A short-term detainee holding facility operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Midland Center in Glenwood Springs could be one step closer to shutting down.
On Thursday, the City Council voted 6-1 to sue the ICE facility’s private landlord in state court for allegedly violating municipal code by allowing unauthorized detentions in a commercial zone without a city permit.
JG Housing Solutions, a Florida-based limited liability company, is listed as the current owner of the section of the building that ICE occupies. Aspen Public Radio and Aspen Journalism sent a request for comment to members of the Gillespie family that appear in property tax records and state business filings to be associated with the landlord JG Housing Solutions, but they did not respond by publication deadline.
The city’s Planning and Zoning Commission on April 28 revoked the ICE facility’s decades-old special use permit. Over the past three months, local residents had been urging the city to enforce its decision and stop detention operations at the facility, located at 100 Midland Ave., Suites 110 and 210.
A large crowd showed up once again to urge action during public comment before the final vote at Thursday’s meeting, including longtime Glenwood Springs resident Amy Hausman.
“If we do not go after this tenant or this landlord because we think it will be too costly, or too difficult, or too hard to pursue, … do we set a precedent where we can no longer enforce our zoning anywhere against any tenant or landlord?” Hausman said. “And that I find to be a real problem.”
In response to Hausman and other concerned residents, Mayor Pro Tem Erin Zalinski acknowledged that the City Council had remained mostly silent on the issue since the special use permit was revoked.
“For months, we have had rooms like this full of passionate people who plead with us to take action, and it feels like we're just sitting on our butts doing nothing,” Zalinski said. “Just know that our intentions are to represent our community with integrity and in the best way possible with the tools that we have available to us, and so what felt like negligence was just trying to be purposeful.”
City Attorney Karl Hanlon, who also provides legal counsel to Aspen Public Radio, said at Thursday’s meeting — and in a memo submitted this week recommending that the city take legal action — that it wasn’t until the city’s fire department was dispatched for an emergency medical services call at the facility on July 24 that the city could confirm with certainty that ICE was still detaining people there. He said this confirmation gave the city an opportunity to pursue legal action for a zoning violation — namely, using the facility for detention operations without a special use permit.
“It's important factually for me as your attorney, if I'm going to walk into court, that I have a legal basis and I have a fact that I can rely on regarding its use,” Hanlon said. “And that's what I got with the July 24 EMS call.”
Previous permit violations
The permit for the ICE facility was first approved by the city in 2003, but earlier this year, public-records requests, complaints from residents and reporting by news organizations prompted the city to review data showing that ICE held detainees for over 12 hours at the site in violation of the conditions of its permit, leading to the planning commission's decision to revoke the special use permit.
At Thursday’s meeting, Hanlon confirmed that JG Housing Solutions, ICE and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), which manages commercial leases for ICE and oversaw its original city permit application for the local facility, did not respond to the notice of violation issued March 25, participate in the permit hearing that took place April 28, or appeal the city’s permit revocation decision by the May deadline.
In response to a request for comment sent by Aspen Journalism and Aspen Public Radio to the GSA as well as ICE and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, none of the parties directly addressed the previous permit-revocation decision, the newly alleged violation of municipal zoning rules or the city directive Thursday to take legal action against the holding facility’s landlord.
Instead, a DHS spokesperson provided a written response Friday stating that “ICE is not holding detainees for more than 12 hours at the facility,” which it claimed is a “processing facility, not a detention facility” where people are “quickly processed and transferred to permanent housing at a detention facility.”
Smaller ICE holding facilities such as the one in Glenwood Springs are basic, temporary processing spaces not designed for overnight stays and have faced increasing scrutiny nationally and in Colorado over limited oversight and rising detention lengths.
Aspen Journalism analyzed about 15 years of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) data — published by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California Berkeley School of Law — and found that ICE detained people beyond the 12-hour limit at the Glenwood Springs facility at least 17 times between Jan. 1, 2011, and March 10 of this year.
About half of the over-12-hour violations occurred since the second Trump administration ramped up immigration enforcement. The total number of recorded detentions since 2011 was about 1,200.
In a previous March 12 email, ICE declined to comment on the reported violations of its 12-hour-hold policy and permit conditions, citing "unverified" third-party data, although the Deportation Data Project says it sources its datasets directly from government records requests, litigation or proactive government disclosures. In the same email, ICE also denied broader concerns about oversight, transparency and conditions at smaller holding facilities.
Enforcing city zoning rules
Although some residents and council members were inclined to discuss ICE’s previous 12-hour violations and broader issues surrounding federal immigration crackdowns at Thursday’s public meeting, the City Council’s ultimate decision came down to the enforcement of local zoning rules.
