Almost exactly six years after he entered the United States, Ramon Paredes Calderon asked an Aurora immigration judge to send him back to Mexico.
Paredes, a middle-aged man with spiky salt-and-pepper hair, was sitting alone in an Aurora courtroom earlier this month. Like most others held in the state’s only immigrant detention center, he wore a polo shirt and appeared without a lawyer. Through a Spanish translator, he told Judge Nina Carbone that he’d entered the United States in mid-September 2019, in Laredo, Texas. He said he didn’t have a wife or children here.
“Just friends,” he said.
He told Carbone that he wanted a voluntary departure — an increasingly common form of deportation that provides a swift exit from detention and from the country, at the cost of giving up on any other avenue to stay in the U.S.
Appearing by video stream from an empty courtroom in Denver for the Oct. 2 hearing, Carbone ticked through the same details and questions she and other immigration judges had asked of dozens of detainees in recent weeks: Paredes would have to leave within two weeks. Did he have money to pay for his own ticket? Did he have documents to return to Mexico?
Satisfied, Carbone granted his request.
As Paredes turned to leave the courtroom and return to detention for — at most — two more weeks, a woman who’d watched and nodded along from a pew in the back of the room stood to follow him into the hallway outside. An officer advised her: “No hugging, no touching, please.”
Behind them, another man took Paredes’ seat and turned to face the judge on the TV screen.
As immigration arrests have surged in Colorado this year, federal immigration authorities in Aurora and across the country have moved repeatedly to keep immigrants detained and to swiftly remove them from the country, according to court data and interviews with several Colorado immigration attorneys. The government’s goal, those lawyers argued, is to create conditions that push immigrants to voluntarily leave or to accept a deportation order — fulfilling President Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants without legal status from the United States.
Federal officials have taken several steps to achieve that end and turn arrests into deportations, according to interviews, immigration court data and national media reports. Immigration judges in Aurora and elsewhere have been instructed to expedite removal cases and to stop allowing bail for immigrants who’ve long lived in the country’s interior — keeping them detained and upending more than 25 years of practice.
At the same time, authorities often transport immigrants rapidly between Colorado’s detention center and facilities across the country, frustrating their already-limited ability to hire and speak with lawyers.
The result, data shows, is the steepest surge in deportation orders from Aurora’s immigration court in 15 years. Since April, more removal orders have been issued there each month than in any month since 2010, according to a federal records clearinghouse based at Syracuse University. The court has issued more than 1,900 removal orders this year — 1,200 more than the same time period last year.
That figure doesn’t include an even sharper increase in immigrants who voluntarily departed. More than 100 detainees a month received voluntary departures at the Aurora center in July and August — more than in any single month in at least 28 years, according to the Syracuse database, which dates back to 1997.
“The deportation machine is running at full speed,” said Hans Meyer, an immigration attorney in Denver.
In September, he joined with the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado to file a lawsuit challenging the Justice Department’s efforts to block longtime detainees from seeking bail. In a preliminary ruling in mid-October, a judge wrote that the policy “likely violates federal law,” joining a growing chorus of similar findings nationwide. Meyer and the ACLU have since filed another lawsuit, alleging that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arresting practices are illegal.
“The Trump administration is smart,” Meyer said. “They know that by changing the interpretation of law — making less people eligible for bond — more people would give up. That’s a primary driver of what we’re seeing.”
The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department office that oversees immigration judges and courts, did not respond to emails seeking comment this month. Immigration courts are effectively administrative courts. Their judges are Justice Department employees who can be — and have been — fired with relative ease.
The federal government has also encouraged immigrants without legal status to leave the country prior to being arrested. Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that “ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you.”
ICE arrest data shows that most immigrants arrested in Colorado this year have never been convicted of a crime. ICE’s detention data also shows that more than 70% of recent detainees in the Aurora facility are listed as “non-criminals.”
Meyer likened the government’s deportation efforts to playing chess against an opponent who’s three steps ahead. Laura Lichter, another veteran Denver immigration attorney, said the system had long been so complex that it felt like playing three-dimensional chess.
But it doesn’t feel like a rules-based game anymore.
“You realize everybody else is saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s a blender,’ ” she said.
‘I don’t want to fight my case anymore’
Over the course of four mornings in late September and early October, a Denver Post reporter watched more than two dozen men detained in Aurora either request a voluntary departure or accept a removal order, waiving any right to contest their deportations. Several others said they wanted to leave but had their proceedings delayed.
