two days; repeal then removed the ordinance itself.