The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., asserts that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE Director David Venturella are breaking a federal law that protects free and fair elections by allowing armed agents to enter voting locations, including to arrest people for civil immigration violations.

“The specter of armed officers at polling places threatens the freedom of this upcoming election,” attorneys wrote in the lawsuit. “It places voters in fear that they will be confronted by armed federal immigration enforcement officers if they choose to cast a ballot.”

In response, an unnamed Homeland Security spokesperson said ICE is not planning operations targeting polling places. The agency “conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement, and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

That statement, cited verbatim in the lawsuit, is the same one DHS officials released after Mullin on Sept. 1 said at polling places but are not patrolling those areas.

But the lawsuit argues that the presence of armed federal agents at voting locations violates a Civil War-era federal law that from being “at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”

The case is the first lawsuit against the administration over such actions.

ICE has already targeted Denver for immigration action, attorneys wrote in the complaint, citing a Denver Post report about an Ecuadorian woman who was detained by federal agents at Denver International Airport.

“Election officials in Denver reasonably expect that the presence of armed federal law enforcement officers at election sites would disrupt (voting) activities and intimidate voters and election workers,” attorneys said in the lawsuit.

The right to vote without fear of intimidation is fundamental to democracy and being an American, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement.

“Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes,” Johnston said. “We’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.”

Denver Clerk and Recorder Paul López said in a statement the right to vote is enshrined in the country’s constitution and code.

“Denver is the vanguard of democracy, and with cast-iron certainty we will protect our free and fair elections from any and all attempts at federal intimidation and intrusion,” he said.

In the lawsuit, Denver officials said the city is home to a large immigrant population, making it a likely target for ICE operations during the midterm election.

The presence of armed officers could deter residents from casting votes or dropping off mail-in ballots and could fuel anxiety among election workers and volunteers, they said in the lawsuit. Election officials in Denver have already scheduled training for election workers on how to identify federal agents in plain clothes, document their presence and de-escalate interactions, according to the lawsuit.

The groups involved in the lawsuit — Common Cause; the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; and UnidosUS — also said recent ICE activity at polling locations is already chilling voter registration drives, canvassing efforts and civic participation in the electoral process. The organizations have also diverted funding, staff time and ad space away from standard voter mobilization efforts toward establishing rapid-response safety networks, “Vote Safe from ICE” educational materials and de-escalation training.

In a statement, Janet Murguía, the president and CEO of UnidosUS, said sending officers into polling locations was “not immigration enforcement” but “voter suppression, plain and simple.”

The lawsuit pointed to three instances in May and June when federal immigration agents converged on polling sites in Texas, California and New York, including when ICE agents entered a polling site in Syracuse, New York, to interrogate an election volunteer over a social media post that she made five months earlier regarding the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Homeland Security’s “polling place policy,” as described by Mullin in September, echoes and allies over the last year that ICE can be at polling places in November, the lawsuit argued.

In the complaint, attorneys asked a judge to declare the DHS policy unlawful, to rule that DHS and ICE do not have lawful authority to bring armed officers into polling places and to prohibit them from doing so.

��contributed to this report.

Supporters moved from one courtroom to the next shortly before 9 a.m., as the four protesters stood before judges for arraignment in different court divisions. Less than an hour earlier, the group had gathered outside the courthouse, chanting and waving signs that read “Drop the charges now!” and “Protesting is not a crime!”

“Our communities are being destroyed, and free speech is not a crime,” organizer Brandon Gehrke said to the small crowd gathered outside the courthouse. “That’s why we’re standing here today: to be able to defend our movement and stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who have been arrested.”

Yoselin Corrales, Arnie Carter, Mateo Henry and Terry Burnsed were all charged with obstructing a passageway, according to Arapahoe County court records. Corrales and Henry also face charges of obstructing a peace officer.

The charges stem from a July 20 demonstration outside an ICE field office in Centennial, 12445 E. Caley Ave., according to the protesters’ court summons. More than 100 people showed up that day to protest ICE violence and detention-center neglect, said , Carter’s attorney.

Copies of the summons and complaints provided by the court appeared similar to traffic tickets and did not provide additional information about the incident or the arrests.

National immigration arrests , according to the Deportation Data Project. Legal documents from Colorado attorneys filed at the end of August allege immigration agents acted illegally and violently during many of those arrests, including one incident where an 18-year-old’s face was repeatedly slammed into the pavement in a convenience store parking lot.

ICE agents arrested 495 people in Colorado in July, a 93% spike from March, according to a Denver Post data analysis.

Adams County health officials also publicly confirmed an active tuberculosis investigation at the Aurora immigration detention center in early July, less than a week before the Centennial protest. The Adams County Health Department began investigating reports of the disease in late June.

Detention center officials were slow to cooperate with the investigation and allegedly ignored deadlines to turn over records, prompting the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to file a federal lawsuit in August.

“We were standing up using our First Amendment rights to stand up against the kidnapping of our neighbors and illegal detentions,” Carter said. Still, he said, the arrest wasn’t a surprise because he’s seen retaliation against protesters before.

