Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Wednesday sued the operator of the immigrant detention center in Aurora in an effort to force the company to cooperate with an investigation into tuberculosis at the facility.
The lawsuit, against the Florida-based GEO Group, was filed in state court in Adams County, where the facility is located.
“The GEO Group is endangering Coloradans’ public health by refusing to follow the state health department’s order and by violating Colorado law,” Weiser said in a statement.
The suit comes after weeks of effort by state and local health officials to get GEO to turn over information related to a positive case of tuberculosis in the Aurora facility that was identified in June. Authorities are seeking details on where the infected person is now, who else may have been exposed to the highly contagious disease, whether those people have been tested and where they are.
The lawsuit cites state laws that make it illegal to disregard public health orders. The state is asking for a court order requiring GEO to provide the information CDPHE has requested.
GEO, meanwhile, is challenging the state’s authority to conduct health investigations at the facility in federal court. With the attorney general’s lawsuit Wednesday, the two cases appear to be on a collision course that would pit state oversight power against federal autonomy.
The showdown began in June, when a testing lab reported a positive case of tuberculosis in someone housed at the facility. After an initial meeting and other communication with local health authorities, GEO stopped responding to requests for information. It similarly denied answers to Colorado U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper when he visited the facility earlier this week.
The company, backed by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, for whom it operates the facility, has said that there are no active cases of tuberculosis at the facility and that it has conducted its own public health investigation.
Early in its investigation, before GEO cut off communication, the Adams County Health Department was able to interview the person who tested positive for tuberculosis, according to Wednesday’s lawsuit.
“During that call, the individual confirmed that he was isolated within the facility, but he was reluctant to provide any information about those he had been in contact with both in and out of the Aurora facility,” the suit states. “As a result, the interview did not provide the full information necessary to perform a case investigation or contact tracing.”
GEO stopped communicating with Adams County around July 1, and it ignored a subsequent public health order issued by the county. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment stepped in with its own, largely identical health order last week, and Weiser’s lawsuit seeks to enforce that order.
“The GEO Group asked Colorado to put blind-faith into the facility’s response to the disease,” the lawsuit states. “Colorado is therefore flying in the dark when it comes to a contagious and deadly infectious disease within its borders. Just-take-our-word-for-it is not a viable public health response to such a disease.”
Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease that spreads through the air and can be fatal if not treated. People living close together — such as at a detention facility — can be particularly vulnerable. While it is spread only when someone is actively sick, the bacteria that causes the disease can lie dormant in a person’s body for months or even years before developing into active illness. That means tuberculosis can lay the seeds of a future public health emergency undetected.
During a 2024 instance of tuberculosis at the GEO facility in Aurora, state and local public health officials were allowed access to conduct their investigation. In that case, authorities identified 12 additional cases of inactive tuberculosis, though it’s unclear whether those people had been infected at the facility or elsewhere, according to Wednesday’s lawsuit.
This is a developing story and will be updated.