As the Trump administration carries out its promise to ramp up Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, recently released data confirms that a growing number of people have been arrested in Pitkin, Eagle and Garfield counties.
About 37 people were arrested in the tri-county region by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations between Jan. 20 and July 28 this year, according to an analysis by Aspen Journalism of ICE data obtained through a lawsuit by UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy and published by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.
That’s about three times the number of people arrested during the same time period last year, although historical data shows 2024 was a relatively low year for ICE arrests in the region. In Colorado, arrests quadrupled after President Donald Trump took office compared with the same time period in 2024, according to a similar regional analysis of ICE data by The Colorado Sun and WyoFile published in July. These local and statewide numbers do not include immigration arrests made by other federal agencies assisting ICE, such as Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Marshals, and Customs and Border Protection.
Despite repeated claims by the Trump administration and ICE that they’re targeting dangerous criminals, about half of the people arrested in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys so far this year had no criminal conviction compared with 8% of those arrested under the Biden administration between Jan. 20 and July 28 last year.
In addition to the 19 individuals with a criminal conviction arrested in 2025, 11 arrestees had a pending criminal charge. This means that about 20% of arrestees had neither a pending charge nor a conviction, while all of the people arrested last year had one of those.
This trend has been observed across Colorado and the U.S., where the majority of people arrested by ICE this year for being in the country without legal status had no criminal convictions.
Locally and statewide, the most severe crime most often recorded by ICE for those with a criminal conviction was driving under the influence of either drugs or alcohol, the data from this year shows. Other “most severe crimes” listed for local arrestees this year ranged from assault and domestic violence to traffic offenses and fraudulent use of a credit card.
In response to a request for comment on these findings, a spokesperson with ICE’s Denver field office said the agency is “executing its mission of identifying and removing” unauthorized immigrants with criminal convictions as well as “others who have violated our nation’s immigration laws.” The ICE spokesperson added that all people “in violation of U.S. immigration law” may be arrested, detained and in some cases, deported.
‘An uphill battle’
Among those who have been detained this year without a criminal conviction is Kevin — a young man from Guatemala who had been living in Garfield County after crossing into the United States illegally last fall. (Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio are not using Kevin’s full name because his lawyer expressed concern that sharing it could impact his immigration case.)
“Apenas había estado viviendo aquí en este país,” Kevin said. “No me dieron una chance, … Yo quería hacer las cosas bien, pero no se pudo.” (“I had barely been living here in this country. They didn’t give me a chance, … I wanted to do things right, but I couldn’t.)
Like many immigrants, Kevin came to the U.S. seeking opportunity for himself and for his family back home in Guatemala.
“Yo quise venir a Estados Unidos para estudiar aquí y conseguir un trabajo y ayudar a mi familia allá en mi país,” Kevin said in a recent phone interview from an ICE detention center in Aurora. “En Guatemala, está duro para ayudar a la familia, para poder hacer algo, para oportunidad.” (“I wanted to come to the United States to study here and get a job, and help my family back in my country. In Guatemala, it’s hard to help your family, to get ahead, to have opportunities.”)
Growing up, Kevin said he experienced abuse and neglect by his parents. He started working when he was 12 and wasn’t able to attend much school.
Last November, he arrived in the United States hoping to join his older sister who lives in Garfield County and continue his schooling. He was 17 when he got caught by immigration enforcement shortly after crossing the border in Arizona, and he was sent to a youth shelter.
After about 10 days, Kevin was released into the custody of his older sister while he waited to see what immigration officials would do with his case. Upon his release, Kevin was given a notice that he would need to appear in immigration court, but he never received a summons with a court date or location — and federal officials did not file any paperwork to deport him.
“Iba a comenzar la escuela el próximo año, … no creo que pudiera haber sido más feliz,” Kevin said. “La verdad, tuve muchas cosas que mis otros hermanos nunca tuvieron la oportunidad de tener.” (“I was going to start school this upcoming year, … I don’t think I could have been happier. Honestly, I had a lot of things that my other siblings have never had the opportunity to have.”)
Because Kevin is younger than 21, he is eligible for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. Such status allows certain young people in the U.S. to apply for a green card if they have experienced abuse, neglect or abandonment by a parent and cannot be safely reunited with them, but there is a long waitlist and the process can take years to complete.
Earlier this year, Kevin and his sister hired Glenwood Springs-based immigration attorney Fred Hartman to help Kevin with his special juvenile status as well as help him apply for asylum. The latter action, which requires proving that a person will be in immediate danger if they return to their home country, has become harder to obtain over the past year as both the Trump and Biden administrations restricted access to asylum claims.