Obstructing passageways is a “classic crime” used to charge protesters, McNulty said. “No one else gets charged for standing on the sidewalk,” he said.

Crimes like obstruction and jaywalking are rarely prosecuted, but often appear in cases against protesters, McNulty said.

“These individuals were protesting ICE and the horrific abuses of the Trump administration,” said Victoria Dorn, Corrales’ attorney. “They are being prosecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights, and that����ap simply it. These are trumped-up charges.”

Dorn said these charges are intended to scare people into not speaking out about the constitutional rights violations happening every day.

“It’s incredibly disappointing that Amy Padden, who ran as a progressive prosecutor, is choosing to file charges against individuals who are trying to protect some of the most vulnerable members of our community instead of going after ICE agents who day after day violate state and federal laws, not just here in Denver but across the country,” Dorn said.

The 18th District Attorney’s Office fully supports “the public’s right to peacefully protest and to express their views in accordance with the law,” spokesperson Eric Ross said in an email to The Denver Post. But “circumstances can arise when conduct during a protest potentially violates other applicable laws,” he said.

The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for body-worn-camera video or officer reports from the arrests.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

The “ICE Out” protest is being organized by several advocacy groups, including the and 50501 Colorado.

“Students across Colorado are standing together and walking out to demand that our communities are treated with dignity, safety, and respect,” Colorado Youth Coalition organizers wrote on Instagram. “This isn’t just one school. It����ap students from across the state coming together and saying ENOUGH.”

In Denver, protesters are set to gather at La Alma-Lincoln Park, 1265 Mariposa St., at noon.

Organizers on Wednesday said students at schools in Adams, Arapahoe, Alamosa, Boulder, Broomfield, Mesa, Morgan, Denver, Douglas, El Paso, Garfield, Jefferson, Larimer, Montrose, Montezuma, Pueblo, Teller and Weld counties have signed up to participate in the walkout.

Mountain Vista High School senior Braeden Kieffer, 17, said he and his classmates in Douglas County also are protesting the use of Flock cameras in the community.

“Kids know what’s going on, but we have very few ways of demonstrating about it. So one of the few things we can do is protest, to show up and show out,” Kieffer said.

The walk out is not about trying to get out of class, he said, and it feels deeply personal, especially for students who are immigrants or whose parents are immigrants.

“From nationwide to the local level, we’re seeing people’s civil rights come under attack and seeing that the adults in power don’t seem very focused on resolving those issues,” he said. “It’s in the hands of us as kids and our very limited ability to make our voices heard.”

Denver and Jefferson County school districts did not respond to requests for comment about the walkouts. Friday is a vacation day on the Aurora Public Schools calendar, and there are no classes scheduled.

Cherry Creek School District officials sent a message to middle and high school families on Thursday afternoon about the walk outs, including a statement that the district does not endorse walkouts but does support students’ First Amendment rights.

Spokesperson Randy Barber said the Boulder Valley School District is preparing for the likelihood of protests and walkouts at high schools. BVSD supports students’ right to free expression as well as those students who don’t want to participate, he said. During demonstrations, school workers focus on student safety and supervision along with minimizing disruption to normal school operations.

A similar ICE Out protest in January resulted in thousands of Colorado students and community members joining protests, and schools in Denver, Aurora, Commerce City and Glenwood Springs canceled or delayed classes because of a wave of teachers who called out of work.

Denver Public Schools previously challenged federal immigration policy when the district sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in February 2025 to keep immigration agents from arresting people in school buildings after the Trump administration rescinded a 2011 policy that prevented arrests in schools, churches and other places.

But Homeland Security later said its policy about sensitive locations had not fundamentally changed, and it published another policy on “” where immigration enforcement will generally not happen, including schools, hospitals, churches, community gathering and social service locations. DPS dropped the lawsuit in June 2025.

Voters from both parties in the Republican’s 8th Congressional District overwhelmingly favor a lighter touch than the raids and mass roundups used in President Donald Trump’s second term, according to poll results released Wednesday by the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

Colorado’s 8th District, which takes in parts of Weld, Larimer and Adams counties north of Denver, has among the state’s eight congressional districts. Both Evans and his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Manny Rutinel, are Latino.

“There is tremendous common ground to build on to create legislative proposals (on immigration),” said Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation, which conducted the poll. “There is an overarching sense that action��must be taken.”

Still, bipartisan agreement on immigration reform has eluded Congress for years.

The survey, which Kull addressed for reporters on Wednesday in an online briefing, found voters on the right and left largely agree on a number of immigration-related questions both nationally and across more than two dozen battleground House districts. That’s true whether it’s about creating pathways to citizenship for people brought to the United States illegally as children or about requiring employers to verify a worker’s immigration status before hiring them.

The findings come from the latest release of a poll that included 500 voters in the 8th District in May and June. Earlier releases have addressed their views on several other issues, including the regulation of artificial intelligence and the government’s role in healthcare.

