This blog post from Colorado Health Foundation CEO Karen McNeil Miller discusses the escalating uncertainty immigrant, refugee, and LGBTQ+ communities are facing as federal enforcement reaches deeper into everyday life and the importance of resisting attempts to sew division.

“Immigrant, refugee, and transgender Coloradans are part of our families, schools, workplaces, and communities. They are bearing the most direct and immediate harm, but the consequences affect us all. When neighbors are made less safe, children are afraid to attend school, or people cannot access the care they need, the trust and connection that help communities thrive begin to break down. 

To immigrant, refugee, and transgender Coloradans, we see you. You belong here. To the organizations working alongside these communities, we have your back.

Don’t take the bait. Stand up for one another and keep working together toward a Colorado where everyone has what they need to live a healthy life. I’ve seen what is possible when Coloradans come together. We can create communities where more people thrive.”

Read the full blog post here.

The Colorado Rapid Response Network (CORRN), alongside the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) released its 2025-2026 Community Report, a comprehensive analysis documenting trends, experiences, and community impacts related to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal immigration enforcement activity across the state. The report draws on a year and a half of data collected through the CORRN hotline and the relaunched Docuteam, revealing that ICE operations occur nearly every day in Colorado, with notable hotspots in Aurora, Denver, Colorado Springs, Glenwood Springs, and Durango.

Read the full report here.

RMIAN applauds Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser for filing a lawsuit in federal court today to halt the proposed immigration detention center in Hudson, Colorado. If allowed to open, this detention center would nearly double immigration detention in Colorado. Every day RMIAN sees the devastating impact of immigration detention on individuals, families, and our state as a whole. RMIAN adamantly opposes and condemns the opening of this immigration detention facility, or any other immigration detention facility in Colorado.

Join us at Plymouth UCC for a community advocacy forum opposing Amendment 81. Learn how Amendment 81 could affect your community and how to take action.

Únete a nosotros en la iglesia Plymouth UCC para una foro de abogacia en contra de la Enmienda 81. Aprenda cómo la Enmienda 81 podría afectar a tu comunidad y como tomar accion.

Communities United Against Amendment 81/
Comunidades Unidas Contra la Enmienda 81
Sunday, October 4th
4-5:30pm
Plymouth UCC, Fort Collins CO

Register Here

More than 12,000 detainees have been booked into ICE’s Aurora facility — run by Geo Group — since January 2025. This article from The Denver Post goes into the facility’s poor and dangerous conditions. Current and former detainees described frequent fights and feelings of hopelessness. They say they’re often served inedible or rotten food that frequently gives them diarrhea. They speak of enduring summers without air conditioning and taking boiling-hot showers behind tattered and dirty curtains. Living quarters resound with sneezes and coughs, they say, either from the dust spewed from unreliable air conditioning or from the illnesses spread among the more than 12,000 detainees who have been booked into the facility since January 2025. To report this story, The Post spoke with eight current and former detainees and more than a dozen advocates, attorneys and experts.

“The conditions inside the facility are not good right now,” said Monique Sherman, detention program managing attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network. “We are seeing people who are sick, people not able to access medical care, and people who are being assaulted, and most of our clients don’t feel comfortable talking to us about something if somebody who works at the facility is listening.”

Set between train tracks, highways and nondescript warehouses, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s privately run Aurora facility has long been criticized for its conditions. Three detainees died there between 2012 and 2022. Geo Group, its operator, has been the subject of lawsuits, regular oversight visits from members of Congress, and reports and protests by advocacy groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Attorneys and advocates argued that conditions in the facility were not accidental. Geo is one of the nation’s largest and most profitable private prison companies, and problems within its Aurora facility are well known.

“We’re detaining people at an extraordinary cost in large part because we are using detention as a way of brutalizing people in order to get them to self-deport,” said Chapin, the attorney and CU law professor. “The system wants people to give up and leave, and it’s been fairly effective, except we still have thousands and thousands of people in detention.”

Read the full article here.

Every year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subjects hundreds of thousands of people to civil immigration detention—a practice that is unjust, inhumane, and completely unnecessary. It does so under a veil of secrecy, sharing only limited, often error-prone statistics with the public.  

This week, Vera Institute updated its ICE Detention Trends dashboard with new data through early August 2026, presenting Vera’s analysis of millions of detention history records over nearly an 18-year period. This interactive data tool reveals an unprecedented level of detail about ICE detention populations—nationally and across the 1,438 facilities in which ICE has detained people—on each day of the nearly 18-year period covering fiscal year 2009 through the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026. 

Additionally, Vera published a report detailing 10 key takeaways from its analysis of the most recently available ICE detention data through August 5, 2026—obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and shared last week by the Deportation  Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Please join the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network and CBA-CLE for our annual Immigration Law CLE training! 

Date: October 22, 2026
Time: 9am - 1pm
Location: CBA CLE East Classroom

The need for legal representation in immigration proceedings is greater than ever. Build your skills for defending and advancing the rights of non-citizens during this half-day training, offered both in-person and virtually. This training is great for immigration and non-immigration attorneys who have one or fewer years of immigration law experience, and for attorneys who have experience in one area of immigration law and are interested in learning about a new case type.

• Legal research strategies for pro bono immigration matters

• Legal writing for an immigration adjudicator audience

• Novel topics in custody re-determination hearings before the immigration court

Attorneys who agree to take a pro bono case through RMIAN attend for only $75.

Register Here

Cooking for Culture, a community bake sale launched by local organizers, is excited to announce the lineup of participating vendors for its second annual event on Sunday, August 23, from 10 a.m. until goods sell out, at Joyride Brewing (2501 Sheridan Blvd, Edgewater, CO 80214).

