Luis Rivas never made it home from his trip to Walmart last June. The 60-year-old father and businessman who had spent the last 18 years building a life, a family, and a company in the Roaring Fork Valley was approached in the parking lot by Garfield County Sheriff’s Office deputies while he ran errands. Soon, he was in handcuffs.
“They put handcuffs on me after a few minutes and told me I was facing ICE charges,” Rivas told me recently. He spoke with me by phone from the Mexican state of Michoacan, where he now lives.
A recognizable member of the community where he had lived for nearly two decades, Rivas owned a property management company with clients up and down the valley. During his time in the area, according to clients who wrote letters on his behalf after his arrest, Rivas became known as a dependable friend, a hard worker, and a good businessman. He was also an undocumented immigrant, present in the country without approval, with a criminal record for a minor offense for which he had completed a probation sentence years before.
His arrest last summer was caught on video: a quick, shaky clip shows sheriff’s deputies ushering Rivas into a squad car in the Walmart parking lot. At least one of the arresting officers can be seen wearing a vest with the acronym SPEAR emblazoned across the back. SPEAR is a regional partnership of law enforcement agencies in Garfield County.
In the 10 months since the events in that parking lot, Rivas’s arrest has become one of the central pieces of evidence animating allegations that the Garfield County Sheriff, his deputies, and the SPEAR task force he oversees have illegally cooperated with the Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency despite state prohibitions. In February, the sheriff’s office was served with a cease & desist letter by Denver-based law firm Towards Justice. Rivas’s case featured prominently in the order.
“I am not the only one,” Rivas told me. “I know they have been searching for people,” to hand over to ICE.
The recent dust-up has revived concerns about the county sheriff, Lou Vallario, who many locals see as a law unto himself. Currently in the last year of his sixth term in office, Vallario is one of the longest-tenured elected officials in the state. Though concerns about his role in enforcing immigration laws date back more than two decades, the 2022 creation of the interagency Special Problems Enforcement and Response task force accelerated those concerns. SPEAR operates under Vallario’s auspices, and gives him greater reach than the sheriff’s office alone would provide.
Now, the county – with a population which is more than 30% Hispanic or Latino, on territory which, until 1848, belonged to Mexico – is heading towards changes on more than one front: localities are withdrawing from SPEAR, and Vallario has declined to seek reelection, setting the county on a glide path to a future without him, just as a reckoning on how he has wielded power for the last 24 years arrives.
“We’re in an environment now where there is additional scrutiny on things that probably should have had additional scrutiny already,” New Castle councilwoman Caitlin Carey told me.
Even before Towards Justice sent a cease & desist, before Luis Rivas was arrested, before the SPEAR task force ever came into existence, Vallario was a subject of local fascination and criticism, admiration and concern. Elected six times, the sheriff clearly does not lack local supporters, but even some of them have grown wary of the leadership style of a man who seems to enforce the law at his own discretion.
From his first election in 2002, Vallario has been accompanied by controversies of his own making – financial, personal, and legal. He has spent department funds on questionable purchases, racked up taxpayer-funded legal fees tussling with the federal government and the ACLU, and attracted investigations related to his behavior, including for his overt political activity in support of Lauren Boebert. A more comprehensive review of Vallario’s career can be found in The Revolutionist, an outlet published by Western Slope journalist Jacob Richards, who has covered Vallario in depth for years (disponible en español).
With President Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, just as the state legislature passed new protections for immigrants living in the state, Vallario’s alleged penchant for picking and choosing which laws to enforce reached a new high.
In early March of last year, Vallario and other members of his office emailed with one another about a bill then under consideration in the legislature, which would limit local law enforcement cooperation with ICE or other immigration enforcement agencies. The bill was co-sponsored by Garfield County’s Representative Elizabeth Velasco, the first Mexican-born member of the legislature. The emails were made public in response to a Colorado Open Records Act request filed by a local attorney last fall out of concerns that Vallario’s office was violating the law.
Other emails in the release, from June 2025, feature Vallario referring to Velasco as a “POS” for participating in an anti-ICE protest.
