Dear Mexican: As I’ve been doing a lot more business in the city of Santa Ana (one of the most Mexican cities in the U.S.), I’ve realized that a shitload of Mexicans are the Fox News-type conservative, yacking out the same kind of shit you hear at a Glenn Beck…
In 2014, ten undocumented immigrants entered sanctuary in churches around the country in order to avoid being deported. Arturo Armando Hernandez Garcia was one of them. As explained in this week’s cover story, “Sacred Ground,” Arturo has been living at the First Unitarian Society of Denver church for four months,…
The results of the last election resulted in shared power at the Colorado General Assembly. Democrats remain the majority party in the House, but Republicans gained control of the Senate. Will good ideas from one chamber face ignominious defeat in the other one? A new proposal making progress in the…
Arturo Armando Hernandez Garcia balances on an orange workman’s ladder in the front hallway of the cavernous First Unitarian Society of Denver church. The fit 42-year-old wears work boots, jeans and a T-shirt that says “Chinos Construction” on it, a souvenir from a friend’s business. He dips a paintbrush into…
Each session of the Colorado legislature spawns controversial bills — like, for instance, Representative Timothy Dore’s call for grants to Colorado counties to offset the impact of legal pot whether sales are allowed there or not. But this year has also spawned a slew of legislation that appears to target…
Governor John Hickenlooper has long been a cycling proponent. Now, he’s calling for the construction of a bike trail that would allow riders to cross the state from Wyoming to New Mexico — and a new bill backed by a Republican state senator may offer a way to make it…
Our January 15 cover story, “Tell No One,” delved into an evolving sexual harassment quagmire at an Aurora outpatient clinic operated by the Department of Veteran Affairs; several female health care workers who complained of inappropriate conduct by a male nurse say they’ve suffered retaliation from administrators, including punitive job…
Arturo Hernandez Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who has been in sanctuary at the First Unitarian Society of Denver Church for three months, has suffered another setback in his case. Attorneys for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have declined to join Garcia’s motion to re-open the case. If ICE had agreed…
Vanessa Collier, a 33 year-old mother of two and wife to her partner, Christina, passed away on December 30th. Her funeral at New Hope Ministries was to feature photos of Vanessa proposing to Christina, and family pictures with their daughters, Madison and Kylie. Fifteen minutes after the service was supposed…
With less than a week until Martin Luther King Jr. Day, activists, arts organizations and politicians are all gearing up for a series of events to mark the holiday, which will be followed by continuing discussions of racism. (Mayor Hancock’s office promises that the schedule for those discussions will be…
The First Unitarian Society of Denver Church, on the corner of 14th and Lafayette streets, has been home to Arturo Hernandez Garcia since October 21, 2014, when he officially sought sanctuary. He is fighting to stay in the United States under President Barack Obama’s deferred action program. But in the…
After ten years in the House of Representatives and six as a U.S. Senator, Mark Udall would prefer to go out known as a champion of individual liberty and the environment, rather than the faltering “Senator Uterus” who one-noted his re-election campaign and badly underestimated the Republican who unseated him,…
An administrative law judge has ruled that both Colorado Campaign for Life and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners must pay fines for failing to disclosing financial information in their campaigns against two Republican candidates in the state senate primaries last year. The groups must also file disclosures of spending and earmarked…
Many people are asking what the recent renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba will mean for travel and trade between the island and the United States. For Ryan Sethre and his wife Kim, a Colorado couple, the new deal meant a more exciting trip than they anticipated. Ryan is the coordinator…
This could get ugly. Hot on the heels of huge City of Denver payouts in cases involving Jamal Hunter and Marvin Booker, Denver Auditor Dennis Gallagher blasted the Denver Sheriff’s Department for a lack of transparency regarding his office’s efforts to audit jail operations overseen by the DSD. A key…
This week’s Westword cover story, “The Snitch Who Stole Christmas,” examines the aftermath of a 2013 police investigation that led to the arrests of forty people in Trinidad for allegedly selling heroin, meth, and other drugs to two undercover informants. The cases were so riddled with legal and procedural problems…
UPDATE: The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against Trinidad police, alleging that two detectives fabricated and misrepresented evidence in the 40-person drug sting carried out in 2013. The organization brought the suit on behalf of two former suspects, probation officer Danika Gonzales and school employee Felicia Valdez,…
In June, Eleanor Dewey learned about the murder of Zoraida Reyes. For many, Reyes was a statistic, just another name on a growing list of transgender women killed in the United States — at least eleven in 2014. But Dewey remembers Reyes as a friend, a fierce immigrant-rights organizer who…
Colorado doesn’t have a death-with-dignity law intended to allow the terminally ill to end their lives. However, a bill on that topic will reportedly be pushed during the upcoming legislative session, inspired by the plight of Charles Selsberg, who lobbied for such a change in “Please, I Want to Die,”…
In the year following the 2013 murder of state prison chief Tom Clements by a parole absconder, parole officers working for the Colorado Department of Corrections put in for an unprecedented 8,858 hours of overtime pay — and nearly a third of that overtime was logged by one small, elite…
Republicans’ domination in the recent midterm — John Hickenlooper’s squeaker of a reelection win was among the few Democratic bright spots — extended to the Colorado State Senate, which will now be under GOP control owing to a vote count not formally announced until days after the election. And while…
After news organizations declared John Hickenlooper victorious in an ultra-tight gubernatorial race with challenger Bob Beauprez, the once-and-future guv finally staged a victory rally at the State Capitol yesterday morning. But what he said has prompted less conversation than what his chief of staff, Roxanne White, did. “Was John Hickenlooper’s…
