Glenwood Springs turns to zoning to fight ICE

Tucked in at the edge of a shopping center in Glenwood Springs, near a gym, a dental clinic and a Social Security office not far from Interstate 70, is a nondescript office without any signs that’s been operating for over 20 years. Only in recent months, amid scrutiny of a Trump administration immigration crackdown, have many people learned what goes on inside. 

This is where people arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Garfield County and the surrounding region are held until they can be transported to Colorado’s immigration detention center in Aurora. While it has operated discreetly for decades, the Glenwood Springs holding center has become the latest battleground where opponents of ICE are pressuring local officials to use every legal avenue possible to shut down or stop ICE centers from opening. 

As public sentiment against the surge in immigration enforcement has increased, local officials are joining in on the fight or being pushed to stand up to the federal government, using zoning rules and other municipal regulations and standards. It’s a long-shot, mostly untested tactic that has yielded varying results, but pitching a fight with the feds has become something constituents are increasingly demanding from their elected leaders on city and town councils and county commissions.

A makeshift memorial for Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two demonstrators killed by ICE officers in Minnesota, outside the ICE field office and short-term detention center in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on Jan. 24, 2026. (Ashley Stahl, Special to The Colorado Sun)

In Glenwood Springs, opponents of ICE zeroed in on the holding facility’s operating agreement with the city. After learning that people have been held for longer than the maximum 12 hours at least seven times last year — a condition the city had set for the facility before it had opened — concerned residents successfully pushed for the facility’s permit to be revoked in April. 

Now they want Glenwood Springs leaders to follow through and force ICE out of its space just like they might for any other business that violates its pacts with the city.

Glenwood Springs’ city attorney is recommending that city council members vote Thursday to move ahead and file a lawsuit against the property owner, ICE and the General Services Administration, which manages federal workspaces around the country, so a judge can decide if the city has the power to close the detention facility despite the supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution that allows federal law to override local law when they are in conflict. 

In a memo to council members, City Attorney Karl Hanlon said the federal government could get the case dismissed for that reason. But if the lawsuit survives, it could take two or three years to get to a trial.  

Tying up the federal government in court, however, can be viewed as a win for activists and others fighting ICE. 

“While we recognize the likelihood of success is difficult, attempting to enforce the City’s local regulations until a court tells us we can’t is good policy,” Hanlon wrote. 

Local governance or federal supremacy?

A similar 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, said Bryna Godar, staff attorney for the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Officials in Leavenworth, Kansas, also recently went to court to require a private ICE contractor, CoreCivic, to go through a permitting process before allowing it to reopen an immigration detention facility, Godar said. In a win for local governance, a state court ruled the supremacy clause didn’t exempt CoreCivic, she said.  

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, filed a lawsuit in April against the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, to try to force it to complete a federal environmental review before converting a warehouse in the city of Surprise into an immigration detention center. DHS recently agreed not to move ahead with the project until the review is finished. Some citizens in Surprise, meanwhile, are so angry with their leaders for not fighting the warehouse that they launched an effort to try to dissolve the city. 

How much power local governments have to regulate ICE operations hasn’t been as much of an issue before because in the past federal agencies would try to follow local zoning laws, said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor of constitutional and immigration law at the University of Colorado. 

A federal law said agencies should consider following such local laws including zoning regulations and requirements, he said. But it was also practical to cooperate and consult with local officials since the federal government would need to rely on services provided by local governments, like emergency services, roads and water, he said.

That has changed as DHS has gotten more money to ramp up immigration enforcement and detention, he said.

“This DHS under the Trump administration has decided to take the bull in the china shop approach,” he said. 

Doctrines developed since the early days of the nation have established that states and local governments can’t discriminate against the federal government and can’t control what happens in a federal facility that’s on federal land, like a military base, he said. But he thinks states and local governments have a stronger chance of enforcing zoning laws that apply to all kinds of businesses when it involves private companies that ICE has contracted with.

That’s the case in Hudson where ICE’s private contractor, The GEO Group, is planning to reopen a former private prison as a contract detention center. A lawsuit brought by an immigrant rights group argues the property isn’t zoned for a detention center and the town shouldn’t allow one to open without a special permit under its land use codes.

