By RMV Editorial Board
Hundreds gathered outside a dormant prison in tiny Hudson this week. They braved freezing cold to protest plans for a new ICE detention center. Signs demanded justice.
CBS Colorado captured the scene.
One organizer told reporters the facility would not protect or serve communities. A resident feared people packed like sardines in a can. Another warned expansion drives families into shadows and erodes trust.
The last census puts Hudson at 1,651 people. Someone at the protest warned that a 1,200-bed detention center would somehow double the town overnight.
That only works if detention beds are treated as permanent neighbors, or if the facility somehow brings in far more people than it did when it operated as a prison with roughly the same capacity.
It didn’t. When the site functioned as a prison, it supported about 200 jobs. And Colorado families aren’t exactly modeled after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with seven children or Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy with nine. The average family size here is three. By any measure, the math doesn’t hold.
The demonstrations reflect deeper resistance across Colorado. Liberals fight federal immigration enforcement at every turn. They do so as taxpayers carry heavy costs from past migrant surges.
Taxpayer costs from migrant surge
Common Sense Institute crunched the numbers. From late 2022 through November 2024, Denver metro spent an estimated $356 million responding to the migrant surge.
About $79 million came straight out of city budgets for shelters, housing, transportation and food. Metro schools absorbed an estimated $228 million a year to educate more than 16,000 new migrant students. Hospitals quietly shouldered another $49 million in uncompensated care.
All told, the cost comes out to about 8 percent of Denver’s 2025 budget.
The chart shows how the City of Denver’s $79 million share of migrant spending was allocated by category between December 2022 and November 2024. School and hospital costs are additional.
White House officials note early relief from President Trump delivering on the mandate that elected him to serve again. Mass deportations helped drop home prices in migrant-heavy cities like Denver for the first time in years.
Yet even as enforcement begins to ease measurable pressures on housing and services, opposition has only grown louder—less focused on results, more driven by narrative.
Students joined the protests too. At Summit High School in Frisco, kids walked out and screamed against ICE. Some called President Trump a dictator.
The scene was captured on video.
Schools already strain under those enrollment costs. The chants cheer open borders anyway.
State leaders push resistance
Governor Jared Polis has taken to the microphone to define the moral terms of the debate.
“We’re in this work to make life better, more affordable, safer for all of our fellow Coloradans,” Polis said. “Meanwhile, over the past 12 months, it seems like Washington has often been in it to break it down — to make life harder and less affordable, to make Americans feel more fearful, more belligerent, and more vulnerable.”
He returned repeatedly to a familiar refrain.
“This is not the Colorado way,” Polis said. “Driving up costs with tariff taxes is not the Colorado way. Ripping away critical food and health access — not the Colorado way. Tearing families apart with a costly and often cruel immigration agenda is not the Colorado way.”
That message was delivered just as Colorado expanded legal and regulatory barriers to federal enforcement inside the state.
The governor’s remarks are captured in the clip below.
The Gazette’s editorial board recently reached a conclusion RMV agrees with, based on the historical record. Colorado functions as a sanctuary state.
State leaders rarely use the word themselves, but their actions speak clearly. Attorney General Phil Weiser launched an online portal for residents to submit allegations of ICE misconduct, saying “nobody stands above the rule of law,” even federal agents.
House Speaker Julie McCluskie struck a similar note when the legislative session opened. Democrats, she vowed, would not “shove our immigrant and LGBTQ neighbors back into the shadows.”
Days later, a protester outside the Hudson facility used nearly the same language. Expanding detention, he warned, “drives families into the shadows.”
Now Democrats want to write the rhetoric into Colorado statute. Senate Bill 26-005, introduced last week, would create a new state cause of action for alleged rights violations tied to civil immigration enforcement. Its reach extends to “any person, whether or not acting under color of law.”
Sheriffs have warned the bill functions as a litigation trap—one that chills cooperation not by prohibition, but by risk.
Governor Polis insists officers can still work with federal partners on criminal matters. DEA officials say the reality on the ground is more constrained. Fear of lawsuits carrying penalties of up to $50,000 is already changing how officers share information and coordinate with federal agents.
Democrats broadened similar restrictions last session. Those laws are now the subject of a federal challenge.
Contracts contradict activist claims
ACLU of Colorado drove much of the document fight, filing repeated lawsuits to force the release of records tied to ICE’s detention expansion plans.
Public statements from advocacy groups focused on redactions and secrecy. Leaders described the detention system as a “cruel and brutal deportation machine,” driven by private prisons and operating largely out of public view.
The released pages tell another story.
They are heavily redacted. In a national climate where assaults against ICE officers have increased by more than 1,300%, shielding agent identities and internal contact information reads less like secrecy and more like basic risk management.
FOIA disclosures show email chains redacted to protect agent identities and contact information, citing privacy and safety concerns.
After months of litigation, the result was not revelation but paperwork. ICE had issued a $39 million, six-month letter contract to the GEO Group for detention services at the Hudson facility.
Contract proposal language disclosed through FOIA litigation.
The contracts are specific about how facilities must operate, from providing basic and intermediate medical care to maintaining on-site mental health services, emergency evacuation protocols and access to nearby hospitals.
Food service must meet defined quality and nutrition requirements. Hygiene fixtures are governed by specified ratios tied to detainee counts.
Transportation is not ad hoc. The contracts require secure escorts for medical appointments, court hearings and attorney visits.
Excerpt from ICE detention service requirements disclosed through litigation.
That disconnect—between rhetoric and record—now defines Colorado’s immigration debate.
The documents do not answer every policy question. They do answer one persistent claim: detention expansion is not proceeding in a vacuum, nor without written standards governing care, transport and oversight.
Those mandates stand in contrast to the scenes staged outside the Hudson facility. The contracts describe a regulated system at a time when Colorado’s own public institutions have struggled to absorb the costs of illegal immigration.
Coloradans are now living with state policies that earlier Democrat leaders rejected outright and worked to enforce in the opposite direction.
Voters demanded national immigration enforcement back on election day in 2024, and early results suggest the pressure points—housing, safety and affordability—are beginning to respond.
State leaders can continue treating enforcement as an ideological threat. Or they can acknowledge reality and reduce the burden their policies have placed on taxpayers and communities.
The record is not hidden. It is simply inconvenient.
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