This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
A new 1,200 bed immigration detention facility is coming to a rural town northeast of Denver.
The GEO Group, which already runs an immigration detention facility in Aurora, announced plans Monday to expand to Hudson in a now-shuttered facility they used as a prison until 2014. Federal securities filings show the building is owned by a subsidiary of a Chicago company, Highlands REIT, a real estate investment trust. They will be paid $250,000 per month to start on Aug. 1, with that rent going up to nearly $1 million a month in six months, or as soon as the facility is occupied.
Monday’s announcement comes after activists across Colorado have, for months, tried to track down information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s interest in growing detention capacity in the state.
The ACLU of Colorado sued the Department of Homeland Security last year for refusing to comply with a federal Freedom of Information Act request tied to its expansion. That lawsuit resulted in several hundreds of pages of heavily redacted data dumps that confirmed that the federal agency was scoping out a number of locations across Colorado to build more detention space.
“As ICE escalates its aggression across Colorado and the country, we must demand more answers not less,” said Tim Macdonald, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado, said in a statement. “We must have more transparency into how they plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to imprison more people who have not been convicted of any crime.”
The current Aurora ICE Processing Center last year expanded its capacity to 1,530 and officials reported to Democratic Rep. Jason Crow’s office that they were nearing capacity. That means it’s among the 10 biggest populations of immigrant detainees in the country, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
GEO Group said that the Hudson facility opening, which will be called the Big Horn Facility, will generate $85 million in annual revenue in the first full year of operations. Services at Big Hornwill include the exclusive use of the facility, along with security, maintenance, recreational amenities, medical care, legal counsel and food services, the company said.
Andrea Loya, who runs Casa de Paz, an organization that helps immigrants reunite with families, said she’s been tracking progress at the Hudson building since February.
Loya has gone out to visit the area and taken pictures, witnessing deliveries, infrastructure improvements, including water and road construction, she said.
“They’ve been very blatantly working around the facility,” Loya said. “For six months we heard it wasn’t happening, the city of Hudson declined it was happening. There is a very serious concern about what transparency looks like right now.”
Hudson Mayor Joe Hammock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Loya said she’s concerned about the proximity of emergency services to the Hudson facility. The Casa de Paz office is across the street from the Aurora detention facility and she said they see daily calls for emergency vehicles.
“This GEO Group does not have the capacity or the ability to house human lives safely,” she said. “They’re putting a facility miles and miles away with less transparency and less oversight.”
The nearest fire station from the new Big Horn facility is two miles away and the nearest hospital is 12 miles away in Brighton, according to documents obtained by the ACLU of Colorado. DIA is 30 miles away, the documents said.
Denver activist Dana Miller has been tracking ICE expansion across Colorado, including holding spaces in various locations around the state, and said the system is cruel because it’s detention without due process.
“We don’t need more of this unfair incarceration in Colorado,” she said.
ICE did not respond to an immediate request for comment on detention expansion in Colorado or how they plan to use the facility.
