Happenings
RMIAN is deeply disturbed by the shooting that occurred outside the Aurora immigration detention facility last night during a community protest. We are relieved that the injured protester is expected to survive, and our thoughts are with them as they recover.
Everyone has the fundamental and constitutional right to peacefully protest and to speak out against injustice without fear of violence. We unequivocally condemn this shooting and any act of violence that threatens the safety of those exercising their constitutional rights. This violence serves to intimidate and instill fear in our communities, in those held in the facility, and in those speaking up for immigrant rights.
For years, community members have gathered outside the Aurora immigration detention facility to peacefully bear witness to the harms of immigration detention and to advocate for the dignity and rights of those inside. Their voices are an essential part of our democracy.
As the investigation moves forward, we urge a full, transparent, and independent review of this incident. Violence has no place in our communities, and those responsible must be held accountable.
RMIAN remains steadfast in our commitment to protecting the rights of immigrants, advocating for an end to the expansion of immigration detention, and supporting the right of community members to peacefully demand a more just and humane immigration system
This article from CBS News discusses the new detention facility in Colorado. A government contractor announced Monday it has entered into a five-year agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to open a new federal immigration processing center northeast of Denver in Hudson.
The facility will be located in a former prison complex that has sat empty since 2014. The complex is owned by a real estate investment trust, Highlands REIT, and was opened in the 2000s. It was known as the Hudson Correctional Facility but will now be renamed the Big Horn Facility.
"We denounce this profit-motivated contract that will deeply harm immigrant communities in Colorado and our state as a whole," stated Mekela Goehring, executive director of Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.
This article from The Denver Post investigates an active case of tuberculosis at the Aurora immigration detention center. Adams County health officials confirmed the case, but they said facility officials haven’t complied with a public health order requiring access and interviews of affected detainees.
Shira Hereld, an attorney for the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network who works with detainees, said they were aware of two people who were placed in “precautionary” quarantine. Hereld said one sick patient was also moved from the facility, though it was unclear if that person had tuberculosis.
MEDIA INQUIRIES
Contacts:
Jodi Vongsakoun, development@rmian.org, RMIAN Director of Development & Communications
Mekela Goehring, mgoehring@rmian.org, RMIAN Executive Director
Westminster, Colorado, July 13, 2026—Today GEO Group announced that they have signed a five-year contract for $529 million with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to open a new immigration detention center in Hudson, Colorado, just north of Denver International Airport.
Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN) adamantly opposes and condemns the opening of this immigration detention facility, or any other immigration detention facility in Colorado.
“For over 25 years, RMIAN has worked at the Aurora immigration detention center, providing free legal information, legal representation, and social services to detained individuals in immigration proceedings. Our clients include long-standing and treasured community members, beloved family members, asylum seekers, survivors of trafficking and other crimes, young adults, and elders—all of whom have been imprisoned solely because of a civil immigration infraction. The impact of detention is far-reaching and devastating. We denounce this profit-motivated contract that will deeply harm immigrant communities in Colorado and our state as a whole,” states Mekela Goehring, Executive Director of Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.
RMIAN is seeking a Director of Social Work to lead the next chapter of its Social Service Project’s vital services, and to manage and support a strong team of social workers. The Director of Social Work will direct program strategy; supervise members of the team; oversee day-to-day operations, including grant management, evaluation and reporting; liaise with community partners and funders; carry a limited caseload; and participate on RMIAN’s Leadership Team to carry out the organization’s mission and strategic priorities.
The Andrew Carnegie Foundation announced its annual list of “Great Immigrants, Great Americans” yesterday, recognizing 25 distinguished naturalized citizens whose contributions have strengthened America. We are excited to share that the honorees include RMIAN Founding Board Member, Hiroshi Motomura! Professor Motomura, a leading scholar of U.S. immigration and citizenship law, said “I’m honored to be part of the 2026 Class, especially at this moment. Immigrants have been part of this nation since its inception, though it is sometimes forgotten in these times. And I am a small part of a greater story that reminds us that those who come to the United States help create a stronger union. I am grateful to Andrew Carnegie Foundation for this recognition.”
This article from CPR News highlights the relief felt by immigrants and allies after SCOTUS upheld the right to birthright citizenship. Tami Goodlette, RMIAN's Vice President of Legal Programs, said the alternate decision would have sparked widespread chaos for the organization’s hundreds of clients.
“Children who would have been born to our clients here in this country would not have been citizens and that would have had a devastating effect,” Goodlette said. “And that’s not only on their families but also on hundreds of thousands of children and babies born in the United States going forward.”
Refugee Action Coalition of Colorado and Keep Families Together Coalition, including RMIAN, respond to recent Supreme Court decisions.
