The year is 2024 and your Colorado ballot has just arrived in the mail. The envelope is thick, another year’s ballot loaded not just with candidates, but with state and local initiatives. You fill in the bubbles next to the candidates you like, take a deep breath, then turn to the page where the initiatives start.
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.
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.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency operates a network of 170 unofficial detention sites around the country, called “hold rooms,” according to agency data obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Located in warehouses, strip malls, office parks, and ICE substations, the facilities are held to different standards than the agency’s official detention facilities. They are not permitted to contain beds, and are not required to contain toilets. Though agency policy limits the time a detainee can be kept in a hold room to 72 hours, federal data show thousands of violations of that rule, including many stays lasting weeks or months at a time.
Last week, those of us here at the Colorado Times Recorder reported a bombshell scoop: ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, has held detainees, including children, at a network of nine undisclosed detention facilities called hold rooms. The hold rooms are often located in ICE or other Department of Homeland Security substations which have not been declared as detention facilities. Located in strip malls and office parks around the state, many of the hold rooms have detained people for weeks at a time, never disclosing to neighboring businesses or residents that the locations are being used for detention.
Just west of downtown Glenwood Springs, perched between Midland Avenue and Interstate 70, a strip mall houses a gym, a chiropractor’s office, a tax accountant, and on the far end of the building, one less-common tenant: an ICE detention facility, one of at least nine such secretive facilities in the state.
This week, a comparatively minuscule number of Colorado Democrats and Republicans will gather at churches and elementary schools around the state to engage in one of American democracy’s most arcane, useless, and undemocratic processes: caucus. And while I commend each and every one of the civically engaged Coloradans who chooses to participate — a number which even in Presidential election years has come to roughly 5% of eligible voters — I believe it is also high time for our thoroughly modern state to abolish the antiquated process which has long since been supplanted by more reliable and accessible methods of participation.
In some of the worst corners of the Internet, the recent revelations about billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein have been greeted as something they are not: vindication. The former denizens of conspiratorial right-wing internet forums like 4Chan, 8Chan, and 8Kun where the QAnon conspiracy subculture first burst into life have taken the recent release of files related to Epstein as proof that everything they once raved about is true. The problem? They’re wrong.
Last week, I received the kind of text message I love the most. “I have something you might be interested in,” it read, “but can you keep my name out of it?” I agreed, source confidentiality being a cornerstone of journalism, and was sent a document which did, in fact, interest me: it was a letter of engagement between the state’s 10th largest school district and a controversial law firm I have covered at length.
The Heritage Foundation is back with a new plan for remaking America in its own image. The think tank which masterminded Project 2025 released a new issue paper last month, this time focused on, as the title puts it, “Saving America by Saving the Family.” Where Project 2025 focused on dismantling and rebuilding public structures and government institutions in a bid to strengthen conservative, Christian nationalist political power, the group’s new initiative establishes a roadmap for remaking a more personal institution: the family.
