It was a temperate spring Tuesday in Grand Junction, Colorado on May 20, 2025, when a 36-year-old Colombian woman was taken into custody by Immigration & Customs Enforcement officers. Her first stop in detention was the Grand Junction ICE hold room, followed by the Glenwood Springs hold room, a little ways down Interstate 70, before being taken to the major GEO Group detention facility in Aurora. Over the next four weeks, she was shuttled between 10 separate detention facilities — both official and ad hoc, from Colorado to Arizona to Louisiana — before ultimately being deported.
We do not know her name, or what happened to her in detention. We do not know if she was separated from her children or if she was ultimately sent to a country which she has not seen since she was a child herself. We know that she was not a felon, that her only charge was being present in the country without approval. We know what the data tells us: that she was detained in Grand Junction on May 20, then shuttled through the machinery of deportation like cargo for weeks on end.
During her long and winding journey through that machinery, she was held for a time at the Removal Operations Coordination Center in Mesa, AZ, a facility where detainees have reportedly been held without food and water for extended periods of time. Last month, lawmakers visiting the facility described the conditions there as “sickening.”
The woman was also held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, LA on two separate occasions during her meandering deportation. Like the Aurora facility, the Basile detention facility is operated by the GEO Group. That facility has faced allegations of forced labor, and has been the subject of confirmed reports of detainees being sexually abused.
After being shipped from one dangerous facility to another for a month, the 36-year-old woman was finally deported from the Louisiana facility to Colombia, where her fate is unknown.
Her story is just one of nearly 3,000 that started in ICE’s Colorado hold rooms between January and October of last year.
We spent the month of March reporting on ICE hold rooms – small, bedless, unofficial detention centers, mostly housed in ICE sub-offices in strip malls and office parks around the country – where, in violation of the agency’s own rules limiting detention in hold rooms to no more than 72 hours, thousands of detainees have been held for weeks and months at a time. We started by reporting on the nine hold rooms operating here in Colorado, using data from the Deportation Data Project, then expanded our focus and published a list and a map of all 170 known hold rooms nationwide. That reporting contributed, as we hoped it would, to local follow-ups from outlets in southern California, Arizona, and elsewhere.
Now, we are returning our focus to Colorado’s hold rooms. Previously, we reported many numbers and statistics about the mass of people who passed through those facilities during the first ten months of the second Trump administration. Now, we want to give readers a chance to understand those statistics for what they really are: individuals, thousands of them.
Relying once again on data from the Deportation Data Project, the Colorado Times Recorder has mapped each individual journey of the roughly 2,800 detainees held in ICE’s Colorado hold rooms last year, from infants to the elderly, following them from their initial detentions in Colorado through their deportation, their release, or the end of the dataset.
The map, which we have hosted below, allows users to follow any individual detainee’s path through the grinding process of incarceration, transportation, and deportation, giving us a better idea of what they went through – not as statistics, but as individuals. Like the 36-year-old Colombian woman above. Or the 74-year-old Iranian man who was first held at the Denver hold room before being shuttled to the Aurora GEO Group facility, then to the Sweetwater County jail in Wyoming, before ultimately being brought back to the Aurora facility. His journey started in late June of 2025, and he was still being transferred from facility to facility by the end of the dataset in October.
The new map also shows the many children sent from Colorado to the euphemistically named South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Some appear to have been sent with parents. Some appear to have been sent alone. Like so many other ICE facilities, the Dilley facility has faced allegations of abuse, neglect, and inadequate food supplies – conditions which would have been experienced by the five-year-old Egyptian twins who were detained, along with their mother and older siblings, in Pueblo in June of last year before being sent to Dilley, where they remained as of October 15 2025, the end of the dataset.
It shows us the 30-year-old Afghan man who was detained by ICE the day after Trump’s inauguration, and was still languishing in the Aurora GEO Group facility as of October.
Among the thousands of detainees’ stories, we have been able to put a name and face to just one. Caroline Diaz Goncalves, a 19-year-old college student at the time of her arrest in Mesa County last year, was brought to the United States from the Brazil of her birth at age 7. When the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department improperly shared her information with federal immigration officers, she was detained for 15 days before being released. She is now a named plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against ICE leadership.
Beyond the thousands of individual stories, the new map also reveals certain patterns and realities about ICE’s current detention practices. A number of the lines on the new map, for instance, make stops at medical facilities, including St. Joseph, Denver Health, and UCHealth hospitals in Colorado. At least seven detainees who were at one point held in Colorado hold rooms were also held at behavioral health facilities at different points in their journeys through the system. 2025 saw a major spike in the number of deaths that occurred in ICE custody, and the agency has faced criticism for the lack of healthcare infrastructure in many of its detention facilities.
Many of the lines also make stops at locations controlled by local law enforcement agencies, like the Sweetwater County jail in Wyoming, the Kay County jail in Oklahoma, and the Chase County detention center in Kansas. In Colorado, at least one journey passes through the Teller County Jail, where Sheriff Jason Mikesell has been sued for his cooperation with the agency. While ICE works to rapidly expand its cooperation agreements with local law enforcement around the country, the issue of cooperating with the agency has become a focus for lawmakers in a number of states. In February, Maryland became the latest state to ban the practice.
The pattern of pinballing detainees through long chains of detention facilities also sheds some light on the known pattern of ICE detainees temporarily “disappearing” within the system, leaving families and immigration attorneys unable to ascertain where a loved one or client is being held. According to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) – a Quaker-led social justice organization which does work relating to immigration – the “average time to locate a missing loved one was three to five days from the moment of arrest.” The organization also reported that “ICE or CBP agents misreported, denied, or withheld basic information about a person’s whereabouts” from family members and attorneys in multiple cases with which the organization was involved.
By moving detainees rapidly from facility to facility, the agency can plausibly extend the amount of time that passes before a detainee’s family or attorney is able to locate them within the agency’s system and make contact. According to AFSC, many cases they have worked on saw the detainee deported before any contact could be made.
Below, our new map chronicles the roughly 2,800 human stories which passed through Colorado’s ICE hold rooms last year, overlaid with a map of the various ICE facilities they were sent to. Most of the journeys on the map end in South Texas, the epicenter of the agency’s deportation machinery, and many migrants’ last stop before deportation. South Texas is followed as a final destination by the networks of facilities in Louisiana, Arizona, and southern California, respectively.
Though the detainees are anonymized in official agency data, each is assigned a unique alphanumeric identifier. On our map, in order to highlight the people obscured by the data, we have replaced those unique identifiers with the demographic information for each detainee provided in the data, including their sex, age, and country of citizenship, meaning that each line is listed as something like “Male, 42, Mexico.”
By clicking on any line, you can see the path the detainee was taken on, as well as basic demographic information, and a sequential list of the facilities they passed through. Alternatively, you can start with the map’s sidebar, and select any individual in order to highlight their line on the map. You can also search for detainees by nationality or age. Because ICE’s data only provides birth years, and not birth dates, ages may be off by a year, depending on when in the year an individual was detained. Caroline Dias Goncalves, for instance, appears as “Female, 20, Brazil,” despite being 19 at the time of her arrest.
The human toll of ICE’s operation is vast, and growing. Our hope in publishing this information is to keep a human face on that toll, to prevent thousands of human stories from being boiled down to impersonal statistics, and to provide a clearer understanding of a growing system of brutality being funded by taxpayer dollars.
For ease of use, the map is able to be opened in a separate window. As a note – the three lines which appear to lead to the Tampa area are geocoded to a P.O. Box which is the only official address given for the facility where those detainees were actually sent: ICE’s Guantanamo Bay facility.
