Manuel went after the dog in their Colorado Springs neighborhood. A stranger ran with him, trying to help, and when they reached the startled animal, the dog bit the stranger.

Law enforcement showed up. Manuel was given a court hearing for the dog bite.

The case was later dismissed. But when Manuel left the courthouse in September, he said two cars followed him. The 23-year-old stopped for gas and was quickly surrounded by federal agents from .

The undocumented immigrant, who had come with his parents from Mexico when he was 3 years old and had never been in trouble with the law before the dog bite, was detained in the state’s only immigration facility in Aurora for the next two months.

“It was not very pleasant,” he said. He spoke on condition that he only be identified by his middle name to speak candidly about his experiences with the federal government. “I’ve never been in trouble before. It really takes a toll on you mentally.”

As federal authorities pursue President Donald Trump’s goal of arresting and deporting millions of immigrants without legal status, they moved last summer to block longtime U.S. residents from requesting bail in immigration cases, and they have kept others, who would have been released under previous administrations, detained indefinitely.

Caught in that cycle, Manuel was only released after his attorneys filed — and a judge granted — a habeas petition in federal court.

Once a technically complicated legal rarity used to challenge improper incarcerations, habeas corpus petitions have become the predominant avenue for immigrants seeking release from detentions that increasingly end only with a deportation order.

With bail sharply curtailed and other avenues of release all but closed off, Colorado has seen an explosion of habeas cases: In the first 100 days of 2026, more than 370 detained immigrants have asked federal judges to either grant them bail hearings denied by ICE, or to release them altogether. The surge is an unprecedented increase from 2025’s total of 104 and 2024’s total of a bare dozen.

In his first 19 years as a lawyer, Denver immigration attorney Hans Meyer said he’d filed six habeas cases. In the past six months, his firm filed 60. When ICE first moved to withhold bail from a broad swath of detainees last summer, few people in detention were aware that filing habeas petitions was an option.

“The first three months, very few people understood the issue,” Meyer said. “For the next three months, people might know it was an option, but didn’t know much more. But now people in detention always go to habeas first.”

So significant is the crush that attorneys from the , which oversees ICE, have stepped in to help federal prosecutors deal with the cases. The highest-ranking federal prosecutor in the state, U.S. Attorney Peter McNeilly, has also personally handled some of the petitions. It’s the only time this century that a U.S. attorney has made personal appearances on such cases, The Denver Post found.

The declined to comment for this story. Jeffrey Colwell, the clerk for the , confirmed The Post’s case data.

“It does put a significant burden on our judges and chambers,” he said. “It’s 300-plus cases that we haven’t historically seen.”

In an unsigned statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it abides by court orders and was unsurprised by the habeas surge, claiming “no lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States.”

Peering inside the ‘deportation machine’

Habeas petitions have been a part of American law since the nation’s founding, and they’ve been used in immigration proceedings in past years, too.

They’re used generally to challenge someone’s detention or incarceration, though not necessarily the underlying case that led to that confinement. Immigrants who are released or given bail hearings through habeas cases are still subject to deportation proceedings — like Manuel, whose immigration case remains underway.

But these petitions offer an avenue out of detention, and their prominence is surging, particularly as — which fall under the authority of the federal government — bend to the Trump administration’s goals.

The assumption that immigration courts can resolve detention questions “no longer holds,” the . Instead, immigration lawyers are taking their arguments out of immigration hearings and into federal court, where appointed judges can’t be removed on a whim. Indeed, they’ve shown a “striking willingness to intervene” in detention cases, the association wrote.

Because habeas cases are complicated — but the need for them is now enormous — immigration attorneys have also worked to train more lawyers on how to file them. Laura Lunn, of the , said she’s hosting a “massive training” at the end of April with the to bring non-immigration lawyers up to speed on writing and filing habeas petitions.

For this story, The Post reviewed scores of habeas petitions and hundreds of pages of court filings, along with publicly available arrest and court data detailing ICE practices. If the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is a “deportation machine,” as Meyer describes it, then the habeas petitions provide a glimpse into that machine’s inner workings. The filings describe both how immigrants end up in detention as well as the efforts that Trump officials have undertaken to keep them detained.