In March, though, months before the personal attacks, when Vallario and other department leaders were discussing the pending legislation, the sheriff said something much more important; something which has had life-changing consequences for Luis Rivas and countless others, and which could still result in accountability for Vallario regardless of his intent to retire.
“I have never refused to enforce a law,” the sheriff wrote on March 4, 2025, “but I will not comply with this, if this draft is the end result.”
The bill was passed into law, complete with the language Vallario objected to, and the sheriff appears to have kept his word. In the year since the bill became law, the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office does not seem to have complied with it. Vallario disputes that characterization, but his rebuttals are undercut by black letter law, court rulings, and his own admissions.
With anti-ICE sentiment growing nationwide, and state governments eager to demonstrate their independence from the feds, could a sheriff with a history of pushing the envelope finally have pushed too far?
After being handcuffed in the Walmart parking lot, Luis Rivas was driven west down I-70 by Garfield County Sheriff’s Office deputies with the SPEAR task force.
“SPEAR drove me pretty close to Grand Junction,” Rivas told me. “In De Beque, they handed me over to an ICE officer.” De Beque is about 40 minutes east of Grand Junction, along the interstate. Deputies transferred Rivas into ICE custody in the empty lot behind a Maverik gas station.
By that point, the cuffs were digging into his wrists. The sensation was a new one for Rivas. Though he had a criminal record, he had never been jailed for any crime. When he asked one of the ICE officers if they could loosen the cuffs biting into his flesh, they told him to calm down or the cuffs would be tightened. The ICE transport continued towards Grand Junction.
In 2014, Rivas was accused of invasion of privacy. He maintains his innocence in that case, believing the accusation was motivated by racism. Though offered a chance to sign a guilty plea and get off with even less of a sentence than he ultimately received, Rivas believed in his own innocence, and in the American justice system, and chose to take his chances with a jury. They convicted him in 2016, and he was sentenced to four years of probation.
“There’s a lot of discrimination, it can be very challenging.”
In our conversation, though, Rivas did not harp on his professed innocence. In fact, he barely mentioned it. What he was more preoccupied with – what he was preoccupied with as he was driven down I-70 with handcuffs making indentations in his skin – was the fact that he had completed his sentence, and done so years before. And yet, the decade-old conviction was the only thing he could think of which could have landed him in ICE custody.
“I got a sentence, I completed my sentence,” he told me. “And you in America, you say that nobody can be sentenced for the same crime two times.”
In Grand Junction, the ICE transport pulled up to a warehouse on the south side of town, waited for the roller door to clatter open, and then pulled inside. Rivas was held for the next several hours in the facility we now know as the Grand Junction hold room, or GJCHOLD in internal agency coding.
Immigration enforcement has been a recurring theme of Lou Vallario’s 24 years in the sheriff’s chair. Time and again, Vallario has inserted himself into the federal issue, sometimes as the agency’s willing partner, and at least once as its opponent. Despite a willingness to wade into the issue, Vallario has balked at state laws governing his involvement, and at federal standards dictating how he is allowed to treat ICE detainees in his custody.
In 2003, after less than a year in the office which he has now held for nearly a quarter century, Garfield County and Vallario’s department entered into a contract with ICE. The then-new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had come into existence months before as a result of the post-9/11 reshuffling of the federal government to create the Department of Homeland Security. As the new agency established itself, the need for additional detention beds became apparent, and ICE entered into jail-sharing contracts with counties like Garfield.
The contract was profitable for the county, bringing in nearly $400,000 per year, but ultimately short-lived, after a lawsuit drew attention to harsh tactics used in Vallario’s jail. In 2006, the ACLU launched a class action lawsuit against Vallario, representing prisoners in the Garfield County Jail who alleged that they had been subjected to patterns of excessive force and violence by sheriff’s deputies. Inmates described being tied to chairs before being shot with pepperball guns, tasers, or pepper spray.
Responding to the lawsuit, Vallario managed to both confirm and deny the claims in the same breath, calling the allegations “absolutely baseless” while also adding that his deputies had “absolutely had to use those devices,” referring to restraint chairs, pepperball guns, tasers, and the like. Speaking to the Denver Post in 2006, Vallario referred to the instruments of violence as “nifty devices.”