When it comes to immigration, Democrats are intent on pinning some of the uglier sides of enforcement under Trump to Republican incumbents in hopes of taking control of the closely divided House chamber in January. Rutinel has made criticism of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s sometimes-harsh enforcement tactics a central theme of his campaign.

Evans has tried to create daylight between himself and the administration on the issue, highlighting his decision last year to join five other congressional Republicans in penning a letter to ICE leadership about its enforcement strategies, and asking whether the agency was prioritizing the deportation of criminals.

Erin Covey, the U.S. House editor for the Cook Political Report, said getting out from under Trump’s shadow will be a tall order for Evans. The 8th District, she said, ranks second in the nation in Latino population for a battleground district currently led by a Republican.

Cook .

“I think Trump is an anchor on Evans in a way he isn’t on other Republicans in other competitive districts,” she said. “Latino voters are going to be a crucial part of either candidate’s fortunes.”

In Colorado’s 8th District, 66% of Republican or GOP-leaning voters and 87% of Democrats or those leaning left said they favored a long-term visa for immigrants who have been in the country for a while and who have committed no crime.

An even higher share of Republican voters and leaners — 77% — said children brought to the United States illegally as children should be provided a path to citizenship, provided they have not committed a significant crime and are employed, in college or serving in the military. Democrats and left-leaners registered an 88% approval of that question, according to the poll.

A dual question asked whether employers should be required to use E-Verify to ensure workers they hire are in the country legally and if more work visas should be issued, provided there’s a demand for workers. Both Democratice- and Republican-leaning voters responded overwhelmingly in the affirmative: 87% for Democrats and 85% for Republicans.

A majority of voters on both sides, according to the poll results, said more judges should be hired to adjudicate asylum cases. Sixty-six percent of Republicans were in favor while 83% of Democrats said yes.

The one question on which 8th District Republicans lined up nearly perfectly with the Trump administration was the need to deport those in the country illegally who had committed a crime. Ninety-eight percent of GOP-affiliated voters supported that policy, while 74% of Democrat-leaning respondents in the district did.

The University of Maryland survey came out just days after a Colorado Latino Policy Agenda poll revealed that 66% of Latino voters statewide said they felt the country was on the wrong track as their frustrations about the cost of living — which ranked higher than any other issue, including immigration — had gone unaddressed and, for many, had worsened.

For Evans, the dissatisfaction among Latino voters poses a potential hurdle to reelection. Only 34% of voting Latinos in his district regarded him favorably, while 42% viewed him unfavorably, according to that poll, which was conducted between July 1 and Aug. 11.

Attorneys say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to violate both a court order and federal law limiting agents’ use of warrantless arrests. The Thursday filings in U.S. District Court in Denver include photos of the injured teenager and descriptions of other violent arrests, and they come as its enforcement efforts in recent months.

Immigration arrests had dipped nationally after federal agents killed two protesters in Minneapolis earlier this year, sparking a public outcry. But they began to tick up again in May and surged in July. ICE agents arrested 495 people in Colorado last month — a 93% spike from March, according to a Denver Post analysis of arrest data from the Deportation Data Project, which is based at the University of California, Berkeley and at UCLA.

In the case of the arrested teenager, who was detained in early August, agents pulled him and another man out of a truck in the 7-Eleven parking lot. They shoved the teenager to the ground, breaking his wrist, giving him a black eye and cutting his face so badly that he couldn’t see, the teenager wrote in a court declaration.

“While on the ground I turned my head to look at D.B.D.J. and I saw the officer beating him, pounding his face against the pavement,” the truck’s driver, identified as J.D.B., wrote in his own declaration. D.B.D.J. are the initials for the 18-year-old, who, like others, is not identified by his full name in the documents.

A federal judge in Colorado has already twice ordered ICE to follow the law when conducting warrantless arrests. The escalating legal dispute over the practice and the overall detention increase, unfolding both in Colorado and nationwide, demonstrate that while ICE has scaled back its high-profile public surges since the Minneapolis killings, the Trump administration has not abandoned its plans to arrest and deport millions of immigrants without proper legal status.

After his confirmation this spring, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised quieter but more effective enforcement, and the agency has not reverted to the intense city-by-city surges that colored the first year of Trump’s second term.

Even still, ICE now appears closer than ever to meeting a recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests.

“They took a lot of heat for the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and Mullin came in to try to say, ‘Look, we’re going to go lower profile’ … but clearly they want to keep ramping up the deportation machine,” said Tim Macdonald, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which jointly filed the new documents alleging a continuation of warrantless arrests. “They have all the money in the world, and what that means is they’re going out and rounding people up.”

Indeed, July in Colorado saw the second-most arrests of any month since President Donald Trump returned to office early last year. Nationwide, it was the most arrest-heavy month of his second term, with 49,571 people arrested, up 70% since February.