One man was arrested at an Ace Hardware. A Colombian father was arrested in Lakewood the same day he and his wife were set to close on a house. Several said they were arrested after they showed up for routine immigration check-ins at ICE offices in Colorado. A man from Guinea arrived at his case worker’s office to have his ankle monitor removed and found ICE agents waiting for him instead.

One man showed up for work at the , where he was directed to wait for a new ID badge in a side room, his lawyers later alleged. ICE agents came instead.

Upending nearly three decades of federal law, Manuel and many of those who’ve filed habeas petitions were denied bail during their detention proceedings. That about-face is the primary cause of the habeas crush: Since the mid-1990s, federal immigration authorities and the court system that oversees them would release immigrants who had no criminal record and were arrested within America’s interior.

Under the Trump administration, however, ICE and the courts have moved to keep those immigrants in custody, denying them bail under a separate federal law previously reserved for people arrested at the border.

The that ICE is now employing to block many immigrants from bail also requires mandatory detention — which attorneys argue is the point. Detention centers are like prisons, and 65% of immigrants arrested in Colorado over the past year have never been convicted of a crime. They’re likely not used to facilities like the one in Aurora, where the lights stay on at all times and the food, Manuel said, is often soggy or inedible.

Without access to bail, many detainees choose to leave: Aurora has seen a jump in deportation orders in the past year, including an unprecedented surge in immigrants asking for immediate removal.

Surging cases tied to size of Aurora facility

The increase in Colorado habeas filings is also partially driven by the size of the Aurora detention center, which can hold more than 1,500 people at any one time. It’s one of the largest facilities in the United States and attracts arrestees from across the country — meaning more people seeking release.

Attorneys for a Maryland man said he was arrested after ICE checked license plates in his neighborhood and discovered he had a “derogatory immigration history.” A teenager in New York, brought to the U.S. as a minor, was arrested after he got into a fender-bender in a snowstorm. Several men were arrested during traffic stops in Florida. All eventually were brought to the detention center in Aurora.

The filings detail myriad other ways the Trump administration has sought to keep immigrants detained.

When bail is granted, ICE appeals, prolonging detention for 90 more days. Some people with years-old removal orders have been re-arrested. For years, deportations could be indefinitely delayed if an immigrant successfully argued that they’d be tortured or persecuted if they were returned home. They would often be released and told to check in regularly with federal authorities.

Now, however, ICE will hold those individuals — who are often religious or political minorities, or members of the LGBTQ+ community — while they try to find another country to send them.

The Post reviewed more than a dozen habeas petitions filed in recent months by those immigrants detained in Colorado. Several detainees were transgender and feared they would be harmed or killed if they were returned home. One gay man from a country in North Africa was nearly deported to Cameroon, , before his habeas petition was granted.

If another country won’t take the detainees, then they languish in detention.

For those cases, as well as for detainees seeking bail, “habeas is the only way that most folks are getting out of detention, and more folks are being both arrested and held in detention than ever before,” said Shira Hereld, an attorney with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.

Indeed, immigration arrests in Colorado surged nearly 300% during Trump’s first year in office. The Aurora detention center has also flexed to its maximum capacity, and by the end of 2025, the facility regularly housed more than 1,400 people at a time.

Federal judges push back

As the flood of habeas petitions washed into federal courtrooms in Denver, judges have repeatedly rejected ICE’s effort to rewrite federal law and have ordered bail hearings or the immediate release of immigrants. They’ve also ordered the release of some people held indefinitely while ICE searches for a country to take them.

Of the more than 100 habeas petitions that have already been closed this year, a federal judge rejected only one, The Post found, while a few dozen more were duplicates or were dismissed voluntarily.

One attorney wrote to a Colorado judge that ICE’s position has been rejected more than 1,500 times nationwide. In their petitions, some attorneys have taken to listing the individual habeas cases that the Trump administration has lost, a tally that stretches over multiple pages.

In its unsigned statement, the Homeland Security Department said it was “applying the law as written. If an immigration judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.”