A drone view of the proposed Hudson Immigration Detention Center Wednesday, July 15, 2026, in Hudson. (Cheney Orr, The Colorado Sun)

The Glenwood Springs case falls somewhere in the middle, Gulasekaram said. 

The ICE office there is owned by a landlord from Florida, Jeff Gillespie, who leases the space to the federal government. According to Hanlon’s memo, Gillespie did not respond to the city’s notice that ICE’s permit was revoked in April. 

Meanwhile, the fire department responded to a medical call there on July 24 and confirmed the building was still being used as a detention facility, according to the city attorney.

Gillespie did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Holding center comes under target

ICE denies that it has violated the 12-hour hold limit despite federal records obtained by the Deportation Data Project that showed that hold times exceeded the 12-hour limit between 2022 and 2025. 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. 

“This is FALSE. ICE is not holding detainees for more than 12 hours at the facility in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. This is a processing facility not a detention facility. Illegal aliens are quickly processed and transferred to permanent housing at a detention facility,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. 

The Glenwood Springs ICE office became a focal point for protests over the immigration crackdown. As people gathered there for a vigil following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January, there was tension between the association representing the business owners in the complex and protesters over whether they could park in the complex’s lot and use a public access to the property from a bike path. 

An attorney for the owners’ group, Sherry Caloia, said the parking lot at the complex is private and space is at a premium. Owners of other units in the complex have expressed support for Gillespie, saying they haven’t had any problems with the ICE office. 

Opponents’ comments that the complex was a “fire trap” have hurt the businesses there, Caloia said. The association has not taken a position on what should be done about the ICE office.

Claire Noone, a Glenwood Springs attorney among those pushing the city to take action against ICE, said the complex’s reaction made her and others at the vigil curious to find out more about the facility’s owner and access rules. 

Noone was among a group that spent hundreds of dollars seeking records from the city about the property, sometimes fundraising to pay for them. Their grassroots effort revealed a lot more than they were looking for. 

They discovered that the ICE office was never granted a certificate of occupancy allowing it to operate, just a temporary one in 2004. The city says paper records from that time are incomplete and the documentation suggests this was just an oversight. A final inspection of the building was conducted in December 2004, which the city says normally only happens when all safety issues with a property have been addressed. 

In response, city officials and the fire department inspected the office and granted a certificate of occupancy this year. Ashley Stahl, another resident investigating the holding facility, said she hasn’t seen any records that indicate that officials reviewed fire safety conditions specifically for a detention facility, where it can take longer to evacuate people.

Officials, including the fire marshal, conducted a comprehensive inspection of the holding facility in February and a follow up review in April, city spokesperson Bryana Starbuck said. A copy of the emergency evacuation procedures was provided to the fire department, she said.

In the charged political climate, Stahl said the fight over whether the city should be able to enforce its rules against a property has become a dispute over whether people support ICE or not. 

“If the climate was different, I think we could all agree that we shouldn’t have a prison in a strip mall,” she said. 

Noone said she first learned that people were being held at the facility around Thanksgiving, when a woman she knew from the community was arrested and brought there. 

Noone rushed there to help translate for the woman, who spoke Spanish, but she said she wasn’t allowed inside. ICE officers met her at the entrance and told her she could not visit the woman and that there was no place for her to wait inside. 

Later the woman, a mother of two children who Noone said was ultimately deported to Mexico, told Noone about her stay at the facility. She described a cell that could hold about 30 people without any beds. Metal benches had dividers so people couldn’t lie down. The woman’s cell was freezing and when she asked officers to turn up the heat, they threw her a dirty, stained blanket, Noone said. 

(ICE officials didn’t immediately respond to The Colorado Sun’s questions about the conditions.)

In her office, Noone keeps a photo of the woman with her children, who friends sent to Mexico to be reunited with their mother. 

Noone glances at it from time to time as she works on using the city’s laws and regulations to try and close the facility. 

“This has been here for 22 years and we just have not looked into it,” she said.