The deadly shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse, in Minneapolis on Saturday has Colorado leaders, immigrant rights groups and residents speaking out against the violent enforcement tactics caught on camera.
And many are wondering: Could we see a similar surge of federal agents and violence here?
Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Colorado have quadrupled since President Donald Trump’s inauguration last January, including raids at apartment complexes, a night club and work places, sweeping up mostly people who do not have criminal records.
But the prospect of an influx of thousands of agents outnumbering local law enforcement in a metro area — what Minnesota leaders are calling an occupation — has some worried about how the state government and organizations would respond.
“It’s already come here,” said Enrique Orozco-Perez, co-executive director of Compañeros: Four Corners Immigrant Resource Center in Durango. “We’ve already seen the violence. ICE agents abducted two children from our community,” he said referring to the ICE arrest of two children and their father on their way to school there in October.
At the Colorado Capitol on Monday, Democratic state lawmakers said they stand with protestors in Minneapolis resisting ICE’s enforcement and expressed solidarity with Pretti’s parents, who live in Colorado.
“Our constituents are asking us, what happens when Colorado is next?” said House Speaker Julie McCluskie, D-Dillon. “Will they be able to exercise their constitutionally protected right to peacefully protest against a government they disagree with without weighing their life to do so?”
Republican Sen. Larry Liston of Colorado Springs appeared to blame the actions of Pretti and Renee Good, the 37-year-old mom who an immigration officer shot and killed in Minneapolis this month, for their deaths.
“It’s very unfortunate, but a normal, reasonable person would not bring a loaded 9 millimeter handgun to a demonstration,” Liston said. “I do not fear law enforcement, I support law enforcement. All we have to do is simply follow the directives that they give us and these kinds of incidents would not happen.”
Republican Sen. Mark Baisley of Woodland Park, who is running for U.S. Senate, blamed recently arrived immigrants for the “chaos,” drawing rebuke from Democrats.
Sen. Lindsey Daugherty, D-Arvada, tearfully described reading the news of Pretti’s killing while playing with her toddler. She is due to have another baby in a week, she said.
“What I would like to believe is that we can all agree that American citizens being shot and murdered on the streets during a protest should not be happening,” she said. “It is terrifying to bring children into this world while that is happening.”
Democrats have introduced a bill that would allow Coloradans to hold federal immigration officers accountable for abuses in state court and plan on introducing more bills next month that would require all law enforcement officers to display their name or identification number and increase state oversight of federal immigration detention centers, among other measures.
Attorney General Phil Weiser said his office received 180 reports over the last year of ICE agents acting dangerously which led him to open a portal this month so that the public could report incidents that will be reviewed by the Colorado Department of Law.
Weiser said he has talked to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, also a Democrat, since this weekend about the cases Ellison is bringing against the Trump administration to preserve evidence in the Pretti killing and halt the ICE operation in the state.
“I would be prepared to do the same thing,” he said. “This is a moment that we’re testing the rule of law, and just because someone gets a badge, you give them a gun, doesn’t mean they can break the law.”
There is no indication that federal immigration authorities are planning to swarm Colorado and launch a similar enforcement campaign.
Senators from Colorado vow to vote against ICE funding
Democrats in Colorado’s congressional delegation — U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, and U.S. Reps. Brittany Pettersen, Diana DeGette, Joe Neguse and Jason Crow — have condemned Pretti’s killing, and some have called for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign. Bennet and Hickenlooper have vowed to vote against a government funding bill that includes $64.4 billion for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, including $10 billion for ICE, risking another government shutdown. Democratic representatives from Colorado already voted no.
Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd called Pretti’s killing “a serious incident that warrants a full, independent, and transparent investigation before conclusions are drawn,” in a post on the social media site X. Republican Reps. Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank and Gabe Evans have not released statements about the shooting.
ICE agents are already barred by a federal court from doing warrantless arrests in Colorado unless they document the probable cause beforehand that the person is violating immigration law and is a flight risk.
ACLU Legal Director Tim Macdonald, who brought the case against ICE along with two Denver law firms, said the court’s injunction prevents ICE from doing the kind of mass roundups of immigrants seen in Los Angeles, Chicago and now Minneapolis.
“It remains to be seen whether this administration, this ICE, will comply with federal court orders, or whether they will continue to engage in ways that threaten the very foundation of our democracy,” Macdonald said.
Already, the increased immigration crackdowns in Colorado have especially been felt by the restaurant industry, which has had to deal with surprise visits from ICE agents. Restaurant owners have reached out to the Colorado Restaurant Association for legal advice and support, said Sonia Riggs, the organization’s president and CEO.
“Last week, a member called us very scared because they thought there was an ICE raid happening across the street,” Riggs said. “When they ask us, we share the resources we’ve compiled from our legal partners, including emergency hotlines, best practices for completing I-9 audits, and what their rights are in the presence of DHS activity.”
