Editor’s note: This story is the second installment in a series about the people helping immigrants in the face of elevated ICE activity across Colorado. Previously: At bus stops across Durango, these volunteers try to shield families from ICE
GLENWOOD SPRINGS
CONFIRMADO.
The Facebook post in Spanish is a community alarm for Colorado mountain towns along Interstate 70, a warning to stay alert because ICE is in action. Confirmed, it translates, a person was taken by ICE agents as he left the Mesa County Courthouse in Grand Junction at 10 a.m. May 1.
Three days earlier: CONFIRMADO, a person with legal immigration status was taken by ICE agents from the parking lot of an apartment complex in Grand Junction.
And a few days before that: CONFIRMADO, federal immigration agents took a man from the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs.
The warnings from Voces Unidas de las Montañas have continued for more than a year, picking up in intensity whenever the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown ramps up. They are alerts but also an accounting — a list of people taken from their community when no real-time public accounting from the government exists.
A man who had just stepped outside his home in Craig to go to work. A person who pulled over after what Voces Unidas calls a “fake traffic stop” along U.S. 50 in Montrose. A man at the airport in Eagle who was about to board a flight to his home country of Nicaragua. Instead, he went to the ICE detention center in Aurora.
Since January 2025, the nonprofit that began five years ago as a platform for Latino voices in local politics has documented 198 people taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in western Colorado from Frisco to Grand Junction.The group’s hotline is the number people dial when their relatives or friends don’t return home, or as was the case on one particularly active day in January, when they find their loved ones’ vehicles abandoned by the roadside with ominous clues left inside — ace of spades cards printed with the address of the ICE detention center in Aurora.
Each report of ICE activity that comes into the nonprofit’s hotline is investigated by the staff of three, who seek photo or video evidence and eyewitness accounts. They keep a growing list of make, model, color and license plate numbers for ICE’s fleet of SUVs, and post an alert only when they are certain someone was detained. The goal is to serve as the go-to website for accurate information about ICE activity — not rumors or sightings that they cannot confirm.
Alan M. takes the calls from his desk in downtown Glenwood Springs, where sunshine pours through the window into the brick building as he sits under a sketch of Martin Luther King Jr. that says, “Hate cannot drive out hate.”
The staff who answer the Voces Unidas hotline use last initials only and post no photographs of themselves on the nonprofit’s website. It’s a way to protect themselves from immigration opponents and federal officials. For similar reasons, the nonprofit doesn’t publish license plate numbers of known ICE vehicles or publish photos of agents’ faces.
Alan’s desk is covered in pink and yellow sticky notes in English and Spanish, reminders about all the legal consultations he sets up for people locked in the Aurora detention center and the loved ones he needs to update.
The calls range from “my relative was taken and I have video proof” to “there’s a suspicious vehicle at a gas station along I-70.” Each one is investigated. If there is a license plate number, Alan cross-checks it with the nonprofit’s list of known ICE vehicles, sometimes finding that the federal agency has swapped plates to a different one of its SUVs, he said. Alan calls local police stations to ask if they are investigating a crime near the same location, because sometimes people confuse law enforcement detectives with federal agents.
No confirmation, no post from Voces Unidas.
Alan’s job is to tell people ICE is out actively arresting people, not just that federal agents are in town. “ICE is always present — there is a field office not 2 miles from here,” he said.
At this point, Alan is prone to checking the license plates and peering inside gray Ford Explorers or other unmarked SUVs he passes on Interstate 70. “I’ll drive up next to it, see who’s driving,” he said, “and I see it’s an old lady, OK cool.”
The nonprofit refuses to scare the community without valid reason, like the time during the first Trump administration that a different Colorado immigrant advocacy group posted that ICE was raiding a boutique hotel in Basalt. Panic ensued, hotel employees didn’t go to work and children were kept home from school. It turned out that U.S. Secret Service agents were checking out the hotel ahead of a VIP visit.