The Cooking for Culture community bake sale will feature a variety of baked goods from local food vendors, bakeries, and restaurants. One hundred percent of proceeds will benefit Kaizen Food Rescue, a Denver-based nonprofit founded on the principle that food is a human right, and the Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network (RMIAN), which provides free immigration legal and social services to children and detained adults in need.

“RMIAN is overjoyed to be a recipient of the 2nd Annual Cooking for Culture Community Bake Sale. Community support and a deep recognition of the incredible contributions of immigrant community members drive our work. RMIAN's team works every day to provide free legal representation and social support for children who otherwise would be forced to navigate a complex and adversarial court system entirely on their own. RMIAN also provides free legal representation to individuals in civil immigration detention. Our clients include long-standing 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. Thank you for supporting RMIAN's work for equal access to justice," says Mekela Goehring, RMIAN Executive Director.

This article from Colorado Public Radio offers a positive update on the reports of tuberculosis at the Aurora immigrant detention center. Colorado’s health department issued a public health order Thursday to GEO Group in a push to allow health authorities to investigate the possible spread of the dangerous disease.

The move comes two months after the Adam County health department was notified of a case of suspected TB, triggering its push to conduct a routine investigation. “Colorado should never have been forced to issue a public health order to gain access to an immigration detention facility for a communicable disease investigation,” said Monique Sherman, managing attorney of the detention program at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, via email.  

She called on GEO to comply, saying detention facilities have a “legal and moral responsibility to protect the health and well-being of every person in their custody.”

Earlier this week, the government let a legal-services contract that provided access to lawyers for tens of thousands of immigrant kids lapse. This article offers a breakdown on the devastating impacts ending this funding will have on unaccompanied children, and on the organizations who provide these legal services.

As a result of this decision, at least one nonprofit has laid off staff. Others count the days until their funding runs out. Ethics also limit how many cases lawyers can take on, says Emily Brock, deputy managing attorney for the children’s program at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, an Acacia subcontractor.

“It’s a preparation and capacity issue,” she says. “Especially as the government makes it harder and harder to pursue relief.”

With the funding lapse, Ms. Brock says her organization can’t take on new cases.

“The onus shouldn’t be on us to be fundraising to provide services that the federal government is statutorily required to provide,” she says.

For nearly two decades, the federal government has funded legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children because Congress recognized that children cannot fairly navigate the U.S. immigration system on their own. On Friday, July 31, 2026, the Trump administration ended the federal contract with Acacia Center for Justice, effectively dismantling the nationwide network of nearly 100 legal service providers, including RMIAN, that provide counsel to more than 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children. This decision leaves thousands of children—including survivors of abuse, trafficking, and persecution—without legal representation at one of the most consequential moments of their lives.

RMIAN will continue fighting alongside its clients and working with partners across the country to ensure that children are not denied the justice and protection they deserve. 

This interview with RMIAN Executive Director Mekela Goehring examines that dangers of a private company operating immigrant detention centers. GEO Group, a private company operating immigrant detention centers, is set to expand its holding capacity in Colorado after signing a $529 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to open a new center just north of Denver International Airport.

The move comes as GEO continues to deny health officials access to determine the extent of a tuberculosis outbreak reported in its Aurora facility.

Mekela Goehring, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, which represents detained individuals, says GEO’s mandate to create profit for shareholders is fundamentally at odds with the health and well-being of people being held.

"Costs are cut in terms of the medical care that's provided to individuals and in terms of the provision of food and services," Goehring outlined. "You simply are not running a facility in the way that it would be run if profit wasn't the number one motive."

House Plan to Pass Anti-Children, Anti-Family, and Anti-Asylum H.R. 9773 Is Abdication of Congress’ Commitment to Freedom.

Over 100 national, state, and local groups call on Congress to uniformly reject HR 9773

After writing a historic blank check to ICE and Border Patrol to further assault our communities, the Trump administration’s allies in Congress are eyeing their next target: children and people fleeing for their lives. The House Judiciary Committee is moving to mark up a new version of H.R.2, a bill anti-immigrant members of Congress first introduced in 2023 to spread fear of a “mass invasion” by immigrants, pit American citizens against their immigrant neighbors, and scapegoat them for the nation’s problems. If passed, this bill would codify the most extreme anti-asylum and anti-children policies in modern American history.

While wrongly touted as a “border security” bill, HR 9773 would have disastrous consequences for people who live here. The bill creates arbitrary penalties to criminalize longtime community members who will suddenly face deportation, when combined with the recent policy aimed at severely restricting the ability for people to gain permanent status in the United States. This will lead to families being separated, chaos in our work force, and an expansion of immigration detention and deportation for longtime residents, including those pushed out of status due to U.S. bureaucratic delays.   

Read the full statement and see the full list of signers here.

Advocacy groups say detainees are getting photocopies of mail, letters are being returned to sender with long delays.

Natalie Petrucci, detention program deputy managing attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, said their organization has also seen a change in immigrants’ mail services, including long delays in sending and receiving mail.

As people make their way through immigration court, oftentimes the only way they can present evidence to help obtain asylum or bond is via documents sent through the mail, like letters confirming they have housing or documented proof that they’ve paid taxes, Petrucci said. With mail held up in sometimes months-long backlogs, Petrucci said immigrants within the detention center have to attend court hearings without the evidence they need to advocate for themselves.

“People are having to move forward on their cases without their critical case evidence,” Petrucci said. “We know of examples where their mail didn’t make it in time for their court cases.”

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.