“The enforcement mechanisms are just as insidious, but they’re just a little bit more sophisticated in the sense that they’re being masked better — and the ways in which they’re profiling noncitizens or targeting people are more hidden,” said Hans Meyer, a Denver immigration attorney who is also part of the legal team suing ICE over the warrantless arrests. “That����ap to nullify a political defense about all of the horrible things that ICE has been caught doing on video.”

Facing judicial scrutiny

Meyer and other attorneys, including at the ACLU, allege that some of the new arrests are illegal.

That allegation has become something of a legal merry-go-round. U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson ordered ICE in November to follow federal law, which requires ICE to establish that a person does not have proper legal status and is likely to flee before agents can arrest them without a warrant.

Jackson then reiterated that order to ICE and chastised its agents in the spring, after the ACLU coalition said agents were still arresting people without following the court’s order. Three agents who testified in court showed little understanding of Jackson’s prior order, and Jackson said they didn’t “have a clue” about what they should be doing.

In an unsigned statement to The Denver Post, the Homeland Security Department said agents use reasonable suspicion to investigate immigrants’ legal status and probable cause to make arrests; the statement did not address accusations of violent arrests.

But now the attorneys are again accusing the agency of ignoring Jackson, including in several allegedly violent encounters.

Macdonald said arrest reports reviewed by the legal team show an “alarming” trend. The latest filings describe instances of agents rapidly and forcefully arresting immigrants before the agents went through the procedures that Jackson — and federal law — required.

In other cases, the attorneys accused the agency of issuing field warrants after someone had already been arrested or including “falsehoods” in the warrants.

In one July 2 arrest, the lawyers wrote, ICE agents pulled over a man and showed him a warrant through his car window. But the warrant was for somebody else, not the driver.

“I told the officers that I am not the person on the warrant,” the man, identified by the initials G.B.R., wrote in a declaration attached to the legal filings. “They said we don’t care, you are arrested.”

His car window was then shattered and he was pulled from the vehicle, the declaration says. He wrote that his hands were cuffed so tightly that the cuffs cut into his wrists and that agents did not ask him questions about his personal life — which would’ve helped establish if his arrest was necessary — until after he was transported to an ICE facility.

Another 18-year-old, who filed a declaration under the initials S.N., said he was delivering food to an apartment building in Aurora when ICE agents raided it. He was pulled into the apartment by its occupants and then, following agents’ commands, opened the door.

He was handcuffed and, as he protested that he was only delivering food, an agent punched him in the face, he wrote.

Agents accused him of being a Venezuelan gang member and did not ask him questions about his personal history until they’d placed him in a vehicle. He wrote that he entered the country at age 14 and was preparing for his senior year in high school, where he played varsity soccer, when he was arrested. As he was being driven to an ICE field office in Centennial, the teen asked the driver if he “had something to stop the bleeding from the punch the officer gave me above my right eye.”

“They said no,” he wrote. “They said that I belonged in Venezuela.”

In a separate declaration, D.B.D.J. — the teenager whose wrist was broken — said an ICE agent arrested him after breaking through a car window on Aug. 4. The agent pulled him out and shoved him to the ground, he said.

Pictures attached to the filing show the teenager with a black eye, cuts on his forehead and a cast on his right arm. In an apparent violation of the court order, the agent did not ask him any questions other than his name and birthdate before driving him away, the declaration says.

He was later taken to the hospital, and ICE agents gave him Tylenol for the pain. He was not asked questions about his personal history until he arrived at the detention center in Aurora, according to the document.

Expanding enforcement

Using government data published by the Deportation Data Project, The Post identified an Aug. 4 arrest appearing to match D.B.D.J.’s description and a June 19 arrest appearing to match S.N.’s description. ICE records indicate that neither had prior criminal histories and that both were arrested because of their immigration status. Using other information from the declarations, The Post was unable to definitively link the other people who filed declarations to specific criminal histories.

As has consistently been the case since the Trump administration began its arrest-and-deport program last year, the majority of those arrested and detained by the agency have never been convicted of a crime. The latest data released by the Deportation Data Project show that between April 1 and Aug. 5, for instance, fewer than a third of the 1,573 people arrested in Colorado had a prior criminal conviction. For those with prior convictions, the most common charges were driving under the influence, assault and immigration violations.

The Post analyzed the data by eliminating duplicates and, for the purposes of analyzing prior criminal histories, by examining only those arrests that resulted in a detention stay, which provides more personal information about arrestees.

In the month before Trump returned to office in January 2025, immigration arrests hovered a little over 8,000, a figure largely made up of immigrants transferred from city or state jails and prisons and turned over to ICE.

But during Trump’s first year back in office, the numbers started climbing as the administration loosened restrictions on whom ICE could arrest — and where it could carry out arrests — while it also infused the agency with billions of dollars approved by Congress.

Some apprehensions that occurred during the recent arrest surge came from ICE activity at airports.

Meyer, the Denver attorney, said he represents a number of clients who were arrested at Denver International Airport and had no prior criminal history. Those arrests are part of . The New York Times reported in December that ICE officers were arresting people subject to deportation orders with the help of information that airlines provided to the Transportation Security Administration.