In January, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote that “the court has concluded, many times over,” that ICE’s interpretation was incorrect. In March, U.S. District Judge Regina Rodriguez granted another petition and wrote that she was “once more (joining) the chorus of courts in this district and around the nation that have overwhelmingly rejected (ICE’s) position.”

“Sometimes it is difficult to arrive at conclusions or resolve issues, due, perhaps, to an issue’s complexity, or the lack of guidance available to help resolve it,” U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney wrote in another case from January. “Neither circumstance is present here.”

Still, the lower-court rulings have not shifted ICE’s posture, and immigrants arrested in Colorado are still routinely denied bail.

A class-action lawsuit challenging the practice, filed by Meyer, the Denver immigration lawyer, and the , earned an initial favorable ruling but is now awaiting a higher court’s intervention. A judge in California struck down ICE’s new bail policy in December, but that ruling has also been held up as a higher court considers it. Another federal appeals court has backed the policy.

The regional rulings point to a prolonged legal battle.

“This is an alley knife fight,” Meyer said. “It’s going to play out circuit court by circuit court, and then end up at the Supreme Court.”

Until the Supreme Court weighs in, “we’re all running around like chickens with our heads cut off every day,” Lunn said, “because the law changes every day depending on which court rules. And we’re having to bring individual challenges for each and every client when the fundamental issue is these massive policies that impact everybody across the country.”

‘A dream that ended up becoming a nightmare’

In the meantime, the number of habeas cases filed in Colorado will only grow. For people like Javier Campos, it offers the only way out.

In July, ICE agents pulled Campos over in Aurora and arrested him. He spent nearly 100 days in the Aurora detention center before he was released last fall. He lost weight because the food was inedible, he said in an interview. He struggled with Bell’s palsy, a neurological condition that causes paralysis in facial muscles.

Through a translator, Campos described his experience in the immigration system as “disgraceful.” A citizen of Mexico, he’d been in the U.S. for 30 years. He worked in the construction industry. He had a wife, and four children who were U.S. citizens. In another time, detention would have been unlikely, and bail a given.

He was initially granted bail in August — $10,000, a sum far higher than what was typical in previous years, immigration lawyers said. Attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security immediately appealed, blocking Campos’ release for three more months. That prompted the habeas filing.

He was finally released shortly before Thanksgiving, but his immigration case continues.

“A lot of the people would just give up their rights and leave because it gets really difficult to not have money to pay for an attorney,” Campos said. “A lot of people would just give up and leave and be deported. It was very sad seeing the things that went on there because a lot of guys came here for a dream that ended up becoming a nightmare — such a bad nightmare that it would cause stress and nightmares we couldn’t wake up from.”

Jean Torres-Ramon, 22, and Newman Castillo Delgado, 23, pleaded guilty to robbery and brandishing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, federal officials said Thursday.

Torres-Ramon and Delgado are two of at least seven suspects facing charges in the June 2024 jewelry store at 5108 W. 38th Ave. in Denver’s West Highland neighborhood.

The group is accused of entering the store, aiming guns at employees, beating employees with weapons and stealing nearly $4 million in gold and jewelry, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release.

An indictment in a different federal case alleges the robbery was approved by Tren de Aragua leaders to enrich the gang.

Torres-Ramon was sentenced to 235 months, or nearly 20 years in prison, and Castillo Delgado was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Both men must pay $3.9 million in court-ordered restitution.

Attorneys for the men could not immediately be reached for comment.

Five other suspects in the robbery, Oswaldo Lozada-Solis, Jesus Daniel Lara Del Toro, Derek Alexander Dun-Vargas, Briley Ballera-Farias and Edwuimar Nazareth Colina-Romero, still have open federal cases, according to court records.

, an Englewood-based firm that manufactures and sells medical devices used for pain management and rehabilitation, entered into an agreement Tuesday with the U.S. Department of Justice to avoid prosecution.

The company, as part of the deal, agreed to pay between $5 million and $12.5 million in penalties — the final tally will depend on its earnings and profit during the settlement period — and will forfeit millions of dollars in unpaid claims.