In 2008, the District Court granted class certification to the plaintiffs – allowing the suit to move forward as a class action – but that decision was reversed by the Tenth Circuit in 2009. According to the ACLU, individual plaintiffs later accepted a settlement with the department.
While the ACLU case was ongoing, in 2007, ICE raised concerns about Vallario permitting the use of tasers on inmates in the Garfield County Jail. At the time, the use of tasers was prohibited by ICE’s detention standards. When Vallario declined to change his policies to align with those standards, ICE declared that the Garfield County Jail was “no longer considered an allowable detention facility.”
In written comments to me, Vallario confirmed that tasers are still used at the jail. “Why wouldn’t they be?” he asked.
“They called me and asked for a letter of assurance that we would not use tasers,” Vallario told the Denver Post at the time, “and I said, ‘I cannot do that and I won’t do that.’” ICE withdrew its contract with the county. In November 2008, the Post Independent reported that in addition to costing the county a contract which brought in $400,000 per year, Vallario had spent nearly $570,000 in public funds paying the lawyers representing his office in the twin disputes against the ACLU and the feds.
The timing – right as the global financial crisis kicked off, soon to plunge local budgets into chaos and austerity nationwide – was not ideal. When Vallario faced his second reelection in 2010, two years after the revelations, the financial cost of the fracas was still on voters’ minds.
“As for renting unused jail space, the issue is really about Lou Vallario’s refusal to cooperate with immigration authorities,” a letter-to-the-editor published in the July 10, 2010 Post Independent read. “You see, Lou feels the need to use tasers on jail inmates, a practice disallowed by international treaties and over which the ACLU is suing. By the way, how much have GarCo taxpayers shelled out covering Lou’s numerous legal defenses?”
Further complicating his reelection bid was the fact that Vallario’s Democratic opponent in 2010 was Tom Dalessandri, who served two terms in the role before Vallario defeated him in 2002 – making the race a contest between two two-term Garfield County Sheriffs. After a bruising race which dredged-up previously reported allegations from Vallario’s divorce, he ultimately won reelection and has not faced a serious challenger since.
In 2012, another scandal involving Vallario’s work with immigration authorities emerged, bringing yet another conflict with the ACLU along with it. In May of that year, the ACLU of Colorado announced that Vallario’s department was reporting victims of domestic violence to ICE. At the time, state law required law enforcement to report undocumented immigrants to the agency, but specifically excluded victims of domestic violence. Vallario’s office reported them anyway. One Garfield County woman, Virginia Urtusuastegui, was held in ICE detention for 13 days after calling police for help when her husband attacked her.
Vallario again simultaneously confirmed and denied the allegations, calling the ACLU’s criticism a “slanderous lie” while also acknowledging that his office referred domestic violence victims to ICE.
This was the context locals had been living in for years by the time the CORA request filed by a Glenwood Springs-based attorney forced hundreds of Vallario’s emails into the open in September 2025 – including the email where the sheriff declared that he would not enforce the state’s new immigration laws.
“He was openly saying that he plans not to follow the Colorado law that says local law enforcement can’t cooperate with ICE,” Debbie Bruell told me. Bruell, a co-founder of Mountain Action Indivisible and former chair of the Garfield County Democratic Party, was not shocked by the revelations.
“There was nothing surprising about it,” she said.
Vallario, in written comments to me, claimed that the language he was concerned with was not included in the final bill, “so the point is moot.” Legislative records, however, show that the language Vallario singled out in the email – provisions prohibiting cooperation with ICE and governing how and where detainees may be transferred into ICE custody – remained in the final version of the bill, which was signed into law.
Vallario says allegations that he and his department are illegally cooperating with ICE are “absolute lies with zero evidence to support them, because they are lies.” As the Towards Justice cease-and-desist lays out at length, Vallario’s claim of innocence is belied by the evidence, and by his own admissions.
“Maybe these useful idiots should try reading the laws,” Vallario told me. “For example, they keep saying that when ICE picks someone up at the jail once they are released, it must be done ‘in an area accessible to the public.’ That requirement does not exist in state law.”