ICE declined a request from The Colorado Sun to ride along with agents from any field office in the state as they enforce federal immigration policy. In an emailed response to The Sun’s questions, an unnamed ICE spokesperson said the agency’s officers are “federal police officers who have the power to make vehicle stops using lights and sirens when investigating immigration violations. These are not ‘fake traffic stops.’”
Immigration agents are “not subject to previous restrictions on immigration operations at sensitive locations,” including schools, churches and courthouses, but ICE “does not indiscriminately take enforcement actions” at those locations, the spokesperson said.
“They try and look for their family members on their own and they can’t”
Margarita P., who answers the hotline from her home in Leadville or a Voces Unidas office in Avon, can’t shake one recent call from her mind.
On the other end was a mother crying so hard she could barely speak.
“I could feel her pain,” Margarita said. “Oh my gosh, it was just awful. She was just so heartbroken, a single mom and her son was the one that helped her pay the bills and rent and all of that. It was just overwhelming for me, too, because I could feel her pain and helplessness.”
The woman’s son, 22, was on his way from his girlfriend’s house to his mom’s house in Glenwood when he realized he was being followed by three vehicles. The man, thinking the vehicles were police, was driving extra carefully. When one of the vehicles turned on flashing lights, he pulled over.
“They instantly asked him if he had a driver’s license and if had the papers to be in the United States, and he said no,” Margarita said. “So they detained him right there.”
Voces Unidas posted on social media about the ICE activity.
He called his mother later from the detention center in Aurora. She couldn’t afford an attorney, so Voces Unidas paid for a one-hour consultation with a lawyer. Even though he had no deportation order, and Voces Unidas believed his detention was a case of racial profiling, his legal case was not strong because he had crossed the border illegally.
The family chose not to fight it. He was deported.
Another mother who called Margarita on the hotline told her that her family, including her daughter-in-law and granddaughter, were struggling financially and mentally since her son’s deportation. The woman sank into a depression so debilitating that she struggled to go to work, which made her feel useless, she told Margarita.
During hotline calls, Margarita doesn’t ask questions beyond what kind of assistance people need, but they often tell her anyway. One person’s deportation affects an entire family, she said.
“It’s not just the person that they are taking with them,” she said, “it’s the mom, the wife, the child. It just impacts everyone.”
The hotline gets about a dozen calls during an average week, but sometimes there are 50 calls in a day. After a burst of ICE activity, including when nine men were detained in Minturn and Avon in one day, the volume of calls is high for weeks.
People need legal advice. Some can’t even figure out where their relatives were taken.
“Can you help me find my family?” they ask Margarita. “Because they try and look for their family members on their own and they can’t,” she said. “There’s times where we help people with everything because they’re so anxious. They’re in a shock stage.”
It can take about 24 hours for a person who has been detained in the mountains to reach the detention center in Aurora, and 36 hours for them to show up in the online federal detainee locator system.
Information gleaned from families about the circumstances of each detention can sometimes protect other immigrants, Margarita said. She recalled a hotline call from a small mountain town she called “organized, tight and mighty.” The town was shaken by the arrest of a beloved community member who had lived in the United States for 30 years, had no criminal record and is a business owner.
The man’s arrest, she said, was the first time that Voces Unidas learned that federal officials were detaining people after only looking at their driver’s licenses — Colorado residents who are not U.S. citizens or do not have permanent legal status are issued a license with a black bar across the front.
Words in the black bar say: “Not valid for federal identification, voting or public benefit purposes.” The marked licenses are given to immigrants with work visas, as well as those with temporary legal status under DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which requires renewal every two years.
“They asked him for his driver’s license, and when he showed his special driver’s license with a black line, they arrested him instantly,” Margarita said. “I felt very sad that it happened, but at the same time, I was in a good position to refer this person to get help in places that I know will help him.”
The man’s two sons paid his bond and he is home while his deportation case is pending, Margarita said.
Even with all the details, it’s hard to know what advice to give, though. Telling people not to put their car window down or not hand over their driver’s license often isn’t helpful, she said.
“We’ve had cases where they break people’s windows if you do not want to give your ID or respond to their questions,” Margarita said.
