For the , Colorado legislators have passed laws limiting how state and local officials interact with federal immigration authorities.
Those laws have expanded, been tested by federal courts and Colorado’s governor, and led to the resignation of a Mesa County deputy last year after he was accused of alerting immigration authorities about a college student he’d pulled over.
In the November election, a ballot measure will test whether voters are comfortable with the protections and restrictions those laws provide — or if they want more cooperation with the federal government.
If enshrined in the state constitution, would require Colorado law enforcement to notify U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents about people charged with crimes who they know are in the country illegally or whose legal status they can’t determine within 72 hours of charges being filed. The notification requirement would apply for people who’ve been charged either with a “crime of violence” or any other new offense, if the person charged had previously been convicted of a felony.
The measure would not fully upend Colorado’s so-called “sanctuary laws,” which generally prohibit state and local officials, including law enforcement, from helping or sharing information with ICE except as part of a criminal investigation.
State law doesn’t prohibit county sheriffs from alerting ICE when someone is being released from jail, nor does it stop them from allowing agents into secure areas of jails to make arrests. Still, Amendment 81 would open a wider channel of communication with ICE, at a time when the agency’s operations have drawn widespread criticism and prompted efforts by state lawmakers to further limit already narrow lanes of cooperation.
The proposal is backed by Advance Colorado, a dark-money group that does not reveal its donors but is backed by prominent conservative figures like former Gov. Bill Owens and megadonor Phil Anschutz. The group and its supporters argue that the state legislature has gone too far in keeping immigration agents out of Colorado’s criminal justice system, preventing law enforcement officials from working with their federal counterparts to arrest and deport people with violent histories.
“It’s just a policy that, across the board, is common sense; there’s a lot of agreement on the idea” that law enforcement should notify ICE about people with certain criminal charges, said Kristi Burton Brown, the executive vice president of Advance Colorado. “Our legislature has gone very extreme, even out of touch with other blue states.”
She stressed that Amendment 81 would require only notification, and that would come only after someone was charged, not merely arrested. It does not say what should happen after notification, and she argued the notifications would often come from district attorneys — not police — since they’re tasked with filing criminal charges.
Burton Brown and other supporters argued that the measure was focused on violent offenders, not immigrants living peacefully in the United States. Under Colorado law, “crimes of violence” include charges of murder, kidnapping, first- or second-degree assault, aggravated robbery and other offenses.
‘Essentially enshrines ICE’ in constitution
But opponents and legal experts argued that the measure was far more sweeping than it appeared because it would include defendants previously convicted of felonies and those whose immigration status couldn’t be confirmed.
Being charged with a crime is not the same as being convicted of one. And because Amendment 81 would also task local law enforcement with investigating people’s immigration status, critics argued it could result in racial profiling or cause immigrant communities to stop calling 911 for help.
“This is just an attempt to override what voters have chosen in terms of the type of representatives they have and the laws that legislators have passed on ICE and the direction that Colorado has taken, which is very clearly that law enforcement in Colorado is not an arm of federal immigration enforcement,” said Henry Sandman, the co-executive director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which is opposing Amendment 81. “And this is a constitutional amendment that requires that collaboration, and it essentially enshrines ICE in Colorado’s constitution.”
Sandman and others also questioned how easily or quickly law enforcement could determine whether someone was in the country legally.
John Walsh, the district attorney in Denver, opposes Amendment 81. He said he feared that the 72-hour requirement would spur law enforcement to report a swath of people to ICE who are either U.S. citizens or people in the country legally.
Walsh, who earlier served as the U.S. attorney for Colorado during the Obama administration, said he believed the amendment would lead to “low-level racial profiling” for people who are facing criminal charges, who speak with an accent and whose immigration status can’t be confirmed within 72 hours.
“I think itap reprehensible, and no one in Colorado should want a provision of the Colorado Constitution that pushes law enforcement in that direction,” he said.
But Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly said it would be “fairly easy” to figure out someone’s legal status. He defended the measure as common sense: Rather than inviting more ICE agents onto Colorado streets, he said, the proposal would allow for more cooperation and efficient immigration arrests of people who shouldn’t be in the state.
He said he would make use of the amendment on a weekly basis, should it pass. He also expressed a wish that the state go further in allowing more cooperation with ICE.
‘This is a public safety issue’
Weekly rejected allegations from opponents that the amendment would lead to racial profiling, a suggestion that he called an “offensive” challenge to law enforcement’s professionalism.
“If somebody commits a crime, a crime of violence, or they’ve been convicted of a felony and they’re in this country illegally, it makes sense that they should be turned over to federal authorities to face extradition back to their country of origin,” he said. “This is a public safety issue.”
But the proposal requires only that a person have been charged with a crime of violence, not convicted of one, critics point out. Law enforcement would also be required to alert ICE about a person who’s charged with a traffic offense if that person had been convicted of any prior felony.
“That really opens the floodgates and makes this apply to a lot of people who are not the ‘dangerous person’ that proponents of this amendment are trying to suggest this is limited to,” said Amanda Savage, a law professor and director of the criminal defense clinic at the University of Denver.
The proposal has drawn a mixed, if not quite muted, response from Colorado law enforcement.
The Colorado District Attorneys’ Council is not taking a position on the measure, said spokesman Patrick Mueller. Walsh declined to describe internal discussions among the state’s elected prosecutors. He did say that there was “a lot of concern” about it but that those concerns were not unanimous.
The organization representing Colorado police chiefs did not respond to emails seeking comment about Amendment 81. The group that represents county sheriffs said it did not take positions on ballot measures. Burton Brown said Advance Colorado had not sought public support from law enforcement officials.
More broadly, the ballot box may prove a test for where Coloradans stand on immigration.
Measure will take voters’ temperature
Advance Colorado starting in spring 2025, shortly after President Donald Trump’s return to office.
At that point, Americans’ pendulum-like position on immigration enforcement appeared to have swung closer to the president’s more hardline stance. Trump ran on a promise to deport millions of immigrants without proper legal status, and in early 2025, that mandated detention for undocumented immigrants charged with certain crimes.
But Colorado was a rare blue island in an otherwise red wave election in 2024. In the nearly two years since, Trump’s immigration plan has produced an aggressive arrest-and-deport program that has been public, often violent and focused largely on immigrants with no criminal convictions.
Roughly two-thirds of immigrants detained in Colorado since Trump’s inauguration had no prior convictions, for instance, and three-quarters of those .
A coalition of liberal groups has formed to oppose the six ballot measures that Advance Colorado is running this year, which also include a constitutional right to buy and sell natural gas, a measure that would toughen criminal penalties for fentanyl and an initiative that would cap the state’s income tax rate.
Committees tied to opponents of Amendment 81 had raised $820,000 as of last month; more than a quarter of that was dedicated exclusively to fighting Amendment 81.
Brighter Colorado, a group backing all of Advance Colorado’s measures, had raised just over $306,000 as of mid-September.
Because it would add to the state constitution, Amendment 81 needs to win at least 55% support from voters to pass.
Of the group’s slate this year, Burton Brown acknowledged that Amendment 81 was not “our No. 1 most likely ballot measure to pass.”
“But we think it’s always worth it to have a conversation with voters,” she continued, “and say, ‘Do you think we’ve gone too far in the opposite direction?’ ”