Two men fired their lawyers and asked to leave the country, rather than continue fighting to stay. One of them had unsuccessfully sought bail a few days before.
“I don’t want to fight my case anymore. I only want voluntary departure,” Santiago Urbina, a bald Colombian with a remarkably deep voice, told an immigration judge.
As he walked out of the courtroom a few moments later, two men waiting for their cases to be called gave him a thumbs up.
Voluntary departures are expedited removals from the country that offer an end to detention. They also ensure that immigrants don’t have removal orders on their records, which would prevent them from returning legally for a decade. Nationally, in the past year, the number of voluntary departures has nearly doubled — from 8,663 to 15,241.
Aurora has seen an even sharper increase: Through August, judges have granted more than eight times as many voluntary departures as they did last year, according to the Syracuse data.
On Oct. 1, four men sat together at a table in front of an immigration judge and, in rapid succession, all accepted removals. One, Eder Arroyo-Barrios, said through a translator that he didn’t have any identification that would allow him back into Mexico. His birth certificate was back in Louisiana with the rest of his belongings, he said, and he didn’t know if ICE still had them or if he could get them back.
He accepted a more punitive removal order instead.
Alex Sontay, a young Guatemalan man with a shoe keychain hanging from his ID card, said through a translator that he would go back to the Central American country of his birth. But then he told Judge Alison Kane about his daughter, who was a U.S. citizen.
Did she change anything?
Appearing through a video conference link from Denver, Kane replied that his daughter could apply for him to return when she turned 21. It was unclear how old his daughter was and how long he would have to wait. Sontay rubbed his face and accepted the voluntary departure.
Increasing pressure to agree to depart
Federal authorities have encouraged immigrants to voluntarily depart, alarming advocates who worry that the detainees don’t know what they’re accepting.
A day after Arroyo-Barrios and Sontay agreed to leave the U.S., two immigrants told another judge that an ICE agent had entered their cells the night before and encouraged them to leave voluntarily.
One man said the agent had promised that if the man had a family, they could all be removed together. The other man said the ICE agent took his picture and told him he’d already been approved to go.
Both men appeared in court on the same morning, and both said they were approached in the same area of the facility. It’s unclear if they spoke to the same ICE agent. ICE representatives did not respond to an email asking about the agent’s offer.
Only a judge can approve a voluntary departure request. Carbone, the immigration judge for both men, told each of them that she didn’t know what they were talking about. Both men still requested voluntary departures.
In court, another man, a 31-year-old from Nicaragua, said he’d been in detention for three months. Though he feared returning to his home country, he said, he wanted a voluntary departure if he couldn’t get out on bail.
The man’s attempts to get a temporary release had already been rejected. He wasn’t alone: Federal immigration authorities moved earlier this year to reinterpret federal law and block longtime U.S. residents without legal status from receiving bail. In fiscal year 2025, half as many immigrants detained in Aurora were granted bail as were in the prior year, according to the Syracuse data.
Between February and August 2024, Aurora judges temporarily released 523 detainees while their immigration cases proceeded. For the same time period this year, the number plummeted to 127, even as the facility’s population increased and its share of detainees with criminal histories dropped.
The result is that immigrants are detained indefinitely within a facility that attorneys and immigrant-rights advocates have long criticized. A federal judge earlier this year wrote that the facility’s condition was “abhorrent,” and a lawsuit challenging the detention center’s practice of alleged forced labor is set to go before the U.S. Supreme Court next month, 11 years after it was first filed.
A University of Utah student briefly detained in the facility in June, after she was arrested following a traffic stop on Interstate 70, said the food there was moldy and soggy. At various points over the summer, the air conditioning broke or was turned up too high, according to court filings.
In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, one former detainee said he was served spoiled milk and that sleeping was “impossible” because of the facility’s lights, which are always on, and because guards often pointed flashlights in people’s faces.
“The stress of detention has been a constant for years. We’ve always seen people giving up on their claims in order to get out, trading their ability to fight their case for their liberty and well-being, or their family’s or children’s well-being,” said Elizabeth Jordan, an immigration attorney who runs the immigration clinic at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law.
“That has also gotten worse,” she continued. “If you are sitting in a detention center and you see that literally nobody is getting a bond, that cannot be a source of optimism.”
