For all of Colorado’s apparent efforts to protect the state against a lawless Trump administration, Coloradans are left vulnerable to authoritarian abuse, and all too often state and local officials are to blame for demolishing the state’s defenses.
Right at the top of state government, Gov. Jared Polis is among the most unreliable allies against attacks on the people of Colorado, and other state and local officials have shown that legal defenses are only so good as officials are willing to assert them. At a time when righteous resolve is the only moral response to federal banditry, officials in Colorado too often have helped the bad guys.
The most spectacular example of this failure comes in the case of Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoenas. In April, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment received a subpoena from ICE seeking personal information on sponsors of immigrant children. Release of the information could improperly expose dozens of residents to immigration enforcement.
Colorado law is supposed to protect against this sort of disclosure. It prohibits state personnel from sharing personal identifying information with federal immigration officers except in response to a court-issued subpoena or to assist with a federal criminal investigation.
States authorities who accommodate federal adversaries only compound the fear.
Instead of upholding the law, Polis claimed to have interpreted the subpoena as being issued as part of a criminal investigation, contrary to all indications, and ordered the information to be released.
A state employee, Scott Moss, sued Polis over this decision, and it was revealed in court that the Labor and Employment Department had already received and complied with another ICE subpoena in March. Then The Denver Post last week reported that the department has actually received at least four federal subpoenas related to immigration enforcement. A department spokesperson told the Post that it is following a court ruling against certain employees being made to comply with the Moss case subpoena. But as for the other three subpoenas, the state has disclosed nothing about its response, since the subpoenas purportedly involve “active investigations.”
Given this lack of transparency and Polis’ eagerness to accommodate ICE, it’s fair to assume the state has provided ICE everything it’s asked for that’s not specifically barred in the Moss case.
Such intergovernmental cooperation might be forgiven in normal times with normal agencies. But the times are not normal — the Trump administration behaves like it’s unconstrained by laws or basic human decency. And ICE is not a normal agency — its unaccountable agents defy court orders, dispense with due process, kidnap people off the streets and disappear them to brutal foreign facilities.
Someday ICE will be abolished, and Americans will remember it with singular shame. Why Polis would make himself complicit with it — even in apparent violation of state law — is a question that should haunt the rest of his career.
But he is not the only authority in Colorado helping ICE terrorize communities.
The Loveland Police Department has allowed the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to access data from the city’s Flock Safety surveillance cameras, and as 9News learned last month, an ATF agent has searched the city’s Flock data on behalf of ICE. This breach at the very least exposes a loophole in the state law against information-sharing with ICE, if not an outright violation.
Last month a Mesa County sheriff’s deputy pulled over Caroline Dias Goncalves, a Utah college student, in Grand Junction. The deputy let her go with a warning, but not before asking her, “Where are you from? You’ve got a little bit of an accent,” extracting from her that she was born in Brazil. A short time later, federal immigration enforcement agents detained her.
Sheriff’s office representatives later revealed that the deputy had shared information about Goncalves on a Signal group chat with federal authorities. Even the sheriff’s office acknowledged that such use of information was “contradictory to Colorado law.”
Episodes like these are transforming American society into a nightmare of paranoia and cruelty. States authorities who accommodate federal adversaries only compound the fear. Residents deserve leaders who, in accordance with ethical behavior, not to mention the law, resist those who mean Coloradans harm.
Quentin Young is the editor of Colorado Newsline. This commentary is republished from Colorado Newsline under a Creative Commons license. Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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