“Asylum cases are an uphill battle for sure, but Special Immigrant Juvenile Status is, a lot of times, a better option for kids when there's either abuse, abandonment or neglect by one or both parents,” Hartman said.
But around the same time they hired a lawyer, Kevin turned 18 and received a letter requesting that he appear at the ICE field office in Grand Junction on June 17.
Kevin’s attorney warned him that he could be arrested for entering the country illegally if he showed up for the appointment, even though he is in the process of seeking legal immigration status. But ICE already had Kevin’s home address and knew where to find him, so he decided to attend the appointment.
“Me arrestaron ahí y me mandaron para acá a Aurora, … y pues ahora estoy esperando a ver qué pasa,” Kevin said. (“They arrested me there and sent me here to Aurora, … and now I’m just waiting to see what happens.”)
In Mesa County, including the Grand Junction area, ICE recorded about 150 people who were arrested between Jan. 20 and July 28 — about five times as many compared with that same time period last year. When it comes to criminal history, about half of the people arrested did not have a criminal conviction compared with about 25% of those arrested under President Joe Biden between Jan. 20 and July 28 last year.
Hartman said he has seen an increasing number of people in the valley getting called into appointments at the ICE office in Grand Junction, along with the agency’s offices in Glenwood Springs and the Denver area.
“People with either deportation orders or other things pending are being told to report to ICE, and many of them are being taken into custody at that appointment,” Hartman said.
After Kevin’s arrival at the Geo Corporation ICE detention center in Aurora, Hartman said ICE tried to fast-track his deportation using a process known as “expedited removal.” It was expanded by the Trump administration earlier this year and allows unauthorized immigrants who have been in the country for less than two years to be deported without court proceedings.
“Normally expedited removal was applied to people entering the United States and caught committing some sort of immigration fraud, … and it generally applied to people within the first two weeks of their arrival,” Hartman said. “But the Trump administration has expanded that, and now some people, who normally would be allowed to complete the asylum process, are getting taken into custody and served with expedited removal.”
People facing expedited removal are entitled to a “credible fear” interview with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and if they pass, they cannot be immediately deported. In Kevin’s case, he was eventually able to prove that he has a credible fear of returning to his home country — allowing him to proceed with both his asylum and special juvenile cases.
Hartman requested that Kevin be released on bond while his legal team worked on Kevin’s case, but the hearing was unsuccessful because of recent changes by the Trump administration ending bond eligibility for people who had crossed the border illegally.
“In this type of case, it used to be that a person would have a bond hearing and the judge would look at ‘Is there a flight risk? Is there danger to the public in terms of criminal history?’ And if there wasn't, then they would get out on bond,” Hartman said. “But starting a few months ago, immigration judges at the court in Aurora were basically all of a sudden finding that anybody that entered the country without inspection, which Kevin did, is subject to mandatory detention under the Immigration and Nationality Act.”
Immigrant rights groups and dozens of federal judges are contesting the new rule, implemented in July, saying it’s illegal, but the federal Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the policy last month, making it binding for now.
“It's being litigated in a lot of places, so the appeals court might change it in the future, but that doesn't really help Kevin right now,” Hartman said.
Meanwhile, as part of a case filed by his sister to get legal custody of Kevin, a state court judge in Garfield County also found that he had experienced abuse, abandonment and neglect by his parents.
Despite an unsuccessful bond hearing, Kevin’s Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and residency petition with USCIS were eventually approved — putting him on a yearslong waitlist for a green card — and on Oct. 3, an immigration judge terminated his removal proceedings.
“He's no longer in the deportation process with an immigration judge, but ICE opposed this, and now they have 30 days to appeal,” Hartman said. “If there's no appeal, then ICE pretty much has to let him out, no bond or anything, because he’s not in deportation proceedings anymore.”
If Kevin is released in the next few weeks, he still won’t have the security of legal-immigration status in the U.S. until he receives a green card.
“Even though he's approved as a Special Immigrant Juvenile, he doesn't necessarily have a technical legal status,” Hartman said. “Having SIJ basically means he meets the definition of somebody who's eligible for a green card, but then he has to wait in line to complete the process.”
Kevin may turn out to be one of the rare people who makes it out of ICE detention while he works on getting a green card, but with recent changes to things such as asylum, immigration bonds and expedited removal, many others are being deported.
According to local data, the majority of people who were arrested in Pitkin, Eagle and Garfield counties between Jan. 20 and July 28 this year were deported. As of July 28, only nine people still had active cases and all of them remained detained.
