ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security, operates at least nine secretive detention facilities in Colorado, called hold rooms. They are not permitted to contain beds. The nine Colorado hold rooms are part of a network of at least 170 such facilities spread out across the country. Combined, those facilities held more than 140,000 detainees last year, including infants and the elderly.
That is what the Colorado Times Recorder has spent much of the last month reporting. What we have not yet reported, though, is that individuals are profiting from the hold room network, including from the nine facilities located in Colorado. Those facilities are located on private property, and are being rented to the federal government by way of leases signed by the General Services Administration.
Now, we can report who owns them – and who, by extension, is directly profiting from the agency’s rapid expansion of unaccountable detention facilities.
Though ICE’s Colorado facilities are almost all owned by LLCs or other intermediaries, property records and public business records allowed us to identify the individual owners. And while it might not come as a surprise that most of ICE’s Colorado landlords were not interested in speaking with me for this story, at least one of them provided thorough information on his experience as a landlord for the federal government.
As a reminder, from our previous reporting, the nine Colorado hold rooms – which are bedless detention facilities where detainees are routinely kept for extended periods of time despite agency rules ostensibly limiting hold room stays to 72 hours – are located in Alamosa, Frederick, Centennial (called Denver in ICE records), Colorado Springs, Florence (called Pueblo in ICE records), Craig, Durango, Glenwood Springs, and Grand Junction. More than 2,800 detainees, ranging in age from 1 to 91, passed through those facilities last year.
The most active hold room in Colorado is the Denver hold room – which, despite bearing that name and being identified as DENHOLD in internal agency records, is located at 12445 E. Caley Avenue in the southern Denver suburb of Centennial. Between Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, and October of 2025, nearly 1,400 detainees passed through the ad hoc detention facility at ICE’s Centennial field office.
The building housing the Denver hold room and field office is owned by the NGP Group, a Virginia-based firm whose business consists primarily of renting office space to the federal government. Despite sounding like a sure thing, that business model has proven risky for NGP: last year, the company found itself scrambling to refinance a $600 million loan, which was backed by its portfolio of federal office space – though they ultimately secured a three-year extension on that deal.
Last week, I contacted the NGP Group to ask about the Centennial ICE facility, and to find out whether the company knew that, in addition to administrative use, the facility was being used for longer-term detention. After speaking to a helpful executive assistant, I was forwarded directly to the voice-mailbox for the firm’s managing partner, David D. Kent, where I left information about who I was and why I was calling. Kent never called me back, and I was never able to get through to his voicemail again on follow-up calls. According to a 2024 General Services Administration dataset of more than 7,000 buildings leased by the federal government, the annual rent for the Caley Avenue facility was $2,198,968 that year.
Given that the company leases millions of square feet of commercial space to the federal government through the General Services Administration, I would, frankly, be surprised if Kent could summon the Centennial facility to the top of his mind. The same cannot be said, however, of the landlord of the ICE hold room in Craig, Colorado.
On paper, the ICE suboffice and hold room located at 466 Tucker Street in Craig is owned by a company named Casa de Chupita, LLC. According to business records, that LLC is controlled by a 67-year-old Craig local named Bruce Timberg. Per the GSA dataset, Timberg’s LLC leased the facility to the government for $140,516 per year in 2024.
I called Timberg last Monday, who confirmed that he owns the building through his Casa de Chupita LLC. When I informed Timberg why I was calling, he told me that I would “have to ask ICE about that,” and quickly hung up.
As it would turn out, I got more out of Timberg than I would from most of the other landlords.
The Durango facility, located at 32 Sheppard Drive, is owned by a trust: the EB Hamilton Jr, et al, Profit Sharing Trust. Though trusts are typically opaque, the Hamilton trust, which owns the Durango facility, happens to be registered at an address in nearby Bayfield, Colorado, where the listed registered voters are all members of a Hamilton family. I made multiple attempts to contact them, but my calls were not returned. According to the 2024 GSA dataset I obtained, the federal government paid $221,601 that year to lease the Durango facility.
The same thing happened with the Frederick hold room facility: located at 3770 Puritan Way, the building housing the Frederick hold room is owned by a company named Ferrous Development, LLC, which, in turn, is owned by Richard Pelletier. Pelletier is the owner of SNS Ironworks – making some sense of the “Ferrous” name – and is also listed on Bloomberg as a retirement plan administrator for the Iron Workers Pension Trust Fund for Colorado. Pelletier’s father, also named Richard Pelletier, passed in 2023, and it is unclear which Pelletier’s name is on the Ferrous Development, LLC paperwork. I called the personal number I found for the younger Pelletier, and also left a message with SNS Ironworks, but Pelletier never responded to the outreach.
The government pays Ferrous Development, LLC $187,275 per year for use of the facility, according to General Services Administration data from 2024.
