HUDSON — More than 70 people protested Saturday against plans to open a new immigrant detention center near a rural community north of Denver, with organizers calling on state and local leaders to stop the facility from reopening.
Carrying signs that likened immigrant detention facilities to concentration camps, protesters organized mass phone calls to Gov. Jared Polis’ office and to elected officials in Hudson, urging them to oppose the reopening of the Hudson Correctional Facility. They chanted and voiced broader opposition to the mass arrest-and-deportation program undertaken by the Trump administration, the scale of which prompted federal officials this year to seek new detention options in Colorado.
Jessica Hernandez and her sister Michelle, both of Greeley, held a sign for their father, who they said was a military veteran deported in 2005. He still lives in Juarez, Mexico, they said. As protesters chanted and spoke into a microphone, tuba player Yehuda Serotta punctuated sentences and chants with the horn slung across his body.
“Excuse my language, it’s [expletive],” Michelle M., who provided only her last initial because of concerns about her job, said of the plans to reopen the Hudson prison. “We don’t need another detention center here.”
About 30 miles northeast of Denver, Hudson’s once-privately run prison has been shuttered for more than a decade. But documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union indicated that its owners had offered the prison to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a potential new detention center. In August, members of Colorado’s congressional delegation were told that the Hudson facility was going to reopen for that purpose.
Shortly after, the Washington Post reported that Hudson was one of three new detention facilities that ICE officials were targeting in the state, based on leaked agency documents.
Hudson’s city manager, Bryce Lange, and Mayor Joe Hammock did not return messages seeking comment this month. When The Denver Post reported in August that the Hudson facility was apparently set to reopen as a detention center, Lange said the town had not been informed of the plans. In July, Hammock told Denver 7 that he considered the prison reopening to be like any other new business coming to town and that he would support it.
In a statement Saturday, Polis spokeswoman Shelby Wieman said the governor’s office has “not heard any communications directly from the administration about potential facilities or ICE operations in Colorado.” She noted that the Hudson prison was not a state facility and was not on state-owned land, suggesting the decision to reopen the prison was up to private companies and a federal agency.
“Gov. Polis has repeatedly called for the Trump administration to be transparent about their operations in Colorado and has not received that courtesy,” Wieman wrote.
When it was last open, the Hudson Correctional Facility had a capacity of 1,250 beds. If it opens and is filled to that same capacity, the detention center’s population would nearly rival that of Hudson, which is home to more than 1,600 residents.
The protest was organized by Jenifer Montes of the Immigrant Partnership Team of Greeley and Weld County, and it spread on social media. Shelby Mendoza drove from the nearby town of Keenesburg after hearing about the protest on TikTok. She said she felt sick when she learned that ICE was planning to reopen the prison.
“My son goes to school down Highway 52,” she said as a light rain fell. “It makes me sick knowing that he is going to school in a town — or in between a town — that has a concentration camp.”
According to documents obtained by The Washington Post, ICE officials were planning to rechristen the former Hudson Correctional Facility as the “Big Horn Detention Facility.” The newspaper reported that it was set to be opened before the end of year.
But it’s unclear when exactly the facility will reopen or if ICE is still planning to do so at all. Highlands REIT, the Chicago-based real estate investment trust that owns the prison and offered it as a detention center, did not return a message seeking comment.
Geo Group, the private prison company that previously operated the prison, also did not return a message seeking updates on the facility. (Geo also operates the Aurora contract facility, ICE’s only detention center in the state.)
Geo has not publicly disclosed any contracts with ICE to open or operate the facility, and no such contracts have been released on federal spending databases. In July, congressional Republicans’ tax-and-spend bill provided tens of billions of dollars in new funding to ICE, including $45 billion for detention.
Some of that money appears to now be moving: CoreCivic, another private prison company, recently announced new ICE contracts to operate detention facilities in California, Oklahoma and Kansas. Geo has also extended its contract for the Aurora facility and increased the detention capacity there, federal contracting records show.
Lucie Donovan, a 25-year-old teacher who attended and spoke at the protest Saturday, said her husband has been detained in the Aurora detention center for the past eight months. The two married last month. Donovan said they signed the marriage license separately because they couldn’t do it together.
With the help of a lawyer, she’s working to get him released from the Aurora facility.
“I’ll be [expletive] before I’m coming here to visit,” she said.