Those efforts now appear to also target people with expired visas, a far larger group than those with deportation orders. It includes a 27-year-old Ecuadorian woman who lives in California and was arrested while attempting to board a plane at DIA last month.

As ICE arrests have increased, so, too, has the number of people housed in Aurora’s privately run detention center. According to the Deportation Data Project, the facility’s daily population peaked in January at 1,451 detainees. It then dipped through the spring, only to rebound in recent weeks.

The facility hit 1,441 detainees on July 26, the highest total under Trump other than the January peak.

The Associated Press and the New York Times contributed to this story.

The Thursday decision from U.S. District Court Judge Daniel D. Domenico defangs the most immediate part of , which Democratic lawmakers passed earlier this year.

Siding in large part with a request from Geo Group, the private company that runs the Aurora detention center, Domenico found that HB 1276’s provisions requiring unannounced inspections at least once every three months were preempted by federal law and Geo’s existing contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

He wrote that the newly required inspections — and a companion provision that directed Geo to pay for them — “are currently in effect, imposing actual burdens on Geo of more frequent and costly inspections.” He said the new rules were likely unconstitutional.

Domenico noted that Geo’s contract with ICE is due to expire Oct. 15. He set his injunction to end on that date because the “provisions of any new contract that GEO (or another operator) obtains from the federal government may alter the analysis significantly, or make proceeding further with this case unnecessary at all.”

Aside from requiring more regular inspections, HB 1276 also empowers state health officials to impose other regulations on Geo, including requiring specific medical staffing and preventing Geo from blocking outside infectious disease inspections. Lawyers for the state have argued in court that those provisions aren’t in effect yet and that the state has no immediate plans to bring them into effect.

As a result, Domenico did not block them — though he suggested that “should enforcement of those provisions become imminent, this analysis might change.”

A spokesman for Geo did not immediately return a message seeking comment; the company recently announced plans to open another ICE-contracted detention center in Hudson, north of Denver.

Nayda Benitez, the organizing director for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which worked on the law during the legislative session, said her group was concerned about what impact the ruling would have going forward.

“We maintain that we don’t necessarily think that pieces of this bill are unconstitutional,” she said. “For us, it����ap just important that we hold Geo and really any private detention facility in Colorado to high standards, especially knowing what we’re hearing from our members and people on the inside at Geo.”

In a statement, Attorney General Phil Weiser called the ruling a “narrow, temporary injunction” and noted that Domenico did not undo other, pre-existing state laws. Domenico’s ruling did leave intact county officials’ ability to inspect Geo at their discretion, and he did not touch other provisions unrelated to facility inspections.

Still, Domenico’s opinion is a blow to the only part of Colorado Democrats’ immigration package to survive the 2026 legislative session. Lawmakers killed two other measures, and Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a third.

More fundamentally, the ruling lays bare the core challenge for legislators hoping to put state-level constraints on the Trump administration’s immigration efforts. Immigration enforcement is generally a federal duty, and its operation is carried out chiefly by either federal agents or federal contractors, like Geo — whicih are often outside the scope of state officials’ regulatory authority

The opinion also comes amid intense scrutiny over the conditions inside the Aurora facility: On Wednesday, Weiser’s office sued Geo for blocking state health inspectors from carrying out a tuberculosis investigation tied to the detention center.

The lawsuit, filed in Denver District Court, was expected after private prison company Geo Group ignored a Monday deadline to turn over records about the June tuberculosis case at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s facility to state health authorities.

The state’s lawsuit argues that, because Geo and ICE have not provided records to health inspectors, Colorado is “flying in the dark when it comes to a contagious and deadly infectious disease within its borders.”

The lawsuit asks a Denver judge to issue a ruling enforcing the public health order.

“The Geo Group is endangering Coloradans’ public health by refusing to follow the state health department����ap order and by violating Colorado law,” Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement. “This law keeps our residents safe and enables the health department to take necessary measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases like tuberculosis.”

In a statement Tuesday, Geo spokesman Christopher Ferreira did not comment on the company’s refusal to comply with the health order. He said there were no active cases of TB at the Aurora detention center and that federal authorities “remain actively involved in disease-prevention and control measures” at the facility.

The lawsuit was filed under a Colorado law requiring investigations of tuberculosis cases, which directs the state “to use every available means to investigate immediately and ascertain the existence of all reported or suspected cases of active tuberculosis within (its) jurisdiction.” The suit was not filed under a new law passed earlier this year, which requires more regular inspections of the Geo facility and empowers state authorities to penalize the company for failing to comply with communicable disease probes. Geo is currently challenging that new law in federal court.

In the lawsuit filed Wednesday, lawyers for the state argue that health inspectors had partnered with Geo to conduct disease investigations in the past, including a mumps case in 2019 and another TB infection in 2024. But in this case, Geo stopped speaking with Adams County officials after the company set up a call between inspectors and the infected patient in late June.