The Grand Junction facility, located at 569 S. Commercial Drive, is owned by the creatively named Ute Gulch 569 S Commercial LLC, and the LLC is owned by a man named John George Raftopoulos. Raftopoulos, who also owns the Diamond Peak Cattle Company, leases the facility where more than 200 detainees were held last year to the federal government for $193,094 per year. He did not return my calls.
Also failing to return my calls: Federal National Finance Corporation president Jay Belk. Though best known as the chief executive of the Castle Rock-based bank, Belk is also the owner of JIOL, LLC, which leases the “Pueblo hold room” – located at 935 State Highway 67 in Florence, despite its name – to the federal government for $402,086 per year. I first left a message for Belk more than seven days ago and have yet to hear back.
Then there are the owners of the Glenwood Springs facility, which is where our investigation into ICE’s use of hold rooms started. The owners of that facility, located in one of the units of the strip mall at 100 Midland Avenue, have done their best to remain opaque. Some parts of the strip mall are owned in common by all of the tenants, through a vehicle named the Midland Center Lot 1 Condominium Association. The building itself, though, is owned by a Florida-based company named J.G. Housing Solutions, owned by Jeffrey W. Gillespie. According to the 2024 GSA data, J.G. Housing Solutions leased the property to the feds for $245,992 that year.
I reached out to Gillespie and have not heard back. Local activists, however, have heard from other tenants who constitute part of the property’s condo association. Last week, a local Garfield County organizer was served with two separate cease-and-desist orders on behalf of other members of the association. The letters, sent by Cathy Lee and Jennifer Harbottle of Midland Fitness – located in the complex – and by former district attorney Sherry A. Caloia, accused the organizer of making “false allegations” which “disparage” the tenants. The organizer, who has asked not to be named, claims not to have distributed any such information at the facility and believes the complainants have confused her with someone else.
The owner of the listed hold room facility being leased to Homeland Security in Colorado Springs, located on the second floor of the Pueblo Bank & Trust building at 415 E. Pikes Peak Avenue, is a company named NFW LLLP, which is linked to an individual named Richard Mark Guy, who did not return my calls. NFW leased the space to the GSA for $293,189 in 2024.
After striking out with the landlords for eight of the nine facilities, I finally got lucky.
The least active of Colorado’s hold rooms, the one located in Alamosa, held only 53 detainees between January and October of last year. That facility, housed at 1921 State Street, is owned by a foreign citizen: a German lawyer by the name of Hans-Jeorg Hegerl. Perhaps due to the insulation he has from the U.S. government as a resident of Cologne, or perhaps simply out of a sense of civic duty, Hegerl did something none of the other landlords did: he answered my questions at length.
Hegerl first purchased the Alamosa property from some fellow German investors 20 years ago, he said, at which point it was already leased to the federal government. According to the 2024 GSA dataset, the annual rent in 2024 was $139,143. Hegerl says he has never had any interaction with any federal government agency about the property except for the General Services Administration, the official lessee. He also says that the lease was most recently renewed four years ago, and has run through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.
When I asked Hegerl if he was troubled by revelations of the facility being used for detention, his response was businesslike. “As long as the U.S. government fulfills the terms of the lease, I am contractually bound by that lease,” he said, but added that he was “sure that any illegal actions in this building will be prosecuted.” Hegerl, for his part, says that he has friends in Colorado and enjoys visiting whenever he can, and stressed that he does not have “any connection to or a relationship with the U.S. government or any of their branches.”
Ownership of the facility, Hegerl said, is in the process of being transferred to another entity.
Though I was determined to do my due diligence and leave dozens of voicemails in pursuit of this story, I will confess a lack of surprise that most of ICE’s Colorado landlords did not get back to me. Perhaps some were concerned about crossing an increasingly vindictive federal government; perhaps they just did not want to jeopardize their lucrative business relationships. Or perhaps they were nervous about what has happened to other companies who have chosen to profit from the rapid expansion of a masked police force’s network of undeclared, unofficial detention sites.
Last Friday, the Highlands Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) received a demonstration of what many ICE profiteers have come to expect from the public: protest, opprobrium, organization. Faith leaders, labor leaders, and local activists with Together Colorado gathered outside of the Muse Apartments in Denver – owned by Highlands REIT – to express their disapproval of the company’s CEO, Robert J. Lange, and the efforts to lease another of the company’s properties to the agency to become the site of a new mega detention facility in Hudson, Colorado.
They were not alone: the Colorado protests were just one part of a nationwide protest against Highlands REIT last week, which included demonstrations at the company’s buildings in its home city of Chicago.
Just like Highlands REIT, ICE’s Colorado landlords are well within their rights to support and profit from the agency’s operations, to pad their bank accounts and feed their own children with money they made by helping ICE incarcerate other people’s children. The only costs they may ever encounter for doing so are a social cost – like the pariah status organizers are attempting to attach to Highlands REIT – and a historical cost, when the textbooks covering this period of American history are eventually written.
For now, they have deemed the dollars more important.
