Nonprofit Builds Real Time Network To Monitor ICE In Western Colorado

By Jennifer Brown | The Colorado Sun

Voces Unidas de las Montañas began as a political organization for Latinos. It pivoted when the federal immigration crackdown came to Colorado.

CONFIRMADO.

The Facebook post in Spanish is a community alarm for Colorado mountain towns along Interstate 70, a warning to stay alert because ICE is in action. Confirmed, it translates, a person was taken by ICE agents as he left the Mesa County Courthouse in Grand Junction at 10 a.m. May 1.

Three days earlier: CONFIRMADO, a person with legal immigration status was taken by ICE agents from the parking lot of an apartment complex in Grand Junction. 

And a few days before that: CONFIRMADO, federal immigration agents took a man from the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs. 

The warnings from Voces Unidas de las Montañas have continued for more than a year, picking up in intensity whenever the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown ramps up. They are alerts but also an accounting — a list of people taken from their community when no real-time public accounting from the government exists. 

A man who had just stepped outside his home in Craig to go to work. A person who pulled over after what Voces Unidas calls a “fake traffic stop” along U.S. 50 in Montrose. A man at the airport in Eagle who was about to board a flight to his home country of Nicaragua. Instead, he went to the ICE detention center in Aurora. 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE COLORADO SUN