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According to a Routt County commissioner, federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) followed her to a parking lot and “boxed in” her car after she recorded their activity near Oak Creek, a town of 900 people south of Steamboat Springs. However, ICE denies the allegations.
“I don’t know what I would have happened if my husband was not in the car with me,” Routt County Commissioner Angelica Salinas said in a Facebook video on Wednesday, September 24, explaining the incident happened earlier that morning. “Certainly once they saw him in the car, they took off.”
Salinas, a Latina, says she and her husband drove out to an area around Oak Creek Canyon near Highway 131 that Wednesday after “we heard there was some ICE activity, and people were feeling scared in Oak Creek,” she explained in the video.
“I drove through town and did see some ICE agents in the canyon, stopping people, patrolling mobile home parks,” she said. “I did not interfere. I did not engage with them. I just rolled down my window and recorded what was going on.”
After recording the ICE activity, Salinas shays she drove to a U.S. Post Office near downtown Oak Creek to talk to a friend. When she stopped, she realized she was surrounded on all sides by ICE agents.
“Then, suddenly, I was boxed in by the ICE agents who were in the canyon,” Salinas said. “They left the canyon. They followed me. One behind. One in front, recording my license plate. All wearing masks.”
Salinas believes that once they realized her husband was in the car, they turned around and took off, but the county commissioner feared “they would have apprehended me” or “asked me to get out of my vehicle” if her husband weren’t there.
According to Salinas, local law enforcement in Routt County is not working with ICE in accordance with a Colorado state law that prohibits local police from assisting in most forms of federal immigration enforcement.
“It’s a really scary time, and it’s really sad that this is happening in our community,” Salinas said. “I have a very privileged position in our community, and I’m able to feel safe a lot of places where I go as a Latina woman.”
In a statement to Westword, an ICE spokesperson strongly called Salinas’s story a “smear” and “irresponsible,” arguing that it could lead to more attacks like the shooting at a Dallas ICE detention facility on Wednesday, September 24, which killed a detainee. The federal government claims that ICE has experienced a 1,000 percent increase in attacks against agents this year, but hasn’t provided supporting data for those numbers yet.
“ICE agents in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, were merely driving along a street when the commissioner encountered them,” according to an ICE spokesperson. “The Routt County Commissioner’s blatant and pathetic lie about being ‘boxed in’ or intimidated in any way contributes to the 1,000 percent increase in assaults against them.”
According to ICE, Salinas “smiled and waved as agents passed her.” ICE sent a photo from an agent’s car supposedly showing Salinas’s car parallel-parked next to the U.S. Post Office in Oak Creek and questioned Salinas’s story.
“The media falling all over themselves to report on this need to ask, does this look anything like being ‘boxed in?'”
ICE in Colorado’s Western Slope
Skyler McKinley, owner of the Oak Creek Tavern and occasional Westword contributor, says that Salinas, who took office in January, is well known and a major part of the community in southern Routt County. The news is already widely known in those parts, McKinley says, and is stirring up division.
“Folks around town are definitely talking about the situation, some in support of ICE, some vehemently opposed,” he says. “It’s rare that these types of divisive issues play out like this in a community of this size. Normally, the major issues central to the national political discourse take place a lot farther from home.”
According to the Steamboat Pilot & Today, residents in Routt County and other parts of the Western Slope are trying to document local ICE activity on social media alongside nonprofits like Voces Unidas and Integrated Community, who are simultaneously trying to clear confusion amid false reports and sightings on social media.
Alex Sanchez, the president and CEO of Voces Unidas, an advocacy for Latinos in the Western Slope, tells Westword that the incident with Salinas “shocked” the community.
“Whenever a Latina or Latino are followed because they’re brown or when our community is attacked and we feel persecuted, it impacts all of us. We all feel it,” he says. “Certainly, when it’s an elected official, when it’s someone well-known in the community.”
According to the United Census Bureau, Routt County has a population of about 25,000 people, and an estimated 6 percent are immigrants. Sanchez says that Routt County’s ski resort economy is heavily dependent on those immigrants.
“Like many other mountain resort communities, you can’t have a Steamboat Springs without a thriving workforce, and Latinos and Latinas play a pivotal role in that ecosystem and that economy,” Sanchez says. “Certainly, we’re overrepresented in some areas, including construction, hospitality and food services.”
Shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January, Voces Unidas launched an ICE hotline for people to report where and when agents are active. Sanchez tells Westword that ICE activity has been “frequent” in the Western Slope since then.
“It has been sometimes daily, and it has been consistent since January 2025,” Sanchez says. “We have been seeing ICE agents follow and racially profile many of us in rural counties in the Western Slope.”
While ICE raids and targeted arrests in the Western Slope are “nothing new,” Sanchez says that “what is new is this aggressive racial profiling and lack of respect to due process and civil liberties.”
Sanchez says that ICE agents have stopped Latinos while driving because they’re brown, targeted people for having special driver’s licenses and waited until after an arrest to ask people their immigration status. Increased ICE activity has already started to “disrupt” everyday lives in the Western Slope, with some children forced to stay from school or go home early to avoid arrest.
“It has a toll, a human toll, where families are afraid of going outside their home, going to work or going to school because they don’t know if someone is going to take them,” Sanchez says. “We’ve seen attacks in our community, in Routt County and other parts, when we’re doing these basic everyday functions.”