While that requirement is not stated explicitly in state law, it does align with how certain provisions of C.R.S. § 24-76.6-101 to-102, which prohibit law enforcement from honoring civil immigration detainers, have been interpreted since well before the bill Vallario opposed last year. By facilitating ICE custody transfers without judicial warrants in non-public areas of a jail, instead of releasing a prisoner when they are eligible for release, the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office arguably violates those provisions.
Vallario disputes that interpretation of the law and says that “there are judicial remedies for those that wish to challenge me. That’s what the courts are for.” But the interpretation Vallario disputes has already been upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals in Nash v. Mikesell, a case in which Teller County Sheriff and former gubernatorial candidate Jason Mikesell was sued for the same practice. The same interpretation was put forward in the Towards Justice cease-and-desist, which Vallario says he “thew in the trash.”
Vallario’s own admissions regarding the case of Luis Rivas also complicate his protestations. “I’ve answered this question a thousand times,” he wrote. “We assisted a law enforcement agency with a person in THEIR CUSTODY due to officer safety concerns with the lack of secure prisoner equipment in that LEO’s vehicle. We transported his arrestee to someone who had the appropriate equipment.” No information surrounding Rivas’ detention indicates that he had already been arrested by ICE before being approached by GCSO deputies. Even in Vallario’s telling, what he describes is assisting ICE with a civil immigration detainer, an action prohibited by the law.
For many locals, particularly those living in fear of being handed over to ICE in violation of state law, the flimsy rationales are more of the same thing they have seen for decades: a sheriff bent on doing what he wants, then trying to justify it later.
“These issues, they’re nothing new to our community,” Rep. Elizabeth Velasco told me. Before being elected as a state Representative, Velasco worked as a translator, often providing interpretation services at the court. “We’ve seen immigration enforcement being done at Walmarts, at Strawberry Days [festival], we’ve seen it done in very public and harmful ways.”
For more than two decades, Garfield County’s Latino population has lived with the capricious nature of Vallario’s power. In other contexts, a sheriff’s declaration that he would not enforce a law, and then following through on that declaration, would come as a shock; to those who had lived through the news of the beatings, and the tasers, and the domestic violence victims referred to ICE in Vallario’s Garfield County, it was not a shock at all.
“It was just a warehouse,” Rivas told me of the Grand Junction facility where he was held for several hours on the day of his arrest. “I could see the sign over the door [on the inside], Homeland Security.”
I was able to locate the anonymous entry detailing Rivas’s detention in the vast tranches of ICE data obtained via FOIA by the Deportation Data Project, using his birth year, country of origin, and the date of his arrest. When we spoke, I was struck by how well his memory aligned with federal data which he had never seen.
“I arrived at about 3:30 and I was there until around 7:00 PM,” he told me. The data shows that he was checked out of the Grand Junction facility at 6:51 PM. “During that time, I shared the room with five or six guys, and everyone was telling their stories about detention.” The data shows that Rivas was one of 7 men held at the facility that day.
Two of the men confined in the warehouse with Rivas had been stopped at a drug checkpoint near the Utah-Colorado border earlier that day. State Patrol officers, they said, didn’t find any drugs, but did find out that the men were undocumented. The men told Rivas that the officers then detained them by the roadside for hours until ICE came and picked them up, then took them to the Grand Junction facility. It is unclear if the men were detained by Colorado or Utah State Patrol.
Later that evening, the Grand Junction hold room detainees were driven to the GEO Group detention facility in Aurora.
As the sun set in the rear view mirror, Rivas had no idea if his children, products of Garfield County public schools, knew where he was.
Immigration enforcement has not been the only source of controversy in Lou Vallario’s multi-decade career.
Unlike most rural sheriffs, Vallario spends a portion of each year at one of his multiple homes on the Caribbean island of Bonaire, a Dutch-owned dot in the Leeward Antilles situated just 50 miles off the coast of Venezuela. Vallario’s penchant for island living is so well-known that it was among the first things many locals I spoke to mentioned about the sheriff.
“He’s never even here,” one said, like many others. “He’s always on that island.”