Tracking ICE arrests
In response to Trump’s immigration crackdown and in order to address a lack of reliable information on local ICE activity, advocacy groups such as Voces Unidas and the Colorado Rapid Response Network, which manage hotlines where people can report ICE activity, have been alerting the community that arrests had gone up significantly across the region for months.
“It is disrupting everyday life, it is impacting the economy, schools and businesses … . It is removing and separating families from the fabric of our community,” said Alex Sánchez, executive director of Voces Unidas. “When families are displaced, when children are left without a parent, when workers can no longer come to work, the human pain and suffering is real.”
Members of both groups reported a spike in local ICE arrests in May, which, according to the most recent data published by the Deportation Data Project, was the highest month for ICE arrests from Parachute to Aspen between Jan. 20 and July 28. Data after July 28 has not yet been released.
“The data mostly seems to track with what we’ve been seeing, but it does not include other busy months like August, which saw a lot of activity in the area,” Sánchez said. “There’s also the caveat that some of the data may not accurately capture who lives in our communities — it’s more reflective of what places they were processed.”
That was the case for people such as Kevin, who was living in Garfield County but shows up in the Grand Junction data since he was arrested and processed there.
In the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys, a majority of ICE arrests between Jan. 20 and July 28 this year were in Garfield County, with the highest number of arrests recorded in Glenwood Springs, according to the data.
Since there is an ICE holdroom in the city, however, it is possible that some people who were arrested elsewhere were brought directly to the facility and recorded as being arrested in Glenwood Springs. It is also possible that people who were arrested from Parachute to Aspen were brought directly to holdrooms in Grand Junction or Denver and had their arrests recorded there.
Although law enforcement in Colorado is limited by state laws when it comes to assisting ICE, the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office confirmed it has been involved in some arrests, while other local agencies like the Rifle, Parachute and Carbondale police departments, have been alerted by the federal agency about some of its operations in the area, including an arrest that took place near the entrance to Carbondale on June 20.
“An arrest took place underneath the Highway 133 bridge on the north side of the river, which is technically not within our town jurisdiction,” Carbondale Police Chief Kirk Wilson said. “But we did receive a courtesy phone call [from ICE] just to let us know that they had been in the area.”
In contrast, the Glenwood Springs Police Department said it has not been notified by ICE about arrests in its jurisdiction, and the Basalt Police Department said it was not aware of an ICE arrest that took place in the area May 19.
“I'm unaware of any contacts any of our officers have had with ICE if they have been in the area,” said Lt. Aaron Munch of the Basalt Police Department.
Although Pitkin County Sheriff Michael Buglione met with ICE in June and asked that it alert him to any future arrests in his jurisdiction, he was not previously made aware of the Basalt arrest in May or of an arrest that took place in the Aspen area Feb. 20.
“It kind of disappoints me,” Buglione said. “You definitely want to notify local law enforcement so you don't have that ‘blue on blue’ incident, right?”
Since his June meeting with ICE officials, Buglione has only been alerted about one federal immigration operation, which took place at the Aspen airport in August.
“I did get a call from an ICE agent in Glenwood saying they were going up to the Aspen airport because someone they were looking for was getting off a flight,” Buglione said. “They were waiting where the planes pull in, … but it turns out the person they were looking for never got on the flight to Aspen.”
Historical trends
Although ICE arrests from Aspen to Parachute between Jan. 20 and July 28 are three times higher than during that same time period last year, historical data published by the Deportation Data Project show that there have been periods over the last 13 years with higher arrest numbers under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Under President Barack Obama, there were at least three years with higher ICE activity between Jan. 20 and July 28, including 2012, when 135 arrests were recorded in the tri-county region.
2012 was also the same year that Hartman, Kevin’s immigration attorney, started practicing immigration law in Glenwood Springs.
“I would say there was probably significantly more ICE enforcement in this valley back then than there is now, which is counterintuitive, but you have to consider that in Garfield County and across the state, there were still ICE holds and detainers,” Hartman said. “I was talking to probably at least one person a week about a family member who was in the county jail on an ICE hold or had already gotten taken into custody by ICE.”
In 2019, Colorado passed legislation to prevent local law enforcement from arresting people based on their immigration status, or holding them in jail past their release time so federal immigration officials such as ICE could pick them up, also known as “an ICE hold.” The law also prevents authorities from providing information to ICE about an individual’s immigration status.
