ICE’s Plans for Colorado Expansion, New Facilities Revealed in Court Docs

The American Civil Liberties Union released more than 300 pages of heavily redacted emails, communications and plans from Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Thursday, January 8. The document dump was the result of lawsuits filed in April and September to obtain more information on ICE plans to open new detention facilities, as President Donald Trump continues to incarcerate a record number of immigrants. The documents suggest ICE will contract the GEO Group to manage a new detention facility in Hudson, Colorado, as well as keep detainees in Huerfano County and by the Southern Ute reservation.

The GEO Group is the private prison company that manages the Aurora ICE facility, the only large detention center that ICE currently uses in Colorado. Upwards of 1,400 people at a time are kept there awaiting deportation trials, up from only about 300 before Trump took office.

In August, ICE told members of Aurora’s Democratic congressional delegation about plans to expand to Hudson, a Weld County town with a 1,300-bed correctional facility. The GEO Group kept Alaska state prisoners there from 2009 to 2014, but the prison has been empty ever since. The ICE documents reveal that the Hudson facility will reopen as the Big Horn Correctional Facility and that ICE awarded the GEO Group a six-month, $39 million service contract. According to the ACLU, the contract appears to have been awarded as far back as June, and the GEO Group may have been active at the facility since then.

“While we have forced ICE to finally give us and the public some additional documents, the agency still resists any meaningful transparency into its actions,” Tim Macdonald, ACLU of Colorado legal director, says in an announcement of the document release. “As ICE escalates its aggression across Colorado and the country, we must demand more answers, not less. We must have more transparency into how they plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to imprison more people who have not been convicted of any crime.”

The ACLU acquired a copy of a December contract between ICE and the GEO Group, but all of its terms and pricing were redacted.

“ICE redacted more than 100 pages of documents from late August 2025,” when expansion plans surfaced, according to the ACLU, which alleges that ICE blacked out parts that justify the GEO Group as the only bidder deserving the Big Horn contract “without full and open competition.” The ACLU says it also discovered correspondence from fall 2025 alluding to ramp-up plans for the Big Horn facility.

Several documents obtained by the ACLU center on the Southern Ute Indian Adult Detention Center, located in Ignacio in southern Colorado. These documents show that ICE sought approval in August from the Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, for a contract worth less than $100,000 related to the facility. However, the status of the contract’s approval was not shared. In August, a Washington Post article revealed plans for new ICE detention facilities in Walsenberg, the seat of Huefano County, as well as Ignacio. The Southern Ute Tribe released a statement after that article was published, saying it was “surprised” by the news.

“The Tribe was not notified nor consulted prior to the release of this information,” the statement added. “It is important to note there have been no discussions between Tribal Council and federal authorities on this matter.”

Documents shared by the ACLU include a spreadsheet from February 2025 that marks the Huerfano County Correctional Facility in Walsenberg as “funded.”

While Colorado’s congressional representatives had confirmed that ICE plans to expand into Hudson, the Washington Post‘s reporting, based on documents from public information requests, had been the only source claiming ICE had plans for Walsenberg and Ignacio, too. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called the documents acquired by the Post outdated and “not accurate” in August.

According to the ACLU, ICE left out any timelines or information that offer a sense of how soon ICE plans to open the new Colorado detention facilities. ICE also refused to hand over requests for correspondence with Highlands REIT, the owner of the former Hudson Correctional Facility, and additional communications with the GEO Group.

ACLU attorneys said the documents it received failed to answer questions about expansion plans for not just detention facilities, but also field operations such as arrests and raids.

“The documents we received from ICE fail to answer fundamental questions about the agency’s planned expansion for the Denver field office,” says Scott Medlock, ACLU of Colorado senior staff attorney, in a statement. “With Congress allocating unprecedented resources and funding to ICE and DHS, the public deserves to know how the federal government intends to use this infusion of money.”