The company instead directed health officials to send all questions through Geo’s lawyers, according to the suit. Gov. Jared Polis made at least two attempts to speak to senior Geo staff, both of which were rebuffed.

In a statement Wednesday, Polis said that “Geo’s consistent lack of transparency” was blocking a routine health investigation.

“Public health orders carry the weight of law, and we appreciate the collaboration from Attorney General Weiser’s office on this effort,” he wrote. “I am hopeful the courts will ensure that local public health officials get the information needed to protect public health.”

The standoff in Colorado began in June, when Adams County health officials learned that a Geo detainee had tested positive for TB, a potentially fatal respiratory disease.

Adams County officials issued a health order later that month seeking access to the facility and more information about the patient and anyone with whom they had come into contact. Geo ignored that order and a mid-July request from state health officials for the same information.

Amid pressure from advocates, state officials from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment issued another public health order to Geo last week. The order dropped the prior request for access to the detention center, though it still sought records about the patient and their potential contacts.

In a statement Wednesday, state health department spokeswoman Hope Shuler said the agency was disappointed that legal action was necessary.

“We remain ready to work collaboratively, but cooperation requires GEO to provide access and information required by law,” she wrote. “We hope this action results in prompt compliance so public health officials can complete the investigation and ensure that anyone who may have been exposed receives appropriate follow-up care.”

Washington state and New Jersey have both also filed recent lawsuits against Geo to force the company to allow health inspectors access to its facilities in those states.

Geo Group’s refusal to comply with the order’s deadline — confirmed Tuesday by a state spokeswoman — means the impasse may now only be resolved in a courtroom.

Urged by advocates to take firmer action to investigate the spread of tuberculosis, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment issued the order on Aug. 13 after Geo refused to comply with a June order from Adams County health officials. The state order gives the Colorado Attorney General’s Office authority to sue Geo to force it to comply with the tuberculosis investigation, which seeks details about the detainee diagnosed with TB and any other people who may have come into contact with them.

Hope Shuler, a spokeswoman for the health department, confirmed that Geo had not sent the required information to state officials.

“Public officials must be able to verify the facts, identify people who may have been exposed and ensure they receive appropriate follow-up care,” Shuler wrote in a statement. “GEO has a responsibility not only to the people in its facility, but also to its employees and surrounding community. Its continued refusal to cooperate significantly limits the investigation, but we remain determined to obtain the information needed to protect public health.”

It’s unclear what happens next or on what timeline: Shuler said the health department is “actively coordinating with Adams County, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office and Denver Health TB Clinic on next steps, including legal remedies.”

A spokesman for Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is in California for a trial against the social media company Meta, said the office had no updates as of Tuesday afternoon.

In a statement Tuesday, Geo spokesman Christopher Ferreira did not respond when asked whether the company had complied with the order. He said that there are no active or suspected cases of tuberculosis at the facility.

“Over the past two months, GEO has engaged repeatedly with the Adams County Health Department and other Colorado officials and has provided information to the state as authorized by DHS,” he said, referring to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement. “DHS and (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) remain actively involved in disease-prevention and control measures at (the detention center).”

In an email last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement referred questions about the order to Geo, which the agency contracts to run the detention center.

One person tested positive for tuberculosis in June, health officials have previously said. That person has since been deported, and Adams County officials said the person was believed to have contracted the respiratory illness before entering the facility. Geo undertook its own investigation and has repeatedly said there are no additional active cases of TB within the 1,530-bed detention center.

But Geo and ICE have refused to provide additional information to state or county investigators or grant them access to the Aurora facility to confirm that report or conduct the health investigation that’s required by law. The county issued its own public health order in June, which was ignored.

The state health department then requested more information in mid-July and gave Geo a 48-hour deadline to respond. Geo ignored that request, too, and state health officials’ attempts to work with Geo — outside of another health order — were unsuccessful.

Adams County officials previously told reporters that Geo had stopped communicating with them in late June.

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper visited the Aurora facility Monday and told reporters that Geo staff declined to discuss the tuberculosis situation on advice of their lawyers. He said they also would not indicate whether they intended to comply with the state health order.

“You cannot do an investigation like this in a vacuum,” Hickenlooper said from the sidewalk outside of the facility. “…I’m shocked. I’ve never in my life seen a time where a direct order from the public health authority or a direct order from the state office of public health is ignored.”

If Weiser’s office sues Geo to enforce the order, the ensuing litigation will likely become entangled with another lawsuit between the company and the state.

In June, after Gov. Jared Polis signed a law requiring more regular inspections of the facility, Geo sued, arguing in essence that only the federal government could regulate it. The first hearing in that case came late last month and had influenced officials’ willingness to take additional legal steps to force compliance with the tuberculosis investigation.

State officials in both Washington state and New Jersey have sued Geo after the company blocked health inspectors in those states from accessing its detention centers.

Last month, Geo announced that it had signed a $528.6 million contract with ICE to open a new detention center in Hudson, a small, rural community north of Denver.