With no bail possible, the 31-year-old Nicaraguan said he wanted to leave the country. But Judge Melanie Corrin told him that he wasn’t eligible for a voluntary departure. She told him to take more time and consider whether he wanted to file applications to stay.
He asked just to be deported, but she continued his case for another two weeks.
As he walked out of the courtroom and back toward detention, the man sighed and muttered, in Spanish, “More time.”
Aurora court lacks dedicated judges
It was unclear if that man would see the same judge when he returned to court.
Colorado has two immigration courts, each with its own set of judges. One is in downtown Denver, for immigrants who aren’t detained. The other is in Aurora, housed within the detention center there.
The Aurora facility has not had a dedicated judge since early August, other than a supervisor who oversees both courts. Its final judge retired more than two months ago. Two others, still not replaced, have been gone for months. At least one was fired in July, according to several attorneys and a Hispanic lawyers association.
The United States has more than 70 immigration courts, according to the Department of Justice’s website. Only Aurora’s is listed as having no dedicated judge assigned to it.
The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review did not respond to an inquiry from The Post about the court’s lack of judges.
Since Trump returned to office, 139 immigration judges have been fired, transferred or have taken a buyout, according to CNN. To replace them and continue expediting immigration proceedings, the Trump administration is planning to turn as many as 600 military lawyers into temporary immigration judges.
At least some of those lawyers will come from the ranks of the National Guard and the Army Reserve. Asked if any members of the Colorado National Guard would be involved in that effort, spokesman Sgt. Joseph VonNida said in an email that the state guard has “not received any orders.”
Attorneys say the arrival of those temporary judges is expected imminently.
Aaron Hall, a Denver immigration attorney who also sits on a national committee that acts as a liaison between immigration lawyers and the immigration review office, said the military judges will be given renewable six-month assignments.
“That’s quite a control mechanism if you want to control how the outcomes of hearings are going,” he said. “If somebody is just not doing exactly what the superiors want, it’s pretty easy not to renew them when the six months is up. … It makes it impossible to believe that (immigrants) are appearing before anything resembling a neutral judge or a neutral justice system.”
As of mid-October, no military judges have replaced the departed judges in Aurora. To handle that facility’s caseload, judges from Denver’s immigration court have filled in on rotating shifts using video conferencing. As a result, a detainee may see several different judges as a case progresses.
The judges also now try to cram multiple cases into a time block that previously would’ve been reserved for one case, attorneys said, prolonging and straining the rare individualized — and critical — court hearings that often determine an immigrant’s fate.
‘A wholesale due-process crisis’
Still, cases in the detention center are marching forward.
Between Jan. 20, when Trump returned to office, and early September, the Aurora court completed more than 2,500 cases, according to data obtained through a public records request. That’s roughly 1,500 more than concluded in the same period last year and in 2020, at the end of Trump’s first term.
The Denver court, meanwhile, cleared about 200 fewer cases through the first eight months of the year than it had during the same period in 2024. According to the Syracuse database, the Denver court has a backlog of more than 71,000 cases. That’s below last year’s total of 77,402 but is significantly higher than any other level from the past 13 years.
In Aurora, where detention cases are prioritized because the immigrants are in custody, the backlog is far smaller — 734 cases as of August. Cases in that court took 69 days to clear, on average, between late January and early September, according to the Justice Department’s data, marking a one-day improvement from 2024.
Federal immigration authorities want cases to move even faster: A Sept. 12 memo from the immigration review office instructed judges to clear 95% of deportation cases involving detainees within 60 days.
The memo is “a recipe for a wholesale due-process crisis, in a system where due process was already more of an idea than a reality,” Hall said.
The Denver judges are also hearing cases from a facility in Cushing, Oklahoma, an hour west of Tulsa. That’s new, too, immigration lawyers said.
On Sept. 30, a Venezuelan man in brown scrubs stood in a small room in that facility, a privately run prison used in part to temporarily house detainees arrested in Texas, according to The Frontier. On a video screen before the man was Judge Corrin.
Through a Spanish translator, the man said he feared returning to Venezuela, where he had previously been arrested for protesting the government. But he didn’t want to be detained any longer.
He’d already requested asylum, and Corrin told him he could proceed with that application. There are steep backlogs there, too, and federal officials have said that immigration judges can swiftly set aside “deficient” asylum cases.
For the Venezuelan man, pursuing asylum would mean continued detention. So he refused.
“I want to leave as soon as possible from this prison,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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