Last week, those of us here at the Colorado Times Recorder reported a bombshell scoop: ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, has held detainees, including children, at a network of nine undisclosed detention facilities called hold rooms. The hold rooms are often located in ICE or other Department of Homeland Security substations which have not been declared as detention facilities. Located in strip malls and office parks around the state, many of the hold rooms have detained people for weeks at a time, never disclosing to neighboring businesses or residents that the locations are being used for detention.
When we did the work of reporting that story, we did what journalists typically do: we reached out to ICE for comment, and provided them with a list of questions about the specific claims we ultimately made in our story. ICE, as government agencies often do, chose to ignore that outreach, neither answering our questions nor providing any comment or context.
Then something changed: the story got quite a bit of attention. First, state Representative and congressional candidate Manny Rutinel led an effort which saw dozens of state legislators sign a letter demanding answers from ICE. Then, Democratic members of the state’s congressional delegation got involved, with Reps. Brittany Pettersen and Joe Neguse each raising their own questions and seeking answers from an agency which Congress is tasked with overseeing.
At that point, with the narrative running away from them, ICE chose to issue a statement denying our reporting. Or at least that’s how they framed it. In reality, ICE’s statement denying our reporting actually confirmed many of the specific details we reported.
The first of our claims which ICE confirmed in its initial response to Rep. Rutinel was that detainees are, in fact, being held in unofficial detention facilities around the state.
“These locations are not ‘hidden’ or ‘black sites,’ they are ICE suboffices located throughout Colorado and the country.”
Our reporting last week confirmed that many of the state’s hold rooms are located in ICE suboffices. Those offices are not declared as detention facilities, despite having held detainees for weeks at a time. While ICE discloses the location of its suboffices, it does not disclose that those suboffices have detained thousands of Coloradans in the last year alone.
“These offices are where aliens may be asked to check in for appointments and where our officers report for work, conduct investigations, process arrests and may temporarily hold detainees before transferring them to a detention center,” the agency’s non-denial denial continued.
As we reported last week, between the creation of hold rooms in 2011 and Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, the rooms were in fact used as places to “temporarily hold detainees before transferring them to a detention center.” What ICE elides with that response, though, is that the agency’s own data shows that the use of hold rooms as longer-term detention facilities ballooned last year.
The dramatic expansion of hold rooms being used as detention centers is stark: between September 2023 and October 2025, 82 individuals were held at the Glenwood Springs hold room (GSCHOLD). 71 of those detainees – or 86% of the total held over two years – were held at the facility some time between Trump’s inauguration and October of last year. In other words, the 16 months prior to Trump’s return to office saw 11 detainees held at the Glenwood Springs Hold Room. The 10 months after his return to office saw the facility hold 71 detainees, a greater than 600% increase.
One of the most important details that ICE confirmed in its denial was that the hold room cells hidden in field offices and suboffices “conform to all national detention standards.” As we reported last week, those national standards forbid hold rooms from containing beds, cots, or any other sleeping apparatus, and do not require them to contain toilets.
Crucially, ICE’s denial also confirmed a heartbreaking detail: that children have been detained at these suboffices.
“On occasion when a family unit is arrested they may temporarily pass through a suboffice before transportation is arranged for them to a detention center with a family housing unit,” the agency said.
While ICE attempts to explain that children are only – or at least mostly – detained at hold rooms in cases in which entire families are being deported, the response only reveals that the agency believes that there are justifiable reasons for incarcerating infants. Needless to say, many people disagree.
All in all, the only substantive details of our reporting which ICE failed to confirm in its denial were the total counts of detainees, and the length of some of their stays. As we reported last week, more than 2,800 individuals were held in Colorado hold rooms last year, and the longest stay in one of those facilities recorded between January and October of last year was 39 days.
In a follow-up piece, Denver7 mischaracterized CTR’s reporting on the undisclosed use of the facilities for long-term detention, saying that records ‘suggest otherwise,’ even though ICE’s statement to the outlet confirmed the very details in dispute. The fundamental point is that ICE’s hold room usage was secret, not that the existence of its regional offices was secret. In fact, we specifically noted that most of the facilities were located in regional offices. Denver7 never contacted CTR and does not appear to have analyzed the original data.
Despite its confirmation of our reporting, the agency remains defiant as lawmakers from Rutinel to Pettersen attempt to inspect the facilities we revealed. In response to each, ICE suggested that, if the elected officials really cared, they would make formal appointments to inspect the facilities. While the agency’s non-denial denial casts doubt on whether they are operating in good faith, I would encourage the lawmakers to take them up on the offer, but to be prepared that they might encounter the same thing lawmakers in Maryland encountered when they visited a hold room last week: that all the detainees had been removed before they got there.