The state Department of Public Health and Environment gave Geo Group until Monday, Aug. 17 to provide information to state inspectors so they could complete a tuberculosis investigation that was first launched in June, when a detainee tested positive for the respiratory illness. The latest order does not seek direct access to the 1,530-bed detention center. But it does request a list of individuals with confirmed or suspected cases of tuberculosis identified since June 1, as well as a list of individuals who may have come into contact with the confirmed case, and information about the person who tested positive in June and has since been deported from the U.S.

If Geo does not comply with the order, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser can file a lawsuit to force the company to turn over the requested records. In a statement Thursday afternoon, Weiser said he was “committed to enforcing this public health order and defending Colorado law.”

“CDPHE’s priority is protecting everyone connected to the facility, including detained people, employees, contractors, visitors and the broader community,” CDPHE executive director Jill Hunsaker Ryan said in a separate statement. “We sought to complete this routine investigation collaboratively, just as we would with any other facility in Colorado. Because repeated requests and the county’s public health order have not produced the necessary information, we are taking this additional step to obtain the information needed to protect public health.”

A Geo spokesman deferred questions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to an email late Thursday afternoon.

The order is an escalation of what has become a protracted standoff between health officials and the state’s only immigrant detention center. After a detainee tested positive in June, Adams County health officials requested access to the facility and to records about the case and other possible infections. When that information wasn’t provided, the county issued its own health order.

With Geo refusing to budge, Hunsaker Ryan sent the company a letter in mid-July demanding access within 48 hours. Like Adams County’s order, that request was also rebuffed.

Though an escalation, the order is narrower than what state health officials had sought from Geo just last month, which included physical access to the facility. Miriam Ordoñez Rodriguez, of the American Friends Service Committee, said the order “has close to no teeth.”

“We are appalled and demand (state officials) hold Geo, like any other private company, accountable,” she said in a statement.

Late last month, CDPHE spokeswoman Hope Shuler told The Denver Post that the confirmed TB patient was no longer in the facility. She said Geo had undertaken its own investigation into the case.

“That information, if true, is reassuring, but it remains summary-level, though we are not able to independently verify the information,” Shuler wrote at the time.

Adams County officials previously said that the patient who tested positive for TB appears to have contracted the condition outside of the facility and that the patient denied having symptoms. Federal authorities have repeatedly said there are no active cases of TB in the detention center.

The impasse had been complicated by a lawsuit that Geo filed in early June, before the TB case was confirmed. The lawsuit seeks to invalidate a new state law requiring more frequent detention center inspections, and the first hearing in the case was last month. Adams County health officials said the case had a direct bearing on their ability to enter the facility, suggesting they would not take legal action against Geo until a federal judge had weighed in on the lawsuit.

As the standoff dragged on, immigration advocates have repeatedly urged Gov. Jared Polis and state health officials to issue a health order to force Geo and ICE to comply with the order. Advocates staged a protest outside of the state Capitol on Monday and pressed Hunsaker Ryan, who attended the event, to issue an order.

Hunsaker Ryan told advocates the state had no timeline on filing a public health order but that state officials’ patience was wearing thin. In a town hall earlier this month, state epidemiologist Rachel Herlihy said the impasse was a “uniquely frustrating” situation.

“It����ap not a magic bullet,” Hunsaker Ryan said of a health order, according to a video of her exchange with advocates reviewed by The Denver Post. “So we were just hoping that we could appeal to (Geo’s) better angels and see if they want to come back into partnership with us first.”

Foul odor

As public health officials are still trying to get their hands around the tuberculosis investigation, advocates this week have warned of an alleged new issue in the facility: a foul, natural gas-like smell that filtered into cells starting late last week.

On Tuesday, Monique Sherman of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network said she’d heard about the smell from multiple people inside the facility. She said the smell appeared to be worst at night, when internal doors were closed, and that it was making people inside the facility feel sick.

The source of the smell is unclear. Eric Hurst, spokesman for Aurora Fire and Rescue, said in a statement earlier this week that the department had received three calls about the odor between Saturday and Monday. He said that fire officials had investigated a gaseous odor “a few blocks north” of the detention center on Sunday but couldn’t locate its source. Xcel crews told fire officials that a nearby business had used a cleaning solution that smelled like propane gas.

In a statement Thursday morning, Xcel spokeswoman Lisa Anderson said Xcel crews were at the detention center on Monday because of an “odor complaint.” No natural gas leak was detected, she wrote.

ICE officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the odor. In an earlier , the agency said that the gas leak reports were “false” and “a hoax.”

The City Council in Glenwood Springs, the Roaring Fork Valley destination known for its historic hot springs, voted Thursday night to sue the landlord who leases the property used as a processing facility by after months of pressure from the local community.

The 6-1 vote was met by celebration inside the packed council chambers after dozens spoke out, imploring the council to move forward with the lawsuit.