While it’s unclear just how much time Vallario spends out of the country, it’s clear that the sheriff and his wife visit Bonaire frequently. According to the local newspaper – not the Glenwood Springs Post Independent but the Bonaire Reporter – the Vallarios purchased their first home on the island in 2008. At some point afterwards, the couple also purchased a second home, which is advertised as a vacation rental and has its own Facebook business page.
However much time the Vallarios spend in Bonaire, their presence in and fondness for the island’s community is evident. One issue of the Bonaire Reporter notes Lou and Kim Vallario as saying that their “two passions are scuba diving in Bonaire and trail riding in the Rockies.” A 2014 issue even lists Lou Vallario as a reporter for the local outlet.
“As an elected official, I can come and go as I please,” Vallario told me, in response to questions about Bonaire. “So, once again, lies and political bullshit.” He added that he has “never had a non-working vacation.”
There is nothing improper about Vallario’s ownership of vacation homes, but the image of the sheriff routinely jetting off to the Caribbean dovetails unfortunately, in the minds of some locals, with broader concerns about Vallario’s stewardship of county funds.
One of the early financial scandals of Vallario’s tenure came in the form of a BearCat: an armored security vehicle which the department purchased in 2009 for around $235,000 (nearly $370,000 when adjusted for inflation). The 17,000-pound behemoth attracted criticism almost immediately, with the local Post Independent referring to the purchase in a November 2009 article as “one of the more controversial aspects of Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario’s two terms in office.”
Criticism of the BearCat purchase was widespread, with letters-to-the-editor calling the vehicle Vallario’s “terrorist-proof ego-wagon.” By May 2010, the sheriff was sick enough of the complaints that he issued a three-page letter attempting to explain the purchase.
Vallario has also come under fire for awarding one of the department’s highest-paying positions to his wife. With an hourly rate of $90.17 and annual base pay of $187,543.82 for her role as the department’s Detentions Commander, Kim Vallario is the highest-paid employee in the department other than undersheriff Colt Cornelius. The sheriff himself is paid $63.61 per hour for an annual base pay of $132,304.02.
With combined pay of $319,847, the Vallarios’ household income is nearly four times greater than the county’s median household income of roughly $91,000 — all of it courtesy of the taxpayers.
In her role, Kim Vallario is responsible for running the Garfield County Jail. While her promotion to that position in 2018 has been criticized by locals as a case of nepotism or favoritism, reality may be somewhat more nuanced. Prior to being promoted by her husband to the jail’s top job, Vallario had worked in the facility since 2005, first as a detentions deputy before climbing through the ranks of corporal, sergeant, and lieutenant.
Though seemingly qualified for the position, Kim Vallario’s career as a jail administrator appears to have been aided in some ways by her husband’s position. In 2018, she was hired to run the Pitkin County Jail at the same time that she ran the Garfield County Jail. That decision – which came with an additional $117,000 per year for the job, according to contemporaneous reporting in the Aspen Times – was made by Pitkin County sheriff Joe DiSalvo, one of Lou Vallario’s longtime allies. In late 2022, when DiSalvo lost reelection to his fourth term after a race in which Lou Vallario publicly campaigned for him, Kim resigned from the Pitkin County position.
Letters to the editor submitted to the Aspen Times during the race indicate that the connections between DiSalvo and the Vallarios ultimately became a liability for the Pitkin County sheriff.
“Do we really want our sheriff’s office to be so intimately linked to the Vallario family?” one asked.
But spending – whether on assault vehicles, legal fees, or on his wife’s salary – is not the only arena in which Vallario’s financial management has been questioned. Sources also allege that GCSO, under Vallario’s leadership, has circumvented the county’s procurement process in order to award lucrative contracts to handpicked businesses. Records appear to support those allegations.
In 2025, the sheriff’s office purchased 14 new Chevy Tahoes as patrol vehicles. Once acquired, the vehicles needed to be kitted out with light bars, sirens, patrol radios, and everything else necessary for duty. With the retrofit for all 14 vehicles estimated to cost around half a million dollars, the sheriff’s office was required to issue a request-for-proposal to attract and evaluate bids.
Three companies submitted bids: Bearcom, with a bid for $462,000; Alpine, with a bid for $480,000, and GreyCo, with a bid for $513,000. Rather than choosing the cheapest bid, though, GCSO conducted another step in the process: having three anonymous evaluators from within the department assess the competing bids and assign each a grade based on various criteria.
