A hundred or so people gathered under the low gray clouds in an office park in Centennial on Saturday morning, holding signs and singing songs, their presence an offering of allegiance to the version of this country they believe can one day exist.
The demonstrators gathered outside of Immigration & Customs Enforcement’s Denver field office — the agency’s headquarters for Colorado and Wyoming, which is also the site of an agency hold room where detainees have been held for more than a month at a time despite agency rules limiting their stays to 72 hours — were not masked or rowdy. They were not, by and large, young radicals or old hippies, though I’m sure both of those cohorts were represented in the crowd.
Instead, what I found on that sidewalk in Centennial was a broad cross-section of Coloradans, including everyone from young children to elders. And what I found speaking to them is that they were not brought there by the belief that their protest would change anything, but by the belief that it was worth doing anyway, to declare their faith in the possibility of a United States of America which does not imprison infants, separate families, or engage in ethnic cleansing.
Despite the clouds, the chill, and the dark reality that brought protesters out on a Saturday morning, the event took on a tone of festive defiance, with songs, speeches, and chants echoing across the office park. One gentleman showed up with a guitar, playing covers of “La Bamba” and “Sympathy for the Devil”, and was joined impromptu by brass players from the activist marching band Notes of Dissent.
Organizers, accustomed by now to the agency’s hostility towards critics, diligently guarded against giving the Feds any reason to break up the gathering or hassle participants. Protesters were encouraged to cross the street only at the intersection, and I was reminded multiple times (sorry) to stay off the complex’s grass, running beside the sidewalk, lest it be called trespassing.
Still, one big question hung over the event. “How do we get them out of there?” a woman in the crowd asked me at one point, nodding towards the building across the street, a tacit acknowledgement that more concrete action is needed.
Though the protest itself bore little change-making potential beyond the possibility of generating awareness of ICE’s detention practices — a worthwhile endeavor but one without the hope of an immediate payoff — the activists and organizers who animated it made it clear that real change is what they seek, and that they are working along other avenues to secure it.
Gina McAfee, the statewide director for the Colorado Immigrant Partnership Teams, probably would not consider herself the leader of Saturday’s protest – and yet the soft-spoken 60-something seemed to be the only person in the crowd who everyone else knew. Over the last year, she has found herself at the center of the kind of concrete action many of Saturday’s protesters are eager to get their hands on.
“We have between 2,000 and 3,000 people on 37 different teams across the state,” McAfee told me when I asked her about IPT. Launched immediately after the 2024 election, IPT stands in solidarity with targeted immigrant communities, provides factual information and know-your-rights trainings to help people legally resist ICE, and works to pressure elected officials to “develop more humane approaches to immigration policy.”
The 37 IPTs in Colorado, McAfee told me, are organized geographically, with each team focusing on its own area, and the group combining its collective weight to advocate for better policies at the state legislature.
“We’re supporting four pro-immigrant bills in the state legislature right now,” McAfee told me. “We’re also regularly having our members call our federal legislators to make sure they don’t pass any more funding for ICE and CBP.” Contrary to what some assume, McAfee told me that members of Colorado’s federal delegation say that they are not hearing much from constituents on the topic.
While protests can raise awareness, the other work IPT has dedicated itself to can have more tangible impacts; impacts that can stop innocent people from being abducted by federal officers.
“We’re doing a lot of work in the communities,” she told me, “teaching people about their rights. We have a program going around to individual business owners and teaching them about what their rights are. We do a lot of outreach to schools to make sure they are training their teachers and their principals about what to do if ICE shows up.”
“That’s just an example of the many, many things we’re doing across the state.”
At the protest on Saturday morning, I also spoke to Dorian Gray, a data scientist and organizer with the group No Concentration Camps in Colorado (NOCCC), who was instrumental in helping the Colorado Times Recorder parse, map, and report on huge tranches of federal immigration data. Now, Gray and his data science skills are working overtime for the cause, as NOCCC positions itself as a repository of actionable information for other activists around the state and country.
“Right now, what we are calling on any local organizer anywhere in the U.S. to do is to email us at [email protected] and we will produce a dossier for you about your local hold room,” Gray told me. “We will provide an analysis of the demographics of that hold room, as well as its usage and any violations of the national detention standards that we can identify in the data.”
More importantly, Gray went on, the group will provide information on the zoning of each hold room and work with local activists to identify challenges which can be made. “We will work with you to identify if any conditional use, special use, or discretionary use permits have been acquired for that building and, if not, we will guide you on how to challenge that at your city hall.”
Through Gray’s data work, activists around the country stand a chance at accomplishing something meaningful, something which could slow the rate at which people are being taken off the street by federal agents: they could get hold rooms closed.
“Many of these facilities are privately owned, and many of these facilities are zoned incorrectly,” Gray told me. “A lot of city councils think that means that it becomes a fight between the municipality and the federal government, but that’s simply not the case.” A zoning dispute, Gray emphasized, has nothing to do with the federal government: it’s a matter to be handled between a city government and a property owner or developer.
“It gives the landlord an opportunity to cancel the lease,” Gray said, putting a fine point on the utility of launching zoning challenges against ICE hold rooms. Activists in Alamosa have already started down the zoning road, with promising early results.
Between McAfee and Gray, between the Immigrant Partnership Teams and the vital data work being done by No Concentration Camps Colorado, what I found on Saturday was not just a protest, not just symbolic action in the absence of real change. What I found was a movement which is growing every day, a movement with leaders who can walk and chew gum, who can organize symbolic action while also orchestrating meaningful, concrete action. What I found on Saturday was a world removed from the do-nothing Congressional opposition in D.C. or the hand-wringing of talking heads. What I found were real people, putting their time, efforts, money, and sometimes safety on the line to make this country better than what it is, closer to what they believe it can be.
What I found on Saturday was hope, with no pretensions.
“This is the time to stand up to a fascist government,” McAfee told me. She did not say it like she’s running for office, she did not blare it into a microphone for attention or reactions. She made a simple statement of fact, almost with a shrug, as if the conclusion was perfectly obvious.
“All of us have to get involved.”