Zynex admitted to participating in a conspiracy to commit health care fraud, securities fraud, mail fraud and other violations, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Rhode Island announced in a .

The agreement comes a month after a federal grand jury indicted two former top Zynex executives who allegedly spearheaded the years-long scheme.

Zynex, in its deal with the government, also admitted to collecting more than $873 million for its products, including more than $600 million for supplies, “the vast majority of which were the result of fraud,” investigators said.

Have you used Zynex for medical devices? We want to talk to you.

The company acknowledged that it shipped and billed for medically unnecessary supplies in excess quantities and misled investors who were unaware of the fraudulent billing practices.

Zynex agreed to implement enhanced compliance and corporate governance reforms "designed to prevent future misconduct," the DOJ said, and will cooperate with the government's ongoing investigations.

“This resolution addresses the seriousness of the fraud committed by Zynex while recognizing the substantial turnaround in conduct implemented under new management,” U.S. Attorney Charles C. Calenda said in the news release.

The company, in a subsequent , said the resolution "represents the fulfillment of the commitments we made as a new management team when we arrived in August 2025: to break from the past, rebuild the company as compliant-by-design and create a new future for the company, its customers and employees."

Zynex leaders say they have completely overhauled their billing and supply replenishment practices, and enacted new marketing policies to ensure the company remains compliant with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The appointment fills an empty spot on the seven-member court left by the departure of Justice Melissa Hart, who retired Jan. 5 after taking a months-long personal leave that began in late October.

Blanco, , has served as a district court judge for nine years. A graduate of Colorado State University, the University of Colorado and Duke Law School, Blanco previously worked as a criminal defense attorney and as an attorney representing children in dependency and neglect proceedings — work that was “deeply meaningful” and allowed her to see firsthand the impact of court decisions, she wrote in her application.

“I step into this role humbled by the weight of the responsibility and inspired by the promise of our democracy,” Blanco said during a news conference Tuesday. “The law is not an abstraction. It is the shield that protects the vulnerable, the guardrails that restrain power, and the enduring promise that justice does not depend on who you are, where you come from or what resources you have.”

Polis cited Blanco’s “strong track record of innovation” as one of the traits that set her apart from other applicants for the job.

“I was looking for somebody who would be a strong operator, somebody who showed an interest, yes, of course, in the judicial work of writing decisions and making decisions, but went above and beyond that,” Polis told reporters.

Blanco has, for the last half-decade, served as the chief judge for Larimer and Jackson counties, where she co-founded a special competency court designed to support defendants who are mentally ill or mentally disabled.

The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Blanco wrote in her application that the courts’ handling of her parents’ divorce and custody case when she was a child still impacts her approach on the bench.

“Ultimately, the court awarded my father all marital assets while granting my mother custody. My childhood was split between scarcity during the week and privilege on weekends,” she wrote. “This decision shaped my identity as a jurist, deepening my respect for the law and the courts’ power to shape lives.”

Chief Justice Monica Márquez welcomed Blanco to the court on Tuesday, noting that the justices had a “big pile of work” ready for her.

Newly appointed justices serve two-year terms before going before voters for retention and an additional 10 years on the bench. The Colorado Supreme Court issues roughly 60 to 100 opinions annually, and in most situations, the justices have the discretion to choose whether or not to take up a case.

The nominating committee also put forward two other finalists: Andrea Wang, a deputy solicitor general at the Colorado Attorney General’s Office who largely handles water law, and Christopher Zenisek, a longtime district court judge in Jefferson and Gilpin counties.

“We are taking names, we are making lists,” Crow said in an interview.

Crow, who represents an Aurora-centered district in Congress, said he had still not received any information from the Department of Justice or the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. He learned through news reports Tuesday night that a grand jury had rejected federal prosecutors’ attempt to charge him and his colleagues over a video the lawmakers released to U.S. troops last year.

In the November video, the Democrats — all of whom served in the military or intelligence services — told military members to follow existing protocol and not obey commands that would violate the law.

