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.
Hold Rooms
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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.
EXCLUSIVE: ICE Locks Thousands, Including Kids, in 170 ‘Hold Rooms’ Nationwide. Here’s Where They Are.
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.