New Report Exposes Pervasive ICE Enforcement Across Colorado, Challenging Perception of Limited Activity

The report documents daily ICE operations across Colorado and the communities most affected

Denver, CO – 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.

The report challenges the perception that ICE activity is limited in Colorado, demonstrating instead that enforcement operations are a daily reality concentrated in immigrant-majority neighborhoods. It underscores the impact of CORRN’s statewide network, which has oriented and provided in-depth support to 519 impacted individuals and their loved ones while offering emergency referrals and tips to thousands more.

“The strength and reach of our network is unprecedented,” said Henry Sandman, Co-Executive Director at The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. “About 90% of Coloradans live in the same zip code as a volunteer from our network.As we trained over 2,250 confirmers and 50 trainers across the state in the last year and a half, we saw calls and incidents spread from the I-70 corridor to the Western Slope and the Eastern Plains. This report will help us build an even stronger network and weave connections between impacted neighborhoods and nearby allies.”

Key Findings from the Report

1. Statewide Enforcement with Disparate Visibility: Our data concludes that immigration enforcement actions mostly take place in concentrated areas of immigrant majority communities across Colorado. ICE returns to the same small precinct or block level of addresses a second or third time from one year to the next. While the agency might detain one individual at a time, they are often returning for other people in that individual’s community. ICE is actively picking apart families and neighborhoods in a way that is designed to be invisible to the citizen community. Someone who lives in a majority citizen, majority white area will not see the enforcement happening repeatedly just three miles away. It may take weeks for the larger community to learn a worker, parent, neighbor, or friend is gone. ICE has created two Colorados: one in which people are alert, cautious, caring, afraid, and feeling surrounded. The other in which citizens are holding their breath, waiting for an “occupation to begin” or “things to get bad” to take more action.
2. Time in the United States: Both Dispatcher intakes and Docuteam documentation show that the majority of detained individuals have been in the United States for less than 10 years. Alarming is the shift toward targeting people who have been in the country for over 20 years, individuals with established lives, businesses, citizen children, and deep community ties.
3. People with Pending Applications Being Detained: Docuteam data finds that 37% of those detained had a pending asylum application, family petition, U visa, or other type of pending immigration application.
4. U.S. Citizens Being Detained: Dispatcher intakes tracked three U.S. citizens detained in separate incidents involving ICE partnerships with federal and local law enforcement. All three were held in immigrant detention for 12–48 hours before being released.
5. Impact to Children: Of those detained, 73% have children, including 18% who have U.S.-citizen children. In many instances, children are present during ICE detentions, exposing them to trauma.

The report concludes that the current immigration system is set up for failure, whether by denying a pathway to citizenship or by trapping and deceiving individuals who attempt to gain legal status through asylum or other forms of relief. It also highlights growing concern over potential collaboration between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement, as well as federal overreach under the current administration.