Voces Unidas de las Montañas

When she got a call from her husband, less than an hour after he left home for work, he told her he had been detained by ICE. She didn’t believe him. “I thought he was joking with me,” the wife said. “I told him to stop lying.” It was later that morning, after a trusted friend had checked the area and accompanied her to pick up his car a few blocks from their Rifle home, that it finally hit her. “I felt like he had died,” she said. “To see his truck and all his things abandoned there. His...

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...

He thought he hired an attorney. After Luis Armando Rivas was detained by ICE, he and his family made sacrifices to secure competent legal representation to fight his deportation in a very complex and biased immigration legal system. After considering several quotes from law firms, they landed on a local option, Hector Gonzalez with Connect Immigration, who was charging about half of what other attorneys were charging at the time. They signed a contract and started a monthly payment plan. But...