Glenwood Springs City Council members voted Thursday to sue the owner of the building where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running a short-term detention facility in violation of city zoning rules, hoping to avoid a more risky legal confrontation with the federal government as it attempts to stop the operation.
The city’s attorney, Karl Hanlon, had initially recommended that council members pursue a lawsuit against the landlord as well as the federal government but warned that he would expect the federal government to push to get the case dismissed by asserting its rights under the supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution. The clause allows federal law to override local law when they are in conflict. But at Thursday’s city council meeting he suggested simply suing the landlord in state court, a less expensive option to try to avoid a head-on legal fight with the federal government.
Mayor Marco Dehm said he felt “somewhat comfortable” pursuing a lawsuit against the landlord in state court to enforce the city’s zoning law but he said he had no interest in suing the federal government. Despite taking the more cautious approach and voting with the 6-1 majority, Dehm suggested the federal government could still seek retribution against the resort community through aggressive enforcement.
“If the buses show up with ICE agents, then we made the wrong decision,” he said.
Some of the residents who have pushed for the city to take action against the detention center backed targeting the landlord as a more effective approach. Many who spoke urged council members to be brave and fight to uphold the city’s law.
“Please take action. This is the moment,” Ellen Freedman of Basalt said.
The property is owned by JG Housing Solutions, LLC, which is operated by Jeff Gillespie. The Colorado Sun attempted to reach Gillespie before the vote, but he did not return a message.
Experts say whether local governments have the power to apply their zoning laws to the federal government, especially when private landowners and government contractors are involved, is still an evolving legal issue.
ICE has operated the office and holding center in a Glenwood Springs shopping center for more than 20 years. A grassroots movement of residents pressed the city’s planning and zoning commission to revoke its permit in April after the city determined that ICE had held some people longer than the 12 hours that the city had allowed.
Despite the revocation, ICE has continued to operate in the building, according to city officials.
Facility was approved in 2003
The fact that the Glenwood Springs facility is privately owned may give the city and opponents of the ICE facility more of a legal chance to force the federal agency out than if the site was publicly owned, experts say.
Local governments have the most leeway to regulate privately owned and operated ICE facilities and the least ability to regulate federally owned and operated ICE facilities, said Bryna Godar, staff attorney for the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Federally leased properties fall somewhere in between, she said. Zoning regulations that specifically apply to the private property owner are more likely to survive a legal challenge, she said.
At issue in Glenwood Springs is a special use permit that the city issued in 2003 so ICE could operate a detention facility in the leased space. ICE’s permit was unanimously approved by the planning and zoning commission after no one spoke against it, according to minutes of the meeting. The permit set a 12-hour maximum hold time for people detained there.
Federal records obtained by the Deportation Data Project showed that hold times exceeded the 12-hour limit between 2022 and 2025. A city summary of the data says hold times exceeded that limit seven times last year.
ICE denies that it has violated the 12-hour hold limit. Twelve hours was ICE’s limit when the city approved its special use permit in 2003. In 2025, an ICE memo waived that internal procedure, allowing people to be held up to 72 hours in short-term facilities.
A similar legal fight is taking place in Portland, Oregon, where officials are locked in a dispute with the landlord of its short-term ICE holding facility after also finding that ICE violated a 12-hour hold rule which was part of the facility’s permit.