An ICE spokesperson did not answer a question from The Sun about whether agents make arrests based only on a marked driver’s license but said that officers “use many determining factors when investigating immigration crime and making targeted immigration arrests.”
Voces Unidas founder realized Latino workers in the mountains needed a voice
Alex Sanchez started Voces Unidas five years ago as a way to empower Latino voices in the Roaring Fork Valley, where he has lived since he was 9 after his family came to Colorado from a town of about 500 people in Jalisco, Mexico.
“I’ve chosen to do this work because of my own lived experiences and because it’s desperately needed, and some of that work needs to be led by us, those of us who are impacted,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez’s father first came to the United States in the 1970s as a teenager, recruited to work in the fruit orchards in Delta and Hotchkiss. On a trip back home to Mexico, he married Sanchez’s mother. They lived for a time in California, where Sanchez was born, and where his mother worked various jobs, including at a factory making the little dried vegetables and shrimp that go in instant noodle cups.
Sanchez’s mother would return to her home in Mexico for a year or so at a time, until eventually, she crossed the border illegally, bringing the family to settle in Colorado, when Sanchez was 4.
In the mid-1980s, when Sanchez was about 5 and his mother was working at an Aspen hotel, federal immigration agents surprised her and other hotel workers as they got off the public bus in El Jebel, coming home from work. Sanchez’s mother, along with an uncle and other relatives, were among those taken to the detention center in Aurora that day.
Sanchez and the rest of the children his grandmother was taking care of hid in the bathtub of their mobile home as agents pounded on the door. He remembers his grandmother turning off the lights and telling the children to stay quiet, a drill they had practiced as a family.
Sanchez’s mother spent Christmas locked up in Aurora and was deported to Mexico. The rest of the family joined her in Mexico, until they returned to Colorado about five years later, when Sanchez was 9. His mother is now a U.S. citizen.
When Sanchez left the Roaring Fork Valley to attend Colorado State University in Fort Collins and work for now U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet when he was superintendent of Denver Public Schools, he realized that Latinos in other parts of the state had a more powerful voice in their communities than what he had experienced growing up in El Jebel.
The immigrant community in the mountains was different from in the cities, he thought, and different, too, from the San Luis Valley, where legacy Latino families have lived since before Colorado was a state. Many Latino families in the Roaring Fork Valley, which stretches from Aspen to Glenwood Springs, have lived in this country less than 40 years, he said.
“We are newcomers,” Sanchez said. “We are the sons and daughters of immigrants. Our parents came in the search for the American dream. Our community has always felt like we were accepted so long as we were the domestic servants or the housekeepers, or the service employees or the construction workers. We have really struggled to see ourselves reflected in governance, in our school boards and leading our towns.”
He started Voces Unidas — which also runs a political action fund to lobby and raise money, and another fund to contribute to political candidates — to “make sure that our community had the leadership opportunities that we deserved.”
Voces Unidas has pivoted when needed, including right after it was founded and the pandemic hit. The nonprofit organized COVID vaccine clinics so that the Latino hospitality workers who had to do their jobs in person had access to immunizations.
In December 2023, as thousands of Venezuelan migrants were pouring into Colorado, the nonprofit found a building to set up an emergency shelter for 80 people living under a bridge in Carbondale. And in the era of Trump administration immigration policy, another pivot led to seeking additional grants and donations to set up a hotline and a network of legal aid for community members who were detained.
Each attorney consultation is $400-$600 per hour, and representation for an immigration case can cost about $15,000. Voces Unidas has helped 163 immigrants so far with legal aid.
The latest addition was hiring another staff member this spring to work out of Grand Junction. Voces Unidas believes it hears about 70%-80% of detentions in Garfield, Eagle and Summit counties, but that it’s missing most of them in Mesa County. About 675 people have been detained by ICE in the region since January 2025, more than three times as many as Voces Unidas has learned about through its hotline, according to federal data.
“Literally every single day, there’s probably three or four cases out of Grand Junction that no one knows about,” Sanchez said. “People are being taken in Grand Junction, and we’re not even hearing about it.”