Rumors of immigration arrests spread across Colorado, but details are unclear

Rumors and fear have overtaken Colorado’s immigrant communities since Donald Trump returned to the presidency and signed a flurry of executive orders and memos related to immigration enforcement.

Across the U.S., reports of sightings of immigration enforcement agents have gone viral. In Colorado, advocates are fielding reports, questions and speculation about potential immigration action in cities across the state.

“Well, here in Greeley, we’re [hearing] that they’re going to raid the JBS plant,” said Sonny Subia, Colorado Director for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). But it remains unconfirmed whether there are any plans to target the major meatpacking plant.

“There’s been a lot of fear because they don’t really understand what’s going on,” Subia said.

In Pueblo, people shared posts about ICE agents stopping cars and knocking on doors in one neighborhood on Thursday. However, local law enforcement said they were unaware of any stepped-up immigration enforcement. The rumors may have been sparked by sightings of ICE agents assisting Pueblo police as they arrested a noncitizen on drug charges.

Meanwhile, a Colorado group that runs a hotline has seen a surge in calls about possible arrests and raids. Few details have been confirmed, but the fear is real.

Subia said some new immigrants are afraid to go to work or to take their kids to school out of fear they could be picked up and deported. He knows from experience. As a teenager working the fields in Arizona, Subia was caught up in a raid years ago, he said. 

“They load you on a bus, they bring you off and they ask you for your papers. How can you prove that you are a citizen? We're going to have to be carrying our papers and our passports with us when we go to the store to buy groceries?”

Feeding these fears are news stories, retweeted by White House officials and even some Colorado lawmakers, touting the hundreds of people with criminal records arrested by federal immigration agents since Trump took office.

“The reason they're putting those numbers out is to scare some of those folks to self-deport, to leave. Well, ask those dairymen and ask those farmers and those produce farmers what it's going to do to their crops. They don't understand the fact of what the benefit is to have immigrant labor,” LULAC’s Subia said. “When they go around bragging about how many people that they arrested, they're just pandering to the right.”

The number of arrests Republicans are now touting is not unusually high and is actually lower than the number of people detained when Trump first took office in 2017.

“They make numerous arrests a day,” said John Fabbricatore, a retired field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Denver office and a former congressional candidate. “This pace, I would say, is slightly above what the normality has been over the last four years.”

Deportations during Trump’s first term in office were also lower than under former President Barack Obama, who was dubbed “Deporter-In-Chief.” It’s too early to know if Trump, who has threatened mass deportations, will overtake Obama and take that title.

Still, Fabbricatore, who is now a visiting scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, thinks the ICE arrests and deportations will increase under Trump. “Absolutely.”

But it will take time. Fabbricatore said ICE doesn’t just run into a business and arrest everyone they think is a non-citizen. The agency plans and usually goes in with specific people in mind.

Still, he concedes there can be “collateral arrests”. One such arrest on Thursday went viral when ICE arrested a U.S. military veteran of Puerto Rican descent during an ICE raid at a fish market in Newark, N.J.

For the time being, LULAC and other organizations plan to combat the fear by educating immigrants on their rights.

Less than a week into Trump’s second term, Colorado communities are still learning how aggressive the Trump administration will be as immigrant enforcement data on arrests and deportations continue to come out.