The evaluation forms produced by GCSO during the process raise questions. Though each evaluation was supposed to be independent, multiple evaluators assigned the same scores in the same categories, down to the decimal point. After the evaluations were averaged together, the contract went to GreyCo, the company which submitted the most expensive bid – and the one which has professional ties to a Garfield County Sheriff’s Office employee.
As part of the retrofit, 12 of the Tahoes needed to be wrapped with a new design featuring the sheriff’s office livery, at a cost of $21,600.
The problem, records obtained via the Colorado Open Records Act show, is that the vehicle wraps were purchased from a company named Valor Customs, which is owned by Garfield County Sheriff’s Office employee Christopher Bornholdt. Bornholdt established the company in July 2024, less than a year before being subcontracted by GreyCo on the GCSO retrofits. Emails I obtained via open records request show Bornholdt identifying himself as “the person who does vehicle wraps for GreyCo.”
When locals filed a records request for information about the three anonymous evaluators who had chosen to award the contract to GreyCo in the first place, suspecting that Bornholdt may have been among them, the request was rejected. Instead of furnishing the records, county finance director Jamaica Watts submitted an affidavit stating her belief that disclosure of the evaluators’ identities would “harm the public interest by impairing the integrity and effectiveness of Garfield County’s procurement evaluation process.”
“That would be a question for the County Procurement Department,” Vallario told me when I asked him about the conflict of interest. “I don’t get involved in that process.”
Aware of concerns regarding how the sheriff’s office manages its finances, multiple locals told me that the department has not undergone an independent audit in at least twenty years. When asked about these claims, Vallario said the department undergoes an annual audit “with the county’s auditing firm,” but declined to produce any documentation to that effect.
Between the scandals, the spending, and the lack of accountability for any of it, a perception has steadily grown among locals that Vallario is a law unto himself. With the longtime, untouchable sheriff preparing to surrender his seat at the end of this term, power in Garfield County is set to shift. Though Vallario will not be on the ballot himself, he has already shown a heavy hand in trying to influence voters to pick the successor he prefers.
“No, I am not Lou Vallario’s hand-picked successor, that’s an accurate statement,” Eagle County undersheriff Dan Loya told me over the phone, after I put the question to him. Born in New Mexico, Loya has lived in Garfield County since before he can remember. A graduate of Glenwood Springs High School and a long-time resident of Rifle, Loya built his law enforcement career in neighboring Eagle County, but has always called the Roaring Fork Valley home.
Loya is one of three candidates to replace Vallario, all of whom are running against each other in next month’s Republican primary. There are no Democrats running for the seat. The other two Republican candidates are Eagle County detective Thomas Wright, and GCSO lieutenant Brent Baker, though most locals I spoke to see the contest as a two-way race between Loya and Baker – and all of them know exactly who Lou Vallario is supporting.
However true or well-founded, the narrative I found swirling around the sheriff race in Garfield County was clear and consistent: Baker is seen as a continuation of the Vallario era, while Loya represents a new direction. Given that locals elected Vallario six times, it’s far from certain how the results will shake out.
Vallario seems to agree with that narrative: in comments to me, he said that he “ABSOLUTELY” supports Baker. “Who has a better front row seat than me to determine who I want to pass the torch to?” he added.
Baker did not respond to outreach regarding this piece, but Loya talked to me about his vision for the department.
“One priority for me is community engagement. I’m fluent in Spanish, I actually had to learn English, so it’s important to me to connect with the Latino community because they’re over 40% of our constituency in Garfield County,” he told me, addressing an area of acute concern under Vallario’s leadership. But he has eyes on day-to-day priorities as well. “I think we have a local drug problem, if not a national drug problem, and I think that we can do a better job there. Animal control is also a priority. That program was eliminated from the budget two or three years ago, and I think that needs to be reimplemented.”
