The door to U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans’ (R-CO) office in Greeley was locked Friday morning when Jen Montes, standing in front of 30 people, delivered an envelope full of petitions opposing a proposal to open a jail for immigrants in Evans’ House district.
Before Montes slipped the petitions through the mail slot into Evans’ dark office, Gina McAffee, the coordinator of the Colorado Immigrant Partnership, stood in front of the crowd and recited through a bullhorn four questions she’d hoped to ask Evans or his staff — if the office had been open.
“Do you agree with ICE targeting non-criminals?” asked McAfee on a mound of grass in front of the office door. “Since over 70% of the people who are currently detained have committed no crimes.”
“Gabe, do you agree with masked men separating children from their parents right now. It’s happening all over Colorado. It’s horrible,” continued McAfee, as the crowd chanted, “Shame, Shame.”
“Gabe, do you agree with ICE abducting immigrants from courthouses and ICE check-ins? These are the people who are in the process of coming to the United States the right way, whatever that is.
“… And Gabe, do you agree with ICE hunting down families instead of gang members? That’s happening right now.”
Evans’ office didn’t respond to a request from the Colorado Times Recorder to answer the four questions above. Also unanswered was the question of why Evans’ Greeley office was closed on a Friday morning. (FedEx notices on the office door had accumulated starting on Monday, according to the dates on the stickers.).
Evans Backs ICE Jail in His District and Mass Deportations
Evans’ support for Trump’s mass deportation policy, which aims to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the U.S. regardless of how long they’ve been in the country, doesn’t appear to be wavering. The congressman, whose district lies mostly north and east of Denver, voted for the Big Beautiful Bill, which funded Trump’s mass deportation program.
And Evans supports ICE’s proposal to open the Hudson detention center, which is part of the mass deportation effort.
Asked on a conservative radio show this summer what he thought of having an ICE detention facility “right near your backyard” in the town of Hudson, Evans responded that “we’ve got to have these facilities.”
“That’s right in my district. I know right where it’s at,” replied Evans when asked about the proposal during an Aug. 13 KNUS interview with Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams, who was substituting for host Dan Caplis. “And look, we go back to the numbers that we got from ICE last year, when a letter was written asking how many people that we know about are illegally present in the United States and have committed other crimes, and the answer that came back was about 660,000 people illegally present in the United States with criminal convictions. … We’ve still got a long ways to go to be able to find these drug dealers, these cartels, these gang bangers, these people that are illegally in our country and committing other heinous crimes to, again, include as of last summer, thirteen thousand convicted murderers. So we’ve got to have the facilities to be able to, when we find these people, detain them and not do what the Biden administration did, which was just turn them loose back into the community with the court date and hope they show up.”
In fact, the Biden administration arrested immigrants with criminal convictions, but unlike Trump, it did not detain those with no criminal convictions, letting their cases be resolved in court.
Evans’ figures cannot be verified because ICE doesn’t provide evidence backing up its estimate for the number of immigrants with criminal convictions who are living in the U.S.
But multiple fact checkers and researchers, like the Immigration Data Project, have shown that most of the immigrants arrested by Trump’s ICE agents this year do not have criminal convictions. A June CATO Institute report states that 65% of detainees had no criminal convictions, and 93% had no violent convictions. Seventy-three percent of Latino Voters in Colorado believe ICE arrests people who shouldn’t be detained. Forty percent of the voters in Evans’ Congressional District 8, which he won by fewer than 2,500 votes, are Latino.
Asked to respond to Evans’ claim that an ICE jail is needed in his district to detain criminal immigrants, McAfee said, “There’s already an immigrant detention facility in Aurora, and it is full right now of people who have mostly committed no crimes. And the data is not there to support that immigrants are criminals.”
“They’re Your Neighbors”
About 1,500 people, mostly from zip codes around Greeley and Boulder, signed the Change.org petition, launched by Montes three months ago, “to stand with our immigrant neighbors and say NO to the Hudson Detention Center.” It is one of six potential jails in Colorado that could be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to records obtained by the ACLU of Colorado. It was last leased by the GEO Group to house inmates in 2014.
“What we’ve seen is, it’s not gang bangers; they’re your neighbors. This just causes more fear,” said Montes, who launched the petition and is the Immigrant Partnership team leader for Greeley and Weld County.
Immigrant Teacher, Father, Children Arrested in CO
Widely-publicized stories continue to emerge in Colorado about ICE officers using its jails to hold immigrants without criminal histories, leading to criticism that ICE uses its detention centers to push immigrants, even if they were arrested without having a criminal background, to ask to be sent to their home countries instead of having to endure lengthy and traumatic periods in jail.
This month, an immigrant, whom ICE agents thought was someone else, was arrested with his two children, 12- and 15-years-old, as he drove them to school in Durango. The three were then transported to an ICE jail in Texas, where the children — separated from their mother — said they were abused physically and emotionally. On Wednesday, advocates announced that the trauma of the arrest and detention led the family to decide to voluntarily return to Colombia, even though they were legal asylum seekers who were waiting for their court date. They originally sought refuge in the United States because the mother was tortured and her former husband was assassinated.
A Douglas County school teacher, who ICE sent to the same jail in Texas, asked last week to be returned to Peru. Her school has stated that she had a work permit through 2029, but she and her family were nonetheless arrested after a routine asylum hearing in October. The detention and arrest had been “terrible” emotionally, the teacher wrote in an email to the school community.
“We’re Here for Them”
Longtime Greeley resident Alex Ward attended the rally to support her Latino neighbors, she told the Colorado Times Recorder after the rally.
“I’m out here today because I’ve lived in this community for almost a decade now, and I have a lot of Latino neighbors, and there’s a lot of Latino people in this community,” said Ward. “It’s important to show that we’re here for them, and we don’t support them being kidnapped, functionally.”
Asked why she came to the rally, Nancy Mau said, “I want to be everywhere I can to make a difference and support people also trying to make a difference and get through to politicians who need to hear the message that we don’t want a fascist country or to see brown people locked up.”
At the end of last month, Evans made an unannounced appearance at an event, promoted as a “community town hall” and hosted by the LIBRE Initiative and AFP Colorado, both conservative advocacy groups, at the Northglenn Recreation Center.
The Libre Initiative’s Colorado Strategic Director Angel Merlos told the Colorado Times Recorder that his organization doesn’t have a position on ICE detention facilities, like the one proposed for Weld County.
The door to Evans’ Greeley office on Friday.
Correction: 11/24/25 This article was updated to state that Evans made an unannounced appearance at an event in early November at the Northglenn Recreation Center, and the Libre Initiative hosted it.
