by Jacob Richards
On September 25, the City of Glenwood Springs quietly filed a lawsuit in the 9th Judicial District Court against ICE’s landlord JG Housing Solutions, a company based in Parrish Florida.
At the heart of the controversy is the ICE Field Office located at 100 Midland Ave., and the “hold-room” at the facility used to detain immigrants before transporting them to the Geo Group’s for-profit ICE detention center in Aurora.
The original permits for the Glenwood Springs facility, issued back in 2004, specifically limited detention times to no more than 12 hours. In an April 28 Planning and Zoning Commission meeting, the board voted to revoke the ICE facilities Special Use Permit. The decision was based on data obtained via FOIA request by the Deportation Data Project (DDP), which showed regular stays at the facility of over 12 hours and ICE’s own Trump-era policy changes to allow for stays of up to 72 hours in ‘hold-rooms.”
ICE and the owner of the multi-unit building did not speak in their defense at the April 28 hearing, likewise they did not appeal the P&Z Commission’s decision in the allotted time.
Glenwood Springs land use code was updated in 2018, and now does not allow detention facilities under any circumstances
Undeterred in this lawless era of MAGA fascism, ICE continued to use the now unpermitted ‘hold-room.’ According to DDP data, ICE detained a 44 year-old man from Mexico on May 22 in the now unpermitted ‘hold-room.’ In total, twenty-seven people were detained in the unpermitted facility between May 22, to August 4, and this represents only the most current available information which was released on August 26.
On July 23, ICE detained an El Salvadorian man in the unpermitted ICE facility. While at the facility he experienced a medical emergency and required transport to the local hospital, giving advocates and the city their first hard evidence that the facility was still being used as a detention facility. Prompting an agenda item at the August 6 City Council meeting, where the city council voted 6 to 1 to sue ICE’s landlord JG Housing Solutions for the continued code violations.
ICE issued a statement after the city council meeting that seemed to admit that they are knowingly still using the facility as a detention center. “… ICE is not holding detainees for more than 12 hours at the facility in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. This is a processing facility, not a detention facility.”
The length of stay is moot point because they no longer have the permits to confine anyone for any length of time in that facility. ICE’s own ‘ICE National Detention Standards’ makes clear that ‘hold-rooms’ are detention centers, defining them as a “secure area used for temporary confinement of detainees.”
Then nothing happened. The DDP data dropped on August 26, showing 27 individual detentions in the unpermitted ‘hold-room.’ Then nothing for another month.
Glenwood Springs didn’t even issue a press release in conjunction with the filing of the September 25 lawsuit, and Rocky Mountain PBS scooped all the media in the state. The lack of fanfare is curious, considering this potentially precedent setting case is the biggest news to story coming out of the small town of Glenwood Springs.
In the seventeen-page filling, the city is asking for court to declare that leasing a property for purposes not permitted by local land use code is in fact a violation of the code; that owners may not lease a property in violation of the city’s code; and that the city “may recover a fine of $1000 a day from the first violation of the Code and for each and every day until the violations cease ($133,000 as of today); or alternatively, a $1,000 for each specific violation of the Code ($27,000 documentable detentions).
They are also asking the court for an injunction ordering JG Housing Solutions to quit leasing to ICE for the purposes of detention, as well as court costs and “further relief as the court deems just …”
Glenwood Springs activists have done the heavy-lifting of filing CORA requests, complaints, showing up at public comment, educating their community and pressuring the City to hold ICE and their landlord to the same laws any and every business owner or property owner in the city has to follow.
The Glenwood Springs community’s demands for justice and transparency echoes the larger battle currently underway in Hudson, Colorado where Towards Justice and now the Colorado Attorney General have filed suit to prevent the permitting of another long-term ICE detention center.
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