“The idea was that local and state police have their own priorities, which is community safety,” said Violeta Chapin, a law professor and director of the Immigration Defense Clinic at the University of Colorado Boulder. “They want everybody in a particular jurisdiction to feel safe coming forward to the police and reporting crimes and also cooperating with law enforcement if they witness a crime, and not being afraid that doing that will result in their detention by immigration authorities.”
In addition to the 2019 law, state legislators have also implemented other policies in the past five years that have made it more difficult for ICE to arrest people, including restricting federal immigration operations at public locations such as courthouses and, as of this year, schools and hospitals.
According to Chapin, Obama also made some concessions by increasing immigration arrests in an attempt to create a pathway to citizenship or residency for immigrants who were brought to the country as children.
“Obama had a strategy to increase enforcement efforts in order to get other things that he wanted, such as the DREAM Act,” Chapin said. “When he failed to get the DREAM Act passed, he created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or ‘DACA,’ to strengthen protections for young people who had grown up here.”
Although, overall, the number of immigration arrests was high under Obama, Chapin said his administration prioritized apprehending people with criminal histories.
“Obama had a list of priorities, which was people with criminal convictions and recent arrivals — those were sort of the top priority,” Chapin said. “When Trump won the presidency the first time, he got rid of all those priorities, essentially saying an undocumented person is an undocumented person, regardless of whether they are an undocumented student or an undocumented felon.”
This trend is something that Sanchez, whose family had to return to Mexico when he was little after his mother was deported in El Jebel, has seen firsthand.
“Immigration raids, targeted operations and deportations are not new to the Roaring Fork Valley — we've seen families separated … , and it's true that it's been while a Republican or a Democrat have been in office,” Sanchez said. “What is new or different, though, is the approach of going after people who have not committed any crimes other than the fact that they’re here without status.”
Although criminal conviction data for the tri-county region only goes back to 2016 in the historical archives provided by the Deportation Data Project, the data shows that the number of people arrested by ICE with criminal convictions steadily decreased from 95% during Obama’s last year in office in 2016 to a low of 3% in 2023 under Biden, before skyrocketing back up to 92% in 2024, Biden’s last year.
In terms of arrest numbers, ICE activity was relatively low in the tri-county area and across the Rocky Mountain region during the first two years of Biden’s presidency in part due to pandemic restrictions, but then spiked in 2023 before dropping again last year. In ICE’s 2023 annual report, the agency attributes the 2023 spike to several factors, including “broader migration trends” contributing to “an increase in unlawful entries” into the U.S. as people fled things such as “violence, food scarcity, severe poverty” in their home countries.
The report also attributes the spike in ICE arrests in 2023 to the end of Title 42 — a pandemic-era policy, invoked by Trump, that closed most avenues for migrants to seek asylum. During the time that pandemic-era restrictions such as Title 42 were in place, “ICE detention capacity was limited,” and consequently, once those restrictions were lifted, “arrests and detainers increased,” according to ICE’s report.
When it comes to comparing this year to last, ICE arrests fell across the country last year in part due to increased demand for enforcement at the border as Biden tightened immigration restrictions allowing fewer people in, according to ICE’s 2024 fiscal year report. The report also notes that its agents shifted during this time to arresting more people with serious criminal histories.
Nationwide, the number of people arrested with no criminal convictions represented 28% of the approximately 113,400 arrests made by ICE in fiscal year 2024. This is down from 170,500 arrests in fiscal year 2023, of which 57% had no criminal convictions, according to ICE’s data dashboard.
Looking ahead
U.S. political leaders have yet to agree on the best way to fix the country’s broken immigration system, and a pathway to citizenship for immigrants without legal status who are already in the country and are seeking asylum or another protected status seems a long way off.
But Hartman still hopes officials will consider what he sees as shorter-term fixes such as a more secure work permit program or a more efficient green card system for eligible people such as Kevin.
“I think sometimes maybe people feel threatened by immigration,” Hartman said. “But there’s a lot of benefits like economic growth, you know, as American birth rates decline, immigrants give us more people getting more work done, … and then there's opportunities to share people’s culture.”
As for Kevin, after spending nearly four months detained in Aurora, he is hoping he’ll be able to get out soon and be reunited with his sister while he works on getting his green card.
But if ICE successfully appeals the recent ruling ending his deportation proceeding, he could be faced with a difficult choice of being detained for years while he awaits a resolution on his immigration case or self-deporting and returning to Guatemala.
“Estar encerrado aquí es duro,” Kevin said. “Si va a estar acá seis meses, un año, aquí todavía, … La verdad, preferiría irme para mi país.” (“Being locked up here is really tough. If I am still going to be here in six months, a year, … I would honestly rather go back to my country.”)