Loya also has thoughts on SPEAR. “I mean, it’s falling apart.” He noted that many similar interagency task forces in the state have not faced the same kinds of problems, and that cooperation can be handled more productively. “We have to understand that we are guided by the laws of Colorado, and we need to stay in our lane. We’re not immigration, we’re not immigration enforcement. We need to stay where we need to stay, and that’s narcotics enforcement and criminal interdiction.”
The vision Loya expressed is in line with what I heard from other locals, and members of local governing bodies. New Castle town councilwoman Caitlin Carey emphasized that Garfield County covers nearly 3,000 square miles – a hair larger than the state of Delaware – and has a major interstate running through the middle of it. Some degree of cooperation between the local law enforcement agencies is essential.
“What we had to do was leverage the resources we have up and down the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys to support each other. From my understanding, that’s how SPEAR started.”
Though she understands the need for an entity like SPEAR, Carey, like others, feels that the task force has gone awry. “Some information makes sense to share locally, but information sharing between our municipalities feels very, very different than giving [Homeland Security Investigations] access.”
In next month’s primary, voters in Garfield County will decide if they agree.
Luis Rivas was held in the GEO Group Aurora detention center for four months. During that time, he worked on his appeal, still desperate to find out why he was being deported, why the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office had handed him to federal authorities in violation of state law. Rivas was eventually removed from the country while his appeal was pending, and he’s still asking the same questions.
“I don’t know what happened,” he told me. “In early September, I presented an appeal for the judge’s decision, and supposedly I shouldn’t have been removed because I had appealed. So, we don’t know. I don’t know. We have asked why I was removed but nobody has given an answer yet.”
During his four months in the Aurora facility, Rivas experienced the kind of neglect and cruelty the system has become known for. The air conditioning broke during the heat of summer – “it was like we were in an oven” – the guards manifested as petty tyrants – “98 out of 100 of these guys are rude and threatening” – and he watched as medical needs were routinely ignored.
“There were a lot of guys suffering respiratory infections, severe problems, and they put no attention on that.” Worse still, he told me about a man who was transferred to the facility with his jaw wired shut, and then left in that condition long after it was no longer necessary.
“He couldn’t move his mouth because of these wires and he needed to go back to the dentist to get the wires removed, and they never did anything,” he told me. “This guy was really suffering, it was almost impossible to eat. He had to break food into small bits and push them into the little space between his lips. It was pretty sad, pretty concerning.”
At one point during his confinement in Aurora, detainees from the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in Florida were transferred into his cell block. Then came a morning when Rivas and a handful of others were awakened around 2am, shuttled through hours of processing, and shipped like cattle to El Paso.
Regardless of which direction the voters of Garfield County choose to go next, regardless of what course they set in Lou Vallario’s sudden absence from power, calls for accountability are growing. Already, events have started snowballing towards some sort of reckoning: the cease & desist order, the slow but certain dissolution of SPEAR, unconfirmed rumors of an investigation at the state level into Vallario’s actions in the Rivas case. That snowball is unlikely to melt just because Vallario leaves office.
But Vallario is not the only person set to leave office next January. Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose office is responsible for investigating a lawbreaking sheriff, will also be departing, either for the governor’s mansion or for some other pasture. With that in mind, I asked the four leading candidates to replace Weiser as attorney general what each of them thought of the situation.
One of those candidates, David Seligman, has already weighed in. Seligman’s law firm, Towards Justice, served Vallario with the cease & desist order in February. I asked Seligman what his approach would be if he found himself in the attorney general’s office.
“We’ve already served Sheriff Lou Vallario with a cease-and-desist letter raising serious allegations that his office is illegally collaborating with ICE, and we’ve sued the Polis administration for attempting to share Coloradans’ personal information with ICE,” he told me. “I intend to work collaboratively with law enforcement across Colorado to protect our communities as Attorney General, but when law enforcement endangers our communities by collaborating with immigration enforcement efforts, I won’t be afraid to use the law to hold them accountable.”
Attorney General candidate and current Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, also weighed in, saying that, as attorney general, she would “use the full range of tools to ensure that local law enforcement follows the law. This includes pursuing financial penalties and injunctive relief against law enforcement officials who fail to comply with Colorado’s protections of its residents from federal immigration enforcement activities.”
