Tag: Ice

Student DREAM Act backers and immigration reform activists took to the streets over the weekend, knocking on doors to talk Boulder residents into voting...

Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with the Congress of Day Laborers in New Orleans, tells a story about the abuse of workers rebuilding the city after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. She once met a man who went to his employer’s house to demand payment for his labor on a construction site after the employer stiffed him of his dues. The man’s boss came at him, swinging a hammer. The worker immediately called the police.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokespeople balked at questions posed by the Colorado Independent in January about the roughly nine ICE "substation" holding facilities located throughout the state. They downplayed concerns about rights violations and about detainees disappearing for hours and days unable to be located by loved ones and advocates. Basalt-resident Edgar Niebla was held in one of the substations. He told the Colorado Independent the concerns are justified.

Coloradans and national politics watchers generally will not be surprised that former Colorado Congressman and anti-illegal immigration champion Tom Tancredo celebrated the new broad...

A Latino truck driver outside Phoenix was taken into custody by law enforcement at a weigh station. He pulled in to have the truck...

In a series of charged emails to the Colorado Independent prompted by a report on the existence of unlisted immigrant-detention "subfield offices" in the state, Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, wrote to clarify that the offices were used only for processing suspects. He said immigrants suspected of violations were held at the agency's subfield offices for up to approximately two hours before being transferred to long-term holding facilities. He conceded that contact information for the facilities was unavailable and that detainees being processed at the offices were not allowed to contact relatives or attorneys before being transferred to the larger facilities. The nature of the processing done in the offices, however, was merely transitional, he wrote, and the offices were not "secret."

The detention policies of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Colorado and the network of facilities that has grown here in the last few years are drawing increasing attention among local lawmakers and human rights organizations. Critics of the system say men and women held on suspicion of immigration violations in the state are housed in conditions that rival those established for violent criminal offenders, that the immigrants are becoming fodder for a booming detention industry, and that detainees are often difficult to locate in the tangle of state facilities, which include unlisted so-called subfield offices.

Weld County D.A. and GOP U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck made a campaign stop at the Longmont Public Library yesterday. His take on flash-point...

According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office of Detention and Removal website, the federal agency has only one center for detention in Colorado, a privately owned facility located in Aurora. The website doesn't mention that the agency may also be holding people at unlisted sub-field offices around Colorado. The Nation, which broke the story last week of such sub-field offices, called them "secret" and suggested that they are "black sites" into which detainees might effectively disappear. ICE disputes the terminology.

An upcoming report from The Nation purports to expose 186 secret Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, four five of which are located...