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.
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.
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.
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.
Living through history, the kind of history that you know will make it into the textbooks, is a surreal thing. The threats can be seen approaching for years on end, the parallels to other times in history can be perfectly obvious, and yet there can remain a thin, persistent membrane of unreality between us and the belief that what happened in those other times, those other places, can actually happen to us here.
Last Monday, Casa de Paz, an Aurora-based group that provides hospitality services to immigrants recently released from detention, issued a statement seeking volunteers to assist with their programs.
Last week two bills, each with the goal of protecting immigrant rights, passed through their respective chambers in the Colorado legislature. This is the second of two brief summaries of what each piece of legislation hopes to accomplish. The first can be found here.
Joe Biden has done a lot on immigration in a short amount of time — much of it good.