“Anyone who violates the law — whether they carry a badge or not – should be held accountable when they break the law,” candidate Hetal Doshi said. Doshi, a career prosecutor and the child of immigrants, said she understands what it means to enforce the law, especially when vulnerable communities feel under attack. As attorney general, Doshi said, she “will always follow the facts and the law wherever they lead and use every tool available to seek justice for Coloradans. Our communities deserve nothing less.”
Like Seligman, current Boulder District Attorney and candidate for the AG’s office, Michael Dougherty, has also had some tangential involvement in the Garfield County situation. Earlier this year, Dougherty conducted a know-your-rights training in Glenwood Springs with an eye towards the nature of immigration enforcement in the county.
“No one is above the law, including ICE agents and local law enforcement,” Dougherty told me. “Under my leadership, when ICE commits crimes in Colorado, there will be full investigations and consequences for the crimes they commit.”
Vallario, in response to questions for this piece, said that he is aware that a complaint was filed against him with Weiser’s office, but that he has not heard anything from the office regarding that complaint. “That suggests that they did not see any reason to investigate because we DID NOT violate the law,” Vallario wrote.
For now, the snowball will keep rolling, and residents of Garfield County will keep waiting to see if the next attorney general will do something with it. For communities far from the Front Range, though, the attention of the powers-that-be can feel like a fickle thing.
“The thing about the Western Slope is that we are a long way from the state capital, politically and geographically,” Jacob Richards told me. Richards, the local journalist and publisher of The Revolutionist, who has reported extensively on Vallario and earlier this year published the hundreds of pages of emails obtained last year via CORA from the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office, has grown accustomed to justice being hard to come by.
“Colorado can pass all the laws it wants but on the ground in western Colorado it is a crap shoot from jurisdiction to jurisdiction whether those laws will be enforced or followed,” he said. “Worse, the people have virtually no recourse to justice. There are zero labor lawyers in western Colorado, there are zero civil-rights lawyers in western Colorado, there is no ACLU branch. In my experience the ACLU comes over the mountains once the people already have the case won.”
The isolation which has allowed Vallario to wield his accumulated power as some combination of lawman and strongman is the same isolation causing some local activists to doubt that accountability will ever come from the Front Range.
“It’s different here, and we need to respond differently,” Debbie Bruell told me.
Now, locals are responding without any help from the flatland. Glenwood Springs has withdrawn from SPEAR, with other municipalities looking to follow. Without the troubled task force in place, and with the longtime sheriff headed for the exit, there is hope that Garfield County’s law enforcement agencies will abandon Vallario’s ill-conceived and unlawful scheme to cooperate with ICE, and return their attention to where it’s most needed: keeping the community safe, rather than keeping it afraid.
Though change might be on the way, the personal cost of Vallario’s lawlessness is still being paid by many.
When Luis Rivas was processed into Camp East Montana, ICE’s sprawling tent complex in El Paso, Texas, he was held in an ice box. “All of the officers were wearing thick jackets, hats, and gloves, and we were just wearing t-shirts. That’s it.” The next day, around 3pm, he was led onto a plane and flown back to Mexico, a country he had not seen in years.
Today, Luis is living a quiet life, focusing on his appeal, and trying to stay safe for his kids’ sake. “It’s not easy to live with fear over here,” he told me. His daughter recently attained lawful permanent status, and is acting as an advocate for him stateside. “I want to get back as soon as possible, and my daughter is going to petition as soon as she can to start a process for me to legally immigrate to the U.S. again.”
Despite what happened to him, despite having had his life upended by the unlawful actions of SPEAR and the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office, Luis Rivas still thinks of Garfield County and the life he built there fondly.
“I had the fortune to work with very, very good people in Garfield County,” he told me. “While I was in detention, I had many, many clients who wrote heart-touching letters to support me, and I felt really happy. I was pretty loved.”
His life today is not the one he built, it is the one which was thrust on him by sheriff Lou Vallario’s decision to place himself above the law. But he is taking it in stride, one day at a time.
“I try to keep my mind in a positive mood,” he told me. “I know there have been acts against me, acts of discrimination, but I have tried not to focus on those. I have always found very good people around me.”
He hopes to make it home to Colorado some day soon.