We welcome the U.S. Supreme Court's June 30, 2026 decision affirming birthright citizenship, but are deeply concerned about the harmful implications of two U.S. Supreme Court rulings issued on June 25, 2026, affecting asylum seekers and individuals with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Read the full statement here.
RMIAN has an immediate opening for a full-time Litigation Senior Staff Attorney who will work within RMIAN’s Advocacy & Litigation Program.
RMIAN seeks a litigator experienced in immigration and constitutional law as well as detention issues. This role is designed for someone who has experience with civil litigation. The caseload will primarily involve habeas corpus challenges to unlawful detention and subsequent appeals as well as other civil litigation before the district court and petitions for review before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
RMIAN has an immediate opening for a full-time Resource Coordinator who will work within RMIAN’s Social Service Project (SSP) and will be supervised by RMIAN’s Supervising Social Worker. The Resource Coordinator is bilingual in Spanish and English, provides case management support to clients receiving legal representation from RMIAN, and supports SSP in resource development and internal organization.
RMIAN has an immediate opening for a full-time Pro Se Staff Attorney in our Detention Program to provide legal information for clients detained at the Aurora Contract Detention Facility. RMIAN’s legal orientation program is a know-your-rights program that seeks to educate and inform individuals detained at the Aurora immigration detention facility about their rights in removal proceedings, court procedures, release options, and relief from removal.
This position is meant for an attorney dedicated to equal justice for all - someone who has experience in immigration law, particularly removal defense (and preferably in a detained setting).
As a member of Colorado’s Keep Families Together coalition, RMIAN strongly condemns the recent USCIS memorandum that may require certain green card applicants to leave the country to continue their applications. This policy risks disrupting the lives and livelihoods of international students, tourists, individuals on certain temporary work visas, humanitarian parolees, certain family members of U.S. citizens, and many others by forcing them to bear burdensome travel requirements, including the potential emotional, developmental, and social toll of separation from dependents or other loved ones. Read the full statement here.
This recent piece from The Denver Post examines how fear of detention, legal uncertainty, and mounting pressure are impacting immigrants and their families across Colorado. “When we’re working with folks who are detained, the financial strain and emotional strain on the family and community is making it less likely that people will fight their case when they have a legal right to do so,” said Cindy Schlosser, a social worker who oversees the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network’s social service project.”…It’s not just the detention, but the detention without the hope of reasonable release that puts families and their loved ones who’re detained in these impossible situations to decide, ‘Should I be deported or not?’”
The Colorado Sun ran this moving and insightful opinion piece, written by an attorney who attended a RMIAN immigration training, about his experiences with immigration court and a habeas case.
As ICE enforcement increases in our communities, many more of our clients are being wrongfully detained and held in prolonged detention. RMIAN is fighting to ensure immigrants' rights are protected by utilizing its litigation expertise to bring habeas petitions before the federal court—a way to challenge this unlawful confinement. This Denver Post article covers the surge in habeas cases. As Shira Hereld, RMIAN Staff Attorney, said in the article "habeas is the only way that most folks are getting out of detention, and more folks are being both arrested and held in detention than ever before.”
During President Donald Trump’s first year back in office, 4,750 people without legal status were arrested by federal immigration authorities in Colorado, new data shows, reflecting a near-quadrupling of the prior year’s arrest rate.
“They’re not at all surprising,” Laura Lunn, an immigration attorney with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, said of the numbers. “They’re (emotionally) deflating, but not surprising.”
“Obviously, so much has happened since this administration took over, but I think a lot of folks don’t necessarily remember that Trump announced Operation Aurora shortly (before) he took office,” she continued. “Communities in Denver and Aurora were targeted for mass enforcement actions. We saw military-grade vehicles rolling down the streets of Denver before we saw the same thing happening in L.A., Chicago, Minneapolis.”
RMIAN Executive Director, Mekela Goehring, and Children’s Program Managing Attorney, Ashley Harrington, will be presenting at the Iliff School of Theology to share about actions community members can take today to advocate for our neighbors. Wednesday, April 29, at 12:00 via Zoom. Register here.
RMIAN’s Executive Director, Mekela Goehring, and Director of Advocacy & Litigation, Laura Lunn, discuss immigration detention with RMIAN founding Board Member Hiroshi Motomura on his podcast “Unsettled: Immigration in Turbulent Times.” Have a listen to this insightful conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Castbox or Zolberg Podcasts.