Rural immigrant groups say they won’t back down
In Durango, where ICE has a field office, immigrant advocates say they already are dealing with harassment from agents.
An ICE agent driving by Orozco-Perez, opened his vehicle window recently and said, “Hey Enrique.”
Orozco-Perez took it as part of an intimidation campaign. ICE agents have held photocopied printouts of Compañeros volunteers’ driver’s licenses out their vehicle windows as they roll by, he said.
ICE officials did not respond Monday to a request for comment from The Colorado Sun.
If an ICE operation like the one in Minnesota comes to Colorado, Orozco-Perez believes the federal government would target Durango along with Denver. Conflict between agents and Compañeros advocates has been intense all year. At a protest after federal agents detained a father and his two children on the way to school in October, ICE agents fired rubber bullets and sprayed pepper spray at protestors.
At the request of Durango Police Chief Brice Current, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation is investigating whether an agent violated state criminal law when he threw a 57-year-old woman to the ground.
A group that ranges from 20 to 150 people protests against ICE weekly in Durango. Larger protests, including one in honor of Good, the woman who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, drew crowds in the hundreds, Orozco-Perez said.
Compañeros has a network of about 100 people who work to confirm suspected ICE vehicles and communicate what they find to immigrants via social media and other channels that Orozco-Perez declined to reveal. On Monday morning, some of those “confirmers” investigated a report of a suspicious vehicle outside a mobile home park. It turned out it was a construction crew.
Each school day morning beginning at 6 a.m., volunteers are stationed at bus stops to make sure children get to school. They return from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., walking children home. Another group of volunteers escorts people to the combined courthouse in La Plata County, which has city, state and federal courts in one spot.
The organization has counted 40 detentions in the region, which also includes Montezuma, Dolores and San Juan counties, in the past year, including four this month.
Going forward, Compañeros is planning more demonstrations.
“ICE can walk around this town and say my name and try to intimidate me, but we are in this fight,” Orozco-Perez said. “Everything we do is backed by the Constitution and the law.”
As for training for those participating in protests, Orozco-Perez said he cannot guarantee volunteers’ safety.
“As a country we have to understand that there is no safety anymore,” he said. “Let’s be honest about that. We understand the risk we take by fighting in the public eye.”
He did offer some advice, however. “If you are going to protest, stay peaceful, stay vigilant. Cotton is not good if you are getting doused with pepper spray. Mask up. Protect your eyes.”
Surveillance of ICE along I-70
Community surveillance to track ICE vehicles is also going on in mountain communities along Interstate 70 on the west side of the mountains.
Voces Unidas, a nonprofit based in Glenwood Springs, only shares the information with the immigrant community if staff find evidence of ongoing ICE activity. They don’t want to alarm residents for no reason if, for example, someone reports an ICE sighting at a gas station. Their service area includes Glenwood Springs, Vail and Silverthorne, all along I-70, where government vehicles pass through daily.
Employees check with local law enforcement in order to rule out their vehicles, and seek firsthand accounts, photos and videos from bystanders who witnessed ICE action. Voces Unidas doesn’t release information on detentions until it has confirmation from family members, including names and the detained person’s “A number,” the alien identification number assigned by the DHS.
Voces Unidas staffs a hotline 24 hours per day, taking reports of ICE sightings and calls from family and friends of those who have been detained. The organization pivoted when President Trump took office a year ago, hiring two new employees and turning its focus toward helping people detained in western Colorado and transported to the ICE detention center in Aurora. The nonprofit spent about $300,000 in the past year to hire staff and build an infrastructure that provides at least one hour of legal advice to those in ICE detention.
In one case, Voces Unidas helped a man with a green card who was held for 30 days, until a judge ruled his detention was unconstitutional, said Alex Sánchez, the nonprofit’s president and CEO. “The federal government wanted to fight,” he said.
The group’s research found that immigrants from rural Colorado are less likely to have attorneys than those living in Denver, mostly because immigrant services in rural areas are far more spread out and less known.
“If you are a rural Latino from the Western Slope and you are caught up in the draconian immigration system and end up in Aurora, you are the least likely to end up with counsel,” Sánchez said.
Voces regularly posts on its blog, as it did last week after relatives of detained immigrants found ICE contact information printed on ace of spades cards left behind in abandoned vehicles. The group’s goal is to disseminate information based on “compassion, the truth and the facts,” Sánchez said.
“There is also an interest in documenting history,” he said. “Our stories are not told as often as in the urban areas.”
In Denver, Jordan Garcia, an organizing director with the American Friends Service Committee, said he has seen a surge in recent weeks of people interested in volunteering to work on the statewide ICE hotline or bring food to people who do not want to leave their homes.
“People are enraged and want to be doing something,” he said. “These are the moments where people ask, ‘Are we going to do the right thing or not?’ That is encouraging to me.”
Staff writers Tamara Chuang and Tracy Ross contributed to this report.