Pepper spray, health crises and rotten food: Inside Colorado’s only immigrant detention center

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.