The story I’m about to share changes depending on who you listen to. Boulder’s district attorney and county sheriff, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and various media outlets all have their own unique takes.
Nominally about two men arrested for road rage, the story has bigger importance; it illustrates why you should seek to understand the way your government works, and why you should withhold judgement until you hear all sides of a story.
Here are the parts that are not in dispute. Two Honduran men were involved in a road rage incident on Highway 36 near Boulder, with one of them firing a shot at another car. They were arrested and charged with attempted murder. A judge gave each men a $100K bond, they each paid $10K cash, and got out of jail. Sometime later, they were picked up by ICE and are in the process of being deported.
Setting the narrative
As near as I can tell, the stories diverge and the various spin machines start turning right about when ICE took to X. In a now-corrected post, ICE mentioned how the two Hondurans were arrested for felony homicide and were released on bond. ICE went on in the replies to say that they “…had to pick them up in YOUR community as immigration detainers were not honored!”
A Boulder DA’s spokesperson shot back in a Colorado Public Radio (CPR) article saying, regarding ICE’s mistaken initial post, that “It is unfortunate that a government agency refuses to acknowledge it or accept responsibility for pushing inaccurate information to the public.”
Later on in the article, the Boulder DA landed a punch: “Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty said he is hopeful that in this case ICE will honor the request to allow his prosecutions [the prosecutions Boulder began with their charges listed above] to continue. ‘Our prosecutor has been working frantically to obtain a court order in the hope that ICE will honor the writ and allow us to continue the prosecution of this serious case,’ Dougherty said on Friday.”
There was also some back and forth behind the scenes between ICE and the Boulder County Sheriff’s office regarding the release of the men. In an email given me by the Boulder Sheriff’s Public Information Officer (PIO), you read that Boulder emailed ICE at 11:10 AM to tell them that “We received notice that the above individual is going to be bonded soon that they were just on their way to get a check. Please advise if you would like to come pick up this individual.” ICE replied about an hour later “Thank you for the notification. Unfortunately, we do not have staff available to pick him up this afternoon.”
The process
If you’ve never been arrested or gone to jail, you likely have no idea what that process looks like. Knowing some of the rudiments is important to navigating the spin coming from both Boulder officials and ICE, so let’s take a quick second to review.
When you are arrested on a jailable offense, you are taken to the officer in charge of booking at the jail. Depending on where you are and their normal practice, your ID is checked against a list of local jurisdictions to see if you’re wanted for any other crimes. When you get a bail hearing, the judge sets how much you’ll have to pay for a bond, and, if you can come up with either the full amount or a percentage for a bondsman, the jail releases you on bail. They have no choice in the matter. Boulder’s PIO put it this way: “Once a court sets a bond, the Boulder County Jail is legally obligated to release the individual upon payment of the bond; we do not have discretion to deny release or modify the court’s terms of release on bond.”
When you’re first dropped at the jail, your name is put into a computer and starts percolating through a variety of law enforcement computer systems and databases. If you were born outside the US, one of the systems your name pings is a database maintained by Homeland Security. This happens regardless of whether you are here legally or not. If you are not here legally, especially if you already have a judge’s order requiring you to be deported, a reply goes back to the jail–a request for a detainer as it’s known– asking the jail to hold onto you until ICE can come pick you up.
This detainer is often noted some time prior to your release. When it gets read and what actions are taken are the crux of the issue. It gets right to the heart of the problem between ICE, state law, and any particular sheriff’s department. At the very least, according to a (non-Boulder) sheriff’s deputy I spoke to on background, the booking officer at the jail will run someone’s name one last time before release, the idea being to catch any requests that piled up after your initial booking.
The sanctuary conflict
It’s how and when this second check happens that divides the Boulder and ICE versions of this story. Despite protestations by the progressive press and majority Democrats, Colorado is a sanctuary state. House Bill 19-1124 and House Bill 23-1100, both signed by the same governor who refutes the sanctuary state label, severely curtail any local law enforcement cooperation or assistance with ICE. HB-1124 prevents them from holding anyone past a release time for ICE solely on immigration/deportation grounds, while HB-1100 prevents any agency in the state from renting jail space to ICE to hold anyone.