It’s unclear what charges prosecutors sought to bring against the lawmakers. Crow said he was “appalled” when he saw the news reports, and he and three of the other lawmakers targeted in the probe accused the Trump administration Wednesday of weaponizing the Justice Department against the president’s political enemies.

“But that is the moment that we are in,” Crow told The Denver Post. “And I think every American is starting to see that, and the tide is turning.”

He said he wasn’t aware of any similar attempts to indict members of Congress for political speech.

The Justice Department had opened an investigation into the lawmakers’ comments, and Crow said he was contacted by the FBI and the department late last year for an interview. He has not been interviewed.

After the video’s release, President Donald Trump accused the lawmakers of sedition that was “punishable by death,” and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth censured Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot and astronaut, for his role in the video. Hegseth has also sought to demote Kelly from his retired rank of captain.

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On Wednesday, Crow’s lawyer sent a letter to Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., instructing her to preserve records from the investigation into the lawmakers. The attorney, Abbe David Lowell, also warned Pirro that “further attempts to pursue these baseless allegations would be actionable.”

“The baseless and absurd allegations by Donald Trump, followed by your carrying out of the president’s political retribution campaign, has already gone too far and are evidence of yet another abuse of power directed to those who dare speak out and criticize this Administration,” Lowell wrote.

Pirro’s office did not respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday afternoon.

that a dance photographer, who worked for Pirro when she was a county prosecutor in the 1990s, was one of the federal prosecutors who’d sought to secure the indictment. He joined the office after a mass exodus of staff, according to Bloomberg.

At a news conference earlier Wednesday, Crow and the three other participating lawmakers — U.S. Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania and Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire — declined to say what next steps they planned to take or on what timeline.

“Actually, that’s a ball that’s in the Trump administration’s court,” Crow said. “We’ve been very clear about that position, and it needs to stop. If it doesn’t stop, then we’ll take all necessary options.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The indictments allege that Ashley Marie Stevens and Wesam Yassin separately participated in the transportation program and fraudulently collected seven-figure payouts — more than $3.3 million for Yassin alone, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Colorado. The two drivers, who ran separate companies, allegedly fabricated rides for appointments that didn’t exist. Stevens is accused of billing for rides for her husband while he was incarcerated, and Yassin allegedly billed $165,000 for driving a patient who was dead.

Both Stevens, of Mesa County, and Yassin, of Douglas County, were charged with multiple counts of wire fraud, money laundering and health care fraud for their participation in the driving service.

The program pays drivers to ferry Medicaid patients to and from doctor’s appointments, but it became a haven for fraud in 2022 and 2023, after state officials increased the service’s reimbursement rates. State officials told The Denver Post last month that an estimated $25 million was lost in the broader fraud.

Yassin’s indictment was still sealed Tuesday evening. In a statement, federal officials alleged that Yassin billed Medicaid for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rides that never occurred between March 2022 and October 2023. She raked in $283,000 from rides for just one patient, most of which was paid to Yassin after the patient had already died.

Yassin allegedly used the proceeds to buy a home and furnishings, along with luxury vehicles, jewelry and cosmetic surgery. She was released on bond earlier this week, according to court records.

Stevens billed the state for more than $1 million between July 2022 and February 2023, according to the indictment. More than $400,000 came from rides she provided to herself or to her family members, for which there were “very few” actual medical appointments, federal authorities allege.

The trips included rides for her husband, who was incarcerated during some of the time when Stevens claimed she was driving him to the doctor. Another $150,000 was billed for rides that either never took place or were for trips that didn’t involve Medicaid services.

She was also paid more than $450,000 for rides that were at least 400 miles long, authorities allege. From east to west, Colorado is roughly 380 miles wide. Stevens allegedly used the proceeds from the scheme for travel and to buy a luxury car.

Stevens was already in Mesa County jail when she was indicted in December, according to court records. She remains in custody.

Yassin and Stevens are the first drivers to face any criminal repercussions for allegedly bilking the program. The fraud was in its heyday in 2023, state officials previously told The Post: A rash of new drivers entered the program then, shortly after the state increased the rate paid to transportation companies. Unscrupulous drivers, who were paid on a per member, per mile basis, allegedly packed their cars with patients and drove them across the state.

