Mind Springs Health is the biggest mental health provider on the Western Slope of Colorado, and in 2018, they expanded West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction as an inpatient mental health care facility.
Over the past few years, the hospital had a 48 bed capacity, but recently, their average daily census was only 30, leaving 18 beds empty.
Due to persistent financial challenges, The Colorado Sun reported last year Mind Springs was losing $500,000 per month.
To account for this loss of revenue, Mind Springs leaders began discussions with ICE to fill its empty beds. The deal would have required Mind Springs to provide inpatient mental health care to adult detainees who were experiencing acute mental crises.
Dr. Nicholas D. Torres is a CEO for Larkin Health, which took over managing Mind Springs in November to help address these deficits. (Larkin Health and Mind Springs severed this relationship in late February.)
“Those are the people that are being treated, and they need to be treated right — so, underserved and underrepresented,” Dr. Torres said.
He estimated that the contract would have yielded between $100,000-300,000 per month.
However, after the community caught wind of their plans, he tried to clarify the scope of Mind Springs’ involvement with immigration enforcement officials.
“We have no say in the actual detention process,” Dr. Torres said. “We're strictly providing those acute mental health services.”
Despite these clarifications, immigrant advocates remained skeptical.
Claire Noone is an attorney based in Glenwood Springs and said since ICE doesn’t have a lot of infrastructure in Grand Junction, the agency needs private contractors to provide services.
“Services like mental health, physical health, education if their families are detained, food, shelter, water, all of that will need to be provided by local contractors,” Noone said.
She worried a contract between Mind Springs and ICE could make it easier for the agency to arrest and detain more immigrants on the Western Slope.
In 2023, Colorado passed legislation that made it illegal for ICE to use public jails or prisons to house detainees, and Western Colorado’s closest detention facility is hours away over a mountain pass in Aurora.
Noone said mental health providers, food service companies, and other contractors in Grand Junction could help ICE build capacity on the Western Slope, but without those partnerships, any expansion would be significantly limited.
“ICE will be unable to establish these facilities here, and doing so will dramatically reduce the ability of mass deportation operations in Western Colorado,” Noone said.
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a law professor at Ohio State University and has spent most of his career studying how criminal law and immigration law intersect.
He said any time a private company offers to work with ICE, it makes the job of detaining and deporting immigrants easier.
“If they can't find somebody to do it for the price that they're offering, then they have to offer a higher price,” García Hernández said. “This is the basic reality of a capitalist market economy.”
While the Trump administration is working to increase funding for ICE, García Hernández says there’s always a breaking point.
“The more it costs to detain one person, the sooner that the federal government will get to the end of the line.”
ICE perspective
However, not all experts agree that there’s a correlation between contractors willing to work with ICE and the agency’s ability to detain people.
John Fabbricatore, a former ICE field office director, said when it comes to people facing mandatory detention because they’ve been charged with a serious crime, it doesn’t matter whether or not the agency has contracted partnerships.
“ICE is going to arrest that person no matter what,” Fabbricatore said.
Fabbricatore added that when ICE does not have a contract with medical providers, they can send detainees to nearby hospitals. This practice is much pricier, and he said it could potentially force the agency to manage its detainee population and release people held on a discretionary basis if the cost of care skyrockets.
Because mental health care is required in all detention settings, he was critical of those who dissuaded Mind Springs from signing a contract with ICE.
“What they actually protested against was providing care that is needed for people that are in a detained setting awaiting their deportation process.”
When word spread that Mind Springs might be working with ICE, many community members were strongly against it.
Chatter on social media exploded and phone calls started coming in asking Mind Springs staff for clarification, according to Dr. Torres.
After fielding so many calls, Mind Springs' board decided funding from an ICE contract wasn’t worth it.
“I think the board just wanted to keep things cool, calm and show that we're listening to the community, which I agree with,” Dr. Torres said. “I think we needed to listen to the community and take a step back.”
Soon after announcing they would not pursue a contract with ICE, Mind Springs issued a statement that they were permanently closing West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction.
Their last day of operations was March 10, so it’s unclear whether a contract with ICE would have resulted in more people being arrested and detained in Western Colorado.
ICE field offices in Grand Junction, Denver, and Glenwood Springs could not be reached for this story.