The two Hondurans in Boulder were held until they bonded out, and thus were required to be released. Per state law, they cannot be held one second longer so ICE could pick them up. The Boulder sheriff’s PIO told me that “In both cases [for both Honduran men], we followed Colorado law, while cooperating with I.C.E. by sharing publicly available information about the release date of an inmate who had an immigration detainer.”
Read carefully–note the “publicly available” for instance–the statement sounds an awful lot like a law enforcement agency wanting to preserve an image of concern for public safety, while not wanting to violate the state’s sanctuary laws.
Hiding in there, however, is spin. As anyone who has ever dealt with teenagers can tell you, there’s cooperation and then there’s cooperation. Much like a teen who mows a lawn so poorly that they hope you never ask again versus one who is diligent, there is a whole spectrum of “cooperation” in this state. Some agencies inform ICE of a release with plenty of time to muster a group to take them into custody, and some don’t.
In a conversation with the spokesperson for the ICE field office in Denver, I was told that it’s not uncommon for some “cooperating” agencies to tell ICE about a release via an email sent to their general inbox instead of a call, at night, right before a weekend, or for them to tell ICE of a release shortly before the individual leaves.
This is bolstered by what the Boulder Sheriff’s PIO told me. In one of our emails, they said the jail informed ICE (in the email exchange above) that they were told about the Hondurans bonding out right before hitting send on their email to ICE.
Untangling the spin here requires knowing the timing and the process. Boulder may have given only as much warning as they had, but anyone who’s ever driven in metro Denver knows that you don’t get anywhere quickly; mustering a team to take someone previously charged with a violent felony into custody and driving up to Boulder is going to take a while.
It’s not like ICE has teams on standby. Their spokesperson confirmed that they do not have vans driving holding patterns across the state awaiting calls. Real or feigned cooperation, no reasonable person could figure that ICE could get these two under these circumstances. I also have little doubt that this same pattern plays out across the state and in other law enforcement agencies.
We all have our thoughts about immigration enforcement, and the best way to go about it. That disagreement has played out large and small all over the country since Trump’s election and his big, public deportation push. Cops and prosecutors are human too, thus they have the same spectrum of views as any other group.
There are some, like the targets of AG Phil Weiser’s ire on the Western Slope, who might want to help ICE. There are some, like the detective I spoke to for background, who are lukewarm on ICE (he doesn’t really care to extend himself to cooperate because, in his words, he has plenty of other work to do). And there are some who want to actively work against ICE.
Caught up in the spin
The Colorado news consumer is caught in the middle of all this spin, as we get stories washed through the filters of government agency interests and ideological media.
ICE wants to push the story about Colorado’s sanctuary policy. Police agencies want their concern for public safety top of mind, but also the constraints slapped on them by state policymakers. DAs treat a mistaken tweet like a slap in the face, and run to friendly media outlets. Media outlets, in turn, sometimes have an axe to grind about immigration enforcement, but just as often have little idea of the process.
But everyone’s being at least a bit disingenuous here.
The sheriff’s office claims they’re cooperating up to the limit of Colorado law, but let’s be real, there are police agencies working with ICE a hell of a lot better than Boulder did here.
And yes, sometimes those that should be deported are missed due to Colorado’s sanctuary laws, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes ICE gets told and doesn’t get there to pick people up. They should be forthright about their actual capabilities to the extent allowed by officer safety.
While the Boulder DA pounds the desk over an inaccurate X post, reminding people about the need for justice, it’s disingenuous to not mention that someone here illegally released on bond is just as apt to run to avoid prosecution as to avoid jail by deportation. It’s also disingenuous to ignore the fact that, while a Boulder judge’s bail order is legally binding, so is a federal immigration judge’s order to deport someone once ICE gets hold of them. There’s no discretion in either case.
Given that everyone here has an agenda, it’s you as the reader that ends up stuck in the spin cycle. And if the story matters, you need to inform yourself of the process and take the time to become a savvy news consumer.
Cory Gaines teaches college physics and is a regular contributor to Complete Colorado. He lives in Sterling on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. He also writes at the Colorado Accountability Project substack.