Some targeted homeless people in Pueblo and Colorado Springs, driving them to methadone clinics in metro Denver. Some patients were bribed with cash or drugs, state officials have said. Kim Bimestefer, the executive director of the state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, told lawmakers last month that the fraud scheme was “international.”

A federal grand jury in Rhode Island indicted Thomas Sandgaard, 67, a Castle Rock resident, and Anna Lucsok, 39, a Denver resident, with conspiracy to commit health care fraud, securities fraud and mail fraud, among other violations, the U.S. Attorney’s Office .

The pair served as the chief executive officer and chief operating officer of Englewood-based Zynex Inc., respectively, a company that manufactures and sells medical devices used for pain management and rehabilitation.

From 2017 through 2025, Sandgaard and Lucsok “orchestrated a scheme to fraudulently obtain millions of dollars from government and private health care payors and patients, and to defraud investors in Zynex by concealing that the company’s billings and revenues were driven by fraud,” according to the indictment.

The Colorado executives collected more than $873 million for its products, including more than $600 million for supplies, investigators said. The company shipped patients excessive volumes of devices each month, using these fraudulent billings to artificially inflate the company’s financial reporting and its stock price, the government alleged.

When financial journalists began asking questions about Zynex’s business practices, Sandgaard hired someone to disrupt the reporters’ lives, the indictment states. These efforts included signing up reporters for therapy sessions and stating that they suffered from erectile dysfunction, and sending female underwear to a reporter’s spouse with a thank-you card.

Zynex filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December. The company listed more than $45 million in assets and more than $86 million in total debts.

The company, in a statement Thursday, said the board of directors removed Sandgaard as director and chair of the board following the indictment and has worked with the Department of Justice and other regulators on the resolution of ongoing investigations.

Over the past six months, Zynex has executed a “complete overhaul of its leadership, compliance program, billing practices and operational controls,” said John Bibb, the company’s chief legal officer. “Under entirely new leadership, we have delivered on our commitment to the highest integrity in our business practices and implemented rigorous compliance oversight.”

Sandgaard, a dual citizen of the United States and Denmark, previously owned the southeast London football club Charlton Athletic. He also owns a professional hockey team in Denmark, according to his .

Lucsok is a dual citizen of the United States and Ukraine, according to prosecutors.

Colorado must act swiftly to triple-check that the federal dollars going out the door for programs like childcare, food pantries and cash assistance are reaching their intended targets and not subject to abuse.

However, we disagree vehemently with President Donald Trump’s attempt to freeze federal funding for Colorado and a handful of other states with zero evidence of the type of fraud we are seeing in Minnesota and Mississippi.

For years, the media has reported on fraud cases prosecuted in Minnesota by federal investigators who began their probes under President Joe Biden’s administration. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis first charged 47 defendants with stealing money from the child nutrition program. From there, the scheme began to unravel and prosecutors discovered a network of fraud.

“From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” Joseph Thompson, then acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said at the time, according . “Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network.”

The scale of the fraud in Minnesota dwarfs the roughly $100 million welfare scandal that rocked Mississippi from 2016 to 2019, embroiling former NFL quarterback Brett Favre in a civil lawsuit and sullying the state’s reputation for oversight.

If such abuses are also taking place in Colorado, then our elected officials, prosecutors and law enforcement must root them out swiftly. Every dollar stolen from these programs is a dollar snatched from the hands of those truly in need. And in an increasingly expensive America, we know that these federal programs can be the difference between homelessness and stability for women and children.

On Jan. 6, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would freeze $10 billion of funding headed to Colorado, Minnesota, New York, California and Illinois for the Child Care and Development Fund, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and the Social Services Block Grant. Oddly absent from the list was Mississippi.

In Colorado, TANF provides financial support to 47,000 children living in poverty, while the Child Care and Development funding keeps 27,600 kids in child care for working families, according to The Denver Post’s Meg Wingerter. Cutting off those programs would harm Coloradans from inner cities to rural counties. Whether it’s farmers down on their luck waiting for tariff pressures to ease on our Eastern Plains or service workers in the mountains struggling to get by during a historically dry winter with low tourism, these dollars keep families in their homes and kids in quality care.

