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.
Originally published on April 24, 2025
Originally published on December 3, 2025
Originally published on October 16, 2025
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.
Colorado voters are no strangers to ballot initiatives: every two years, at least a handful of them appear on our ballots, giving voters a direct say in changing the state’s laws. It’s the process that gave us things like paid family and medical leave – which came from an initiative created and championed by former Rep. Matt Gray and the late Sen. Faith Winter – and recreational cannabis, and it’s the reason our November ballots are usually about eight pages long.
A major force has emerged in Colorado politics over the last five years, flooding the state with largely anonymous cash, reshaping dynamics on both the right and left sides of the aisle, and driving the conversation in ways which have directed both state budgets and ballot initiatives. The rise of Advance Colorado represents the most significant sea-change in the state’s political battlegrounds since Democrats first took control of the State House of Representatives in 2004. Despite the magnitude of the group’s influence, few in the local press corps have covered its rise to dominance, and even fewer have examined its inner-workings.
The biggest stars in the world are currently either bound for or departing from the small city of Indio, California, where the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival kicked off over the weekend and will continue through next Sunday. The festival, better known simply as ‘Coachella,’ draws annual crowds in the hundreds of thousands and gross revenues greater than $100 million, making it one of the highest-profile and most successful live music events in the world.
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.