“The issue before us tonight is a use of land-use code, and I don't think we want to set a precedent for ignoring our land-use codes,” said City Council member David Townsley.
The vote passed with City Council members Townsley, Sumner Schachter, Steven Smith and Mitchell Weimer, as well as Mayor Marco Dehm and Zalinski in support of pursuing legal action against the landlord in state court, and City Council member Ray Schmahl opposed.
“There are very practical considerations going on here, … upholding of law, being consistent,” Smith added. “And combined with that, a sensitivity to human needs, to human danger and to human humanity.”
Although Schmahl ultimately voted against the motion, he said he could get behind the city’s decision with certain limitations.
“I find my definition of courageous local leadership to be not wasting the taxpayers' money, and I've been told over and over again that this is a waste of money,” Schmahl said. “I think we should follow Karl's advice, but I don't think we get an open checkbook for a futile effort.”
Hanlon told City Council members that pursuing the case against JG Housing Solutions in state court, rather than naming ICE and the GSA as defendants in federal court, gave the city its best chance of success — although he cautioned that neither path was likely to be easy.
He estimated the rough odds of winning an injunction in state court at “less than 25%,” citing the likelihood that the landlord would invoke the U.S. Constitution's supremacy clause, arguing that the city's zoning enforcement interferes with its tenants’ ability to enforce immigration laws as a core federal function.
“What do we say in response to that? From my standpoint, it’s ‘You have a whole facility in Denver, you have one in Grand Junction, you don't use this one very much,’” Hanlon said. “It's not essential to your core function — it’s not saying you can't enforce immigration laws. It’s saying you can't hold people in Glenwood Springs.”
Hanlon estimated litigation could cost roughly $50,000 to get through a preliminary injunction hearing in state court or about $100,000 in federal court.
“To get through trial in state court, more than likely [$250,000] to $300,000, in federal court, half a million dollars,” Hanlon said. “That's just the realities of doing this.”
According to Hanlon, the city’s next step will be to file a formal complaint against the landlord in state court, along with a request for a preliminary injunction — a court order that, if granted, could halt detention operations at the facility before the case goes to trial, a process that Hanlon said could otherwise take 18 to 24 months to resolve.
If a judge grants the preliminary injunction, JG Housing Solutions would be barred from leasing the space for use as a temporary hold or detention facility while the underlying lawsuit proceeds.
Hanlon emphasized that any injunction would apply narrowly to the detention operation itself, not to the broader tenancy. ICE and the GSA would still be permitted to use the Midland Center space for administrative or office functions, which are allowed under the property's current zoning.
“If GSA wants to lease that building for ICE to operate out of, they can do that in that zone district,” Hanlon said. “What they can't do under our code is detain [people there], … or operate the hold facility in it.”
Residents support action
As the 6-1 vote was announced, the packed City Council chambers broke out in applause. The reaction spilled into the overflow room, where residents had been listening and waiting their turn to provide public comment during the meeting. Twenty people spoke during about 45 minutes of public comment.
Some, including local resident Ashley Stahl, also urged the city and wider community to think critically about why the ICE facility was able to operate for years despite repeated violations of the conditions of its city permit.
"This building was never a secret, not to everyone,” Stahl said. “Our immigrant neighbors have known exactly what happens at 100 Midland for 20 years because it was their brothers and their mothers and their cousins who were taken through that door never to come home again. … What took us 20 years wasn’t finding out what was happening, it was listening.”
Longtime Glenwood Springs resident and immigration attorney Claire Noone, whose public records requests earlier this year helped reveal that the ICE facility had operated without a final certificate of occupancy for two decades and triggered a new round of city inspections, also spoke at Thursday’s meeting urging the city to consider multiple different enforcement actions.
On Aug. 3, Noone submitted a written complaint recommending that the city further investigate other possible violations at the ICE facility over the decades. Her recommendations included that the city ensure that the facility’s evacuation plans — and other critical safety measures required for detention centers — meet nationwide building-code standards as well as the municipality’s own building and fire codes.
“The city's authority is a century-old, well-settled exercise of the police power under its home-rule charter of the Colorado Constitution, which is untouched and uncontested by federal law,” Noone said. “Since enforcement runs to the private owner under a nondiscriminatory code applied in the same way to every building in the city, it forecloses preemption.”
Although there is no guarantee that the city’s taking legal action to uphold its municipal code will force ICE to shut down its detention facility, for local resident Rey Worrell, it’s a better option than the alternative.
“The likelihood looks bad, the money looks costly and the supremacy clause looks like it can go against us as a city,” Worrell said. “However, no action, silence, doing nothing and feeling defeated [are] exactly how violators continue to violate our code and damage our city. … We need to be viewed as the city that went against all odds for our community.”