Fortunately, Attorney General Phil Weiser was able to join with other states to block the Trump administration’s actions. U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian of the Southern District of New York granted a temporary restraining order against the administration’s actions.

Colorado must be proactive, however, and provide taxpayers with evidence of oversight that would prevent fraud like that which has occurred in other states.

We know that Colorado is not immune.

In September of 2024, a federal grand jury indicted seven people for conspiring to defraud Medicare and Colorado Medicaid through a series of kickbacks and bribes to get referrals that could have led to more than $40 million in false claims. The outcome of the criminal case is still pending.

Coloradans can help by reporting suspected fraud to the . If you see something — outrageous prices billed to insurance, referrals for unnecessary services, etc — say something.

America’s safety net systems are too critical to shutter overnight, and too critical to allow waste, fraud and abuse to siphon assistance away from those in need.

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Austin Ryan Lauless coerced, exploited and threatened at least 84 children on social media into producing thousands of sexually explicit images and videos between 2019 and 2023, according to a news release from the Indiana U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The victims include children between the ages of 13 and 17 from nearly every state and at least five other countries, federal officials said in the release. Investigators believe there may still be more undiscovered victims.

Lauless pleaded guilty in September to 13 counts of sexual exploitation of a child, five counts of sex trafficking of a minor, two counts of advertising child sexual abuse material and possession of child sexual abuse material, court records show.

He was sentenced Wednesday to 84 years in federal prison, which will be followed by a lifetime of supervised release, according to court records.

Lauless posed as “Cason Fredrickson” and “APOPHIS” on the internet, pretending to be a teenager from New York and other cities, federal officials said. He used photos from public Instagram pages to conceal his real identity: a man in his late 20s who lived in hotels and motels across Colorado and Texas.

The man misrepresented his age, identity, background and likeness to groom minors and create a false sense of safety, federal prosecutors said. He also used voice modulators and third-party image and video apps to edit content and keep up his disguise.

“He feigned romantic interest in victims, told them they were attractive and pretended to be in online relationships,” the news release stated. “He purchased items for many victims through Amazon — including fishnet stockings, sexual devices and customized t-shirts — which he instructed them to wear while producing sexually explicit material.”

Lauless threatened to publicly release the images and videos if his victims failed to comply with his demands or if they tried to tell their parents or law enforcement, federal prosecutors said.

He sold child sex abuse material at least 141 times and admitted to federal investigators that his collection included thousands of photos and videos, including videos of sadomasochistic abuse and bestiality.

“This case represents one of the most egregious forms of exploitation the FBI investigates,” Special Agent in Charge Timothy J. O’Malley of the FBI’s Indianapolis field office said in a statement. “This was not an isolated crime — it was a nationwide and international campaign of exploitation.”

The case was prosecuted as part of , a national initiative from the U.S. Department of Justice that focuses on battling child sex exploitation and abuse.

Anyone who believes they were, or who believes they know someone who was, a victim of Lauless should contact their local FBI office, call the FBI tip line at 1-800-225-5324 or submit information online at .

Charlyna Butterworth, 29, took a deal and pleaded guilty to one count of creating and one count of distributing child sexual abuse material, according to federal court records.

The deal dropped additional charges of producing, distributing and possessing child sexual abuse material from her case, court records show.

Between November 2023 and January 2024, Butterworth repeatedly abused three children under the age of five while they were entrusted to her care, and created sexual material of the abuse, according to court documents.

United States District Judge Gordon Gallagher sentenced Butterworth in November to 25 years for producing the videos and images and 11 years for distributing them, court records show. The sentences will be served consecutively.

“This is a serious sentence for a serious crime,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado Peter McNeilly said in a . “I am grateful that this individual is no longer in a position to harm another child.”

The case was prosecuted as part of Project Safe Childhood, an initiative launched by the U.S. Department of Justice in May 2006 to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse.

This is a developing story and may be updated.