New ICE data shows the scope of enforcement on the Western Slope

New public data from ICE offers a look at the scope of enforcement efforts in Colorado, including the Western Slope. While not perfect, this data provides our best available insight into the impact of these operations.

The data comes from the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley School of Law, which obtained internal ICE records through public records litigation against the federal government.

For the Western Slope, the data shows that at least 541 people with a connection to our region were detained by ICE between January 2025 and March 2026.

This total includes 523 people connected to the five ICE offices most tied to the Western Slope: Grand Junction, Glenwood Springs, Craig, Durango and Alamosa. It also includes 18 additional records tied to the Western Slope that appear in ICE data outside those five smaller offices.

Of those 541 people, 358 were explicitly recorded as deported. Ninety-five were still active in the data when this period closed. In total, 435 had some kind of recorded departure event.

Within the five Western Slope ICE offices, Grand Junction accounted for the largest share at 284 people. Alamosa accounted for 70. Glenwood Springs accounted for 66. Craig accounted for 53. Durango accounted for 50. Durango also had the highest share of still-active cases.

The numbers are alarming, yet not surprising to those of us supporting immigrant families. They show sustained immigration enforcement moving through our rural and mountain resort communities in the Western Slope.

State and national numbers show similar trend

The same dataset shows 5,422 unique people detained in the entire state of Colorado from January 2025 through March 2026. Of those, 3,414 were explicitly recorded as deported. Another 1,105 were still active when the data ended.

The national picture follows the same trend. According to the Deportation Data Project’s latest analysis, interior deportations increased fivefold under Trump compared to the final period of the Biden administration. ICE arrests increased 4.4 times. Street arrests increased eleven times. Detention beds used for interior enforcement more than quadrupled. Among people without criminal convictions and without a prior removal order, the release rate within 60 days dropped from 35 percent to 7 percent. The deportation rate within 60 days for that same group more than doubled.

That national context helps explain what families in Colorado are experiencing now. More people are being picked up inside the country. More people are being detained. Fewer people are being released. Cases are moving through a harsher system with less room to recover and less time to respond. This is consistent with what we have seen in the Western Slope and the experience of our clients.

Challenges with ICE dataset

While this release gives us stronger visibility into scale, it does not give us a perfect accounting of what is happening in our communities. The overall total may be closer to reality than some of the office-by-office or geography-based assignments inside the database.

The deeper problem is that the federal government is still not maintaining or disclosing records in a way that communities can trust without question. For families trying to find a loved one, for advocates trying to track patterns, and for local communities trying to understand what is happening around them, that is a serious failure.

For example, if we infer the county of where people lived or where they were detained, regardless of the specific office code, Mesa County accounted for the largest share at 253 people, followed by Garfield County with 93, Moffat County with 51, Gunnison County with 14, and Montrose County with 13. Smaller numbers appeared in Eagle, Lake, San Miguel, and Routt counties with 2 each, and Delta, Pitkin, and Summit counties with 1 each. Together, those county-inferred Western Slope and central mountain records account for 435 people; four additional region-linked records could not be assigned cleanly to a single county, bringing the full strict geography-based regional total to 439 people. That compares with 541 people in our hybrid office-based count, which includes everyone processed through the five tracked offices plus Denver records we could pull back into the region.

When we compare the new data to Voces Unidas’ own case files of actual confirmed people detained in the region, we can already tell that numbers in the dataset for counties like Summit, Eagle, Routt and many others are significantly undercounted.

We know there are people from the Western Slope who do not show up neatly in the places where common sense says they should. For example, it’s unclear how the ICE detentions in Summit and Eagle counties were recorded in the federal data because they are not reflected in the county count, which is inconsistent across the dataset. But we were able to find our former client, Delvin Rodriguez, who died in ICE custody after he was detained in September 2025 in Summit County. He was in the system as part of the Denver numbers without many markers that connected him to Summit County or the Western Slope. But his record stood out amongst the thousands of others. His status was masked as “died.”

We also know there are cases where the federal record does not line up cleanly with what happened on the ground as in the case of Juan Carlos Membreño Portillo, detained in Glenwood Springs but recorded as Grand Junction.

We were able to find Luis Rivas when he was detained by two Garfield County sheriff deputies. But the ICE dataset does not say that these two deputies detained Luis without a warrant on behalf of ICE, at the Walmart parking lot in Glenwood Springs.

We can find other documented cases we have reported on where the Garfield County jail facilitated the transfer of Latinos to ICE custody. We believe these actions are against state law.

This is why we decided to include at least 18 records with a Western Slope connection that appear in the state file but are not coded to the five offices in our region. We add them to our count to more accurately reflect the larger regional footprint of ICE, even as the records themselves contain real accuracy problems.

Transparency must be the standard

People deserve to know what the government is doing in their communities. Families deserve to know whether enforcement is increasing and how these systems are operating. Journalists, researchers, attorneys, advocates, and local leaders need data to test official claims against reality. Without transparency, the federal government controls the story by withholding facts. When that happens, communities are left in the dark while enforcement expands.

Transparency is also important because it allows the public to see where the government’s own records fall short. When federal data does not line up with what organizations like Voces Unidas are documenting on the ground, that should raise alarm. It means the official record is incomplete. It means communities are seeing harm that the public record does not fully capture. And it means there is even more reason to demand fuller, more accurate disclosure.

Voces Unidas operates an emergency hotline. We document confirmed ICE activity. We support families trying to find loved ones inside a detention system built to confuse and isolate them. We provide free legal consultations for people in detention. We send attorneys to meet with our clients. We rely on our own reporting and case management because too often the federal government’s version of events is partial, delayed, or wrong.

Rural Latino communities on the Western Slope should never be invisible. Families here deserve the truth. Communities here deserve transparency. And people facing detention deserve support, legal guidance, and a fighting chance.

If your loved one has been detained by ICE, call Voces Unidas’ emergency hotline at 970-340-8586. We provide free legal consultations for people in detention.

Visit our immigration webpage to follow our work. To support this work, donate at vocesunidas.org/donate.