If you go to the brown brick office building at 4645 W. 18th Street, suite 500, just east of Aims Community College in Greeley, you won’t see a sign on the door identifying who occupies the office — only a white paper taped to the window that reads, “No overnight camping.” And if you look at the sign along the street that lists the other tenants of the building, you won’t see anything about who rents suite 500.
So when Jen Montes, the Immigrant Partnership Team leader for Weld County, arrived at the unmarked office on West 18th Street, a mystery presented itself in front of her.
A volunteer had told her that a van had traveled from ICE’s de facto detention center in Frederick, Colorado, to the brown brick building in Greeley, where it moved through an electric gate and parked inside a fenced lot on the side of suite 500.
Was this also an ICE facility? No sign was present in front of the building — or anywhere. It wasn’t listed on a trove of ICE documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by the Deportation Data Project and reviewed by the Colorado Times Recorder.
Montes knocked repeatedly on the door, but no one emerged. So she took some photos and spread the word on social media.
“Go to the Source”
Mary Metzger, a Greeley resident and activist, heard Montes’ story and headed straight to the facility.
“My dad was a captain in law enforcement in Greeley, and he told us kids, if you have a problem, you should go to the source instead of trying to figure it out without talking to someone,” said Metzger, who hosts the Weld Said podcast. “So I went over there and kept knocking on the door and sticking my face on the glass and whatever.”
Finally, a man opened the door, she said, and he introduced her to his supervisor, who would only identify himself as Jeff. He refused to give Metzger his card, and he asked Metzger not to record him, she said. Jeff told her he was tired of misinformation about the office. He told Metzger that his Department of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office works on sex trafficking and drug cases. He asked Metzger to tell people that it was not an ICE facility, she said.
The truth is, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is part of ICE. It’s an ICE division that focuses on criminal investigations.
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In a statement issued to the Colorado Times Recorder on Friday, the Denver ICE Public Affairs office explained that the Greeley facility is, in fact, an HSI suboffice, “many” of which have hold rooms for temporary detentions.
“The location in Greeley, Colorado is an HSI suboffice. Suboffices are located throughout the country where our special agents report for work, conduct investigations, process arrests, and may temporarily hold subjects under arrest before transferring them to U.S. Marshals custody,” Denver ICE Public Affairs. “Many of the offices have holding cells that conform to all national detention standards and are inspected regularly. They are similar to a sheriff’s office or police department suboffice. HSI uses hold rooms for the short-term detention of individuals under arrest, typically under 12 hours, who have recently been detained or are being transferred to or from a court, detention facility, other holding facility or other agency. Hold rooms are used only for temporary occupancy and comply with all applicable standards” [Emphasis added by Denver ICE Public Affairs].
It’s true that ICE holding cells, also called hold rooms, are intended — per ICE’s own regulations — for the purpose of detaining people for fewer than 72 hours. They have no beds or bathrooms.
The trouble is, ICE is violating its own rules and using the hold rooms for long-term detention, meaning weeks or months in offices in Colorado and nationally, according to ICE documents.
And hold rooms in at least some HSI suboffices (the type of ICE facility in Greeley) are used to detain immigrants snared by Trump’s deportation program — most of whom have never been charged with a crime.
The HSI office in Colorado Springs, for example, held a total of 99 people from January through October of last year, over 60% were noncriminals. Most left within a day, but at least one was held for three days, according to ICE data analyzed by the Colorado Times Recorder.
Another example is the HSI field office in Nashville, where 119 people were detained during the same period, over 70% of whom had no criminal record.
ICE Is Silent on the Number of Detainees in Greeley
ICE did not respond to questions about how many people have been detained in Greeley, if any, and when. Nor did the agency comment on whether an ICE van traveled from its Frederick hold room to its Greeley HSI suboffice, or why the office is unmarked. Also unanswered was the question of whether the agency plans to ramp up detentions in Greeley as part of Trump’s deportation program.
Those are some of the same questions activists, like Montes and Metzger, have.
“They should be capable of answering our questions and not making a mockery out of a real concern,” said Montes. “If you’re here to protect the people, that shouldn’t be a secret. We want transparency.”
After her discussion at the Greeley HSI office, Metzger said, “I have more questions than answers.”
Greeley Mayor Dale Hall did not respond to an email seeking to know if he had concerns about the Greeley HSI office detaining noncriminal immigrants — or any concerns about the facility.
The office of U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO), whose district includes the office, also didn’t respond to the same questions. Evans has said he supports 100% of ICE arrests — and he’s backing an ICE proposal to open a second ICE jail in Colorado, also located in his district in the town of Hudson.
Greeley ICE Office Built to Reduce Overcrowding at Jail
Just before the west Greeley ICE office opened in 2008, Sean Conway, then a staffer for U.S. Rep. Wayne Allard (R-CO), told the Greeley Tribune that the new ICE office, equipped with a hold room, was intended to ease overcrowding at the Weld County Jail. The office would shift the enforcement of crimes related to undocumented immigrants from the Weld County Sheriff’s Office to ICE, Conway told the Tribune.
ICE Spokesman Carl Rusnok told the Tribune at the time that any of the following list of investigations, “and many more,” would be “fair game” for the office: workforce enforcement, gang activity, predatory crimes, sexual assaults against children, child pornography, money laundering, smuggling and intellectual property rights infringement.
The property housing the HSI office is currently for sale for about $2.5 million, listed by Madison Commercial properties, which describes it as having a “strong tenant base backed by the US government.”
“Built in 1992 and currently housing a US Government tenant, this stable income generating property offers a secure and reliable investment,” states the description of the property, which is owned by Murry Gary Brandon.
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