Habeas Training by RMIAN and Colorado Bar Association
On April 28, 2026, RMIAN and the CBA-CLE are providing a half-day training on the nuts and bolts of representing clients in habeas petitions. A group of experts will walk you through the ins and outs of filing habeas petitions, answer burning questions, and offer robust materials that will ease the burden of learning how to file and present habeas petitions in the District Court for the District of Colorado with a litigation goal focused on securing clients’ freedom from detention. The event is free for anyone committing to take on a pro bono case in the next two years and the program has been submitted for four General CLE Credits.
The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network has a “robust attorney-referral program,” according to Laura Lunn, its advocacy and litigation director. “Knowing the rules is absolutely the best tool we have at our disposal,” she says.
RMIAN and 23 other Colorado organizations sent a letter to the members of our Congressional delegation demanding an investigation into and accountability for the death of Delvin Francisco Rodriguez , a Colorado resident from Summit County, who died in ICE detention after being transferred to an ICE detention center in Mississippi.
Immigration attorneys say use of 'pretermission' raises due process concerns for people seeking asylum
Monique Sherman said: “If somebody has never been to a country, they really deserve some time to learn about that country and figure out if they think they would be safe there and to be able to come up with those arguments,” Sherman said. “This is concerning in all cases, but when somebody has an attorney, we’re able to at least give them a fighting chance, and we have won several oppositions to these motions.
“But most people don’t have lawyers,” she said. “We meet with as many of those people as we can to advise them of their rights, and we’ve met with several who were just blindsided by this.”
“Our lawyers and our social workers are on the front lines every day, fighting for justice, ensuring that kids are not forced to represent themselves in immigration court,” said Mekela Goehring, executive director at RMIAN.
Goehring says while donations from small businesses were not finalized by Friday night, the organization received more than $18,000 from more than 100 new community donors on Friday alone.
“This has been a powerful day and just an amazing showing of support at a time in which things have felt certainly quite dark,” Goehring said. “Proud to be a Coloradan today.”
RMIAN joined 1,025 organizations in expressing our horror, outrage and deep grief about the continued violent attacks on our immigrant communities and communities of color, as well as their many allies and supporters. We signed on to a letter to Congress demanding “an immediate halt in all funding for these deadly operations until the violence, abuses, and deaths in American communities and in immigration detention centers stop. Congress must refuse to provide one dollar to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Border Patrol through the appropriations process and immediately take action to revoke the tens of billions already given through last summer’s reconciliation bill.”
This report aims to document the historic expansion of detention under the Trump administration. It details not only the policy changes which have led to ICE detention reaching the highest level on record, but also their impact on the individuals who have found themselves locked into it. The growth in immigration detention, and the spectacle which has accompanied the construction and use of new facilities — coupled with the near-elimination of any transparency into the operation and use of those facilities — is the backbone of President Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
As this report reveals, rather than focusing on serious public safety threats and flight risks, the Trump administration is primarily using detention to pressure people into giving up their chance to remain in the United States.
RMIAN joined more than 400 other civil rights and human rights organizations to call on Congress to rein in the escalating violence and lawlessness endangering our communities.
Arrest rates through mid-October increased fourfold over 2024
Monique Sherman, the Detention Program Managing Attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, said that the data matches her expectations, and that a much larger share of detained people she saw this year were apprehended internally — at work, home or during a traffic stop — rather than at the border.
On Monday afternoon, December 22nd, Jeannette Vizguerra-Ramirez walked out of the Aurora Immigration Detention Center into the loving arms of her family, after nine long months inside the facility.
Laura Lunn, RMIAN Director of Advocacy & Littigation, celebrated her release, saying “For decades, Jeanette has advocated for her community. When she was detained earlier this year, she needed her community to step up for her - and that is exactly what they did, showing up at vigils each week to remind her and others detained that they are not forgotten. RMIAN is honored to be a part of the team supporting Jeanette, the larger immigrant rights movement, and engaging in necessary legal battles to ensure that people can speak out without facing unlawful restrictions on their liberty and impermissible limits on their freedom of speech.”
In 2025, a year marked by what some lawyers describe as attacks on the rule of law, a Colorado federal judge preliminarily blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from conducting warrantless arrests in the state without determining probable cause.
Laura Lunn, director of advocacy and litigation at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, said that in a year when people across Colorado have been "terrorized" by mass enforcement actions and "brutal" arrests, the ruling made clear that ICE cannot conduct warrantless arrests without showing good reason.
Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network loses $1 million in federal funding cuts
“There have been major increases in immigration enforcement and detention, loss of vital legal protections, increases in fear and attacks on the immigrant community, exponential increases on removals, unlawful removals and, on top of all of that, RMIAN has seen deep losses in funding to all of our work,” Goehring said. “You’re starting with a deeply unjust and unfair process where there isn’t a whole lot of due process, and what we’ve seen is that all those hardships have been compounded because of a series of both policy and legal decisions the federal government has made.”