Colorado Newsline: Colorado Democrats question ICE over water, air conditioning outages at Aurora facility
Reports of recent water and air conditioning outages at an immigration detention center in Aurora were among the concerns highlighted by Colorado’s four Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives in a letter to the Trump administration on Friday.
The letter followed a visit earlier this month to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Aurora by U.S. Reps. Diana DeGette of Denver, Joe Neguse of Lafayette, Jason Crow of Centennial and Brittany Pettersen of Lakewood.
Crow and Neguse are among a dozen House Democrats who have sued the Department of Homeland Security over a new ICE policy requiring lawmakers to obtain prior approval to conduct facility oversight visits. But despite providing advance notice of their Aug. 11 visit, the four Colorado Democrats said that ICE personnel accompanying them were unable to provide much of the information they asked for.
“They failed to answer many of our questions and repeatedly encouraged us to instead email ICE’s Office of Congressional Relations,” they wrote in their letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons. “The inevitable delays caused by routing our questions through OCR, rather than the ICE employee leading the oversight visit, prevent meaningful oversight from taking place in a timely manner.”
The letter includes four pages of questions about the Aurora facility, which is operated by private prison company The GEO Group. The facility has a total capacity of 1,532 detainees and has long been the target of criticism from activists over allegations of inhumane conditions and dehumanizing treatment.
Among the concerns highlighted by the Aug. 22 letter are reports of an air conditioning system within the detention center “not functioning for period of time in July.” Detainees in one of the facility’s housing pods were reportedly relocated as a result. The letter also mentions “reports on several occasions of water outages in the facility, including in July and August of this year.” Other issues raised include recent prohibitions on orientation programs previously conducted by legal aid groups, as well as increased signage and “repeated visits” from ICE staff pressuring detainees to “self-deport.”
The lawmakers also want more detailed demographic information about detainees in the facility, including their countries of origin, the number of detainees entering and leaving the facility on a weekly basis, and the percentage of detainees who have not been convicted of a violent crime.
Caroline Dias Goncalves, a 19-year-old Utah nursing student without a criminal record, was detained in the Aurora facility for 15 days earlier this year before being released on bond. She called her stay a “nightmare” and described having to eat soggy bread and being “treated better than others who didn’t speak English.”
Internal ICE planning documents obtained by The Washington Post indicate that up to three new immigration detention centers could be operational in Colorado by the end of the year. The lawmakers’ letter to DHS says that an ICE staffer told them that one of those potential facilities, in the town of Hudson, is “under contract with ICE.”
The lawmakers asked DHS to provide answers to their questions by Sept. 5.