“For months, we have had rooms like this full of passionate people who plead with us to take action, and it feels like we’re just sitting on our butts doing nothing,” Mayor Pro Tem Erin Zalinski said after voting in favor of the legal action. “We had to wait until we had something tangible and actionable and defensible, so it felt like we weren’t listening and weren’t taking action and we were dying up here…

“Just know our intentions are to represent our community with integrity and in the best way possible with the tools we have available to us, so what felt like negligence was just trying to be purposeful.”

Wedged between a chiropractor’s office and a gym at 100 Midland Ave., the ICE processing center is used by federal agents to hold immigrants before they are sent to the state’s only large-scale detention facility in Aurora.

For many in the community, the ICE operation was under the radar until the Trump administration’s deportation push prompted people to start asking questions about what was going on inside the building.

After hearing from people detained in the holding facility, filing open records requests with the city and teaching themselves the intricacies of zoning codes, locals like attorney Claire Noone began uncovering information about ICE’s operations in Glenwood Springs and sharing it with residents who demanded accountability from their elected officials.

The inconspicuous facility had been operating for more than 20 years, Noone said she learned at the beginning of the year. In a decades-old agreement, the city granted use of the facility as a detention center, but agents could not hold immigrants for more than 12 hours.

Community members listened to detainees’ accounts of being held longer than that, and found federal records to back that up, which they presented to the city’s planning and zoning commission. The commission went against staff recommendations and that enabled ICE to detain immigrants at that address.

An unidentified representative from the denied that immigrants were being held at the Glenwood Springs facility for more than 12 hours. The agency said immigrants held at the strip-mall location are “quickly processed and transferred to permanent housing at a detention facility.”

Legal avenue opens up

The revocation of the special-use permit stripped the facility of its ability to hold immigrants. Neither the , ICE nor the property owner appealed the city’s revocation within the allotted time limit, Glenwood Springs City Attorney Karl Hanlon said.

The city determined ICE violated the special-use permit revocation on July 24 when the Glenwood Springs Fire Department responded to a call at the location, alerting city officials that the building was still being used to detain immigrants, “making the question of whether to pursue judicial enforcement ripe for consideration,” Hanlon said in a Monday memo to the City Council.

Hanlon advised the elected body to pursue legal avenues as a means of enforcement.

During Thursday’s City Council meeting, Hanlon recommended the council sue the property owner, Jeff Gillespie, in state court over the zoning violation rather than immediately targeting the federal government.

Gillespie operates JG Housing Solutions LLC, which owns the property. Gillespie could not immediately be reached for comment.

The lawsuit does not hinge on the question of whether ICE should be operating at the Glenwood Springs strip mall, Hanlon reminded the council, asking the members to take their feelings about the federal agency out of the equation. Instead, the legal maneuver focuses on whether the City Council can enforce the existing zoning code violation.

Hanlon said the city had a higher likelihood of success suing the landlord in state court, although he admitted it’s still a long shot.

“We’re in uncharted territory here,” Hanlon said during the council meeting.�� “As an attorney, intellectually, this is an interesting area to practice in. But I have to recognize the law is not necessarily on our side.”

Hanlon predicted ICE would claim the zoning permit revocation interfered with a core function of the federal government, trumping state laws.

Hanlon said he would argue Glenwood Springs isn’t saying ICE can’t enforce the administration’s immigration laws. The city is simply saying ICE can’t violate the zoning regulations by detaining people at the strip-mall facility.

“I would like to be the person who tells you I’m going to get you everything you ever dreamed of,” Hanlon said. “But these are tough cases.”

‘The building was never a secret’

Thursday’s vote is the culmination of months of pressure from the Glenwood Springs community.

In November, Noone got a call from a single mother who was detained at 100 Midland Ave., separated from her young children and in need of language translation. Noone arrived to translate with her 2-year-old on her hip and couldn’t imagine being separated from her baby like the woman in the facility. The lawyer wasn’t allowed inside the building and became curious about what the government was doing.

After months of questions and records requests, Noone discovered that ICE was never granted a final certificate of occupancy allowing the agency to operate in the Glenwood Springs facility — an error from the early 2000s that the city described in a

After inspecting the building this year, Glenwood Springs granted the building a certificate of occupancy, but immigrants were still not permitted to be held there for more than 12 hours. The city confirmed that federal documents showed the facility detained immigrants for longer than 12 hours multiple times.

Community members continued to show up to city meetings demanding their leaders stand up to ICE and hold the federal agency accountable for its violation of the city’s zoning code.

Glenwood Springs residents said during Thursday’s meeting that they had been waved off by the city for months until proof the community gathered about the building’s purpose and violations was undeniable.

“This building was never a secret,” said Ashley Stahl. “Our immigrant neighbors have known exactly what happened at this building for years. They were right first and nobody listened. What took us 20 years wasn’t finding out what was happening, it was listening.”

Hanlon, the city attorney, said Glenwood Springs was gearing up for a tough legal fight that would likely take years and, potentially, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

“If little old Glenwood Springs can do this, anybody can,” Stahl said.