The federal government says it’s ramping up immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump’s crackdown, but the extent of activity in the Denver area has been unclear — with little arrest data available yet.
A lack of transparency by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement so far is making it difficult to determine the size and scope of activities taking place locally, including no official confirmation yet of the number of arrests in a series of raids in early February that drew wide attention. The Denver ICE office’s recent posts on social media, however, have provided a glimpse into more than a dozen recent arrests of immigrants without proper legal status.
The promoted arrests largely have been of people with criminal pasts. On the social platform X, ICE’s Denver field office, which covers Colorado and Wyoming, has cited criminal accusations against people arrested in February and March that include sexual assault on a child, obstruction, gun and drug smuggling, and trespassing. The people were from Guatemala, Venezuela, Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras.
Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., heatedly discussed one such arrest during last week’s hearing by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that featured testimony by Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and three other mayors of so-called “sanctuary” cities.
Johnston and GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio sparred about details tied to Abraham Gonzalez. The 23-year-old “suspected (Tren de Aragua) gang member” was arrested by six federal officers after a brief chase and scuffle outside a Denver jail upon his release on Feb. 28, according to an X post by Denver ICE on March 3.
Jordan listed a litany of criminal allegations against Gonzalez, including an arrest on a charge of aggravated assault. He said Gonzalez also assaulted an officer during last month’s ICE apprehension, though the specifics of the incident remain unclear.
An ICE spokesperson told The Denver Post that the agency had significantly increased immigration enforcement activities since Trump took office on Jan. 20, with help from other federal law enforcement and Defense Department partners.
ICE says it’s working toward publishing enforcement statistics on a monthly basis — up from a quarterly basis now, which means the most recent data predates Trump’s return to office.
ICE did not respond to questions from The Post asking how many people had been detained or arrested in the Denver area since Jan. 20 and seeking other information — including the reasoning behind the detainments, the detainees’ countries of origin, where the people were being detained and whether any had been deported yet.
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Recent ICE activity in Colorado
Typical ICE activity has varied in recent years. From October 2020 through September, the Denver field office made 15,333 arrests, according to the agency’s most recently published statistics.
Other cities recorded much higher rates of arrest activity during those four fiscal years, including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Miami and Chicago.
The arrests in Denver’s region broke down to nearly 3,000 in the 2024 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30; over 8,000 in the 2023 fiscal year; close to 3,000 in the 2022 fiscal year; and around 1,300 in the 2021 fiscal year.
The variance in the most recent three years meant an average weekly arrest total ranging from roughly 57 to 154 — with either end of the range many times higher than the total arrests publicized by ICE Denver in recent weeks.
The scale of local ICE activity since September is unknown, including the results of the raids at several metro Denver apartment complexes, including some in Aurora, on Feb. 5.
The agency confirmed the arrest of a 30-year-old Honduran man that day in Thornton. And in the aftermath, Fox News reported that 30 people were ultimately detained in the raids, with one linked to the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — falling short of ICE’s goal of arresting over 100 gang members that day.
In the days since the raids, ICE has publicly confirmed at least 16 arrests and detainments, in addition to Gonzalez.
According to the agency, the people in custody were largely male migrants without proper legal status from Latin American countries — some of whom had previous criminal convictions like driving under the influence. Others were labeled by federal law enforcement as “suspected” members of Tren de Aragua, which is sometimes referred to as “TdA” for short.
Earlier this month, a man from Guatemala was arrested following an investigation by multiple law enforcement agencies, with Homeland Security Investigations reporting that he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 4-year-old child and would remain in custody until his removal from the country.
In February, a 23-year-old man from Venezuela was arrested by ICE Denver after the agency posted on X that he was convicted of obstructing a firefighter in Douglas County and “is a suspected member of TdA.”
Difficult for congressman, advocates to track
The Trump administration’s limited disclosure of immigration enforcement activity so far has made it challenging for a Colorado congressman and immigrant advocacy groups, along with the media, to track its operations.
According to the latest ICE detention “accountability report” published on Feb. 3 by Rep. Jason Crow, a Democrat whose district includes Aurora, the city’s privately operated ICE detention facility housed 1,116 detainees, including 1,040 men and 76 women. Seventeen detainees identified as transgender.
That week, 117 detainees entered the facility and 76 exited, according to the report. The most represented countries of origin in the facility included Mexico, Venezuela, India, Honduras and Turkey.
But Crow’s office noted online that, “starting in February 2025, the Trump administration has informed us that they will no longer regularly provide updates on the Aurora Contract Detention Facility.” Since then, no new reports have been published.
The Colorado Rapid Response Network has tracked ICE activity throughout the state since 2017, relying on information provided by hotline callers and volunteers in the community. Since Trump returned to office, the hotline has experienced an uptick in calls, said Jennifer Piper, the program director at the American Friends Service Committee Denver, an immigrant-rights organization that helps run the network. It continues to receive calls steadily.
The group can’t provide exact numbers on the results of ICE enforcement activities because it doesn’t receive calls from every impacted party, Piper said, and ICE has stopped making data publicly available.
That reflects a pattern from Trump’s first term, when his administration restricted access to that information, Piper added.
However, she said of ICE, “we feel very confident that they are nowhere near the goal numbers that they announced at the beginning of the Trump administration” earlier this year. In late February, ICE’s acting director was reassigned amid news reports about the Trump administration’s frustration about the pace of the agency’s arrests.
But even if she doubts that there’s been a drastic increase in detainments, she notes that “the presence of federal agents executing immigration responsibilities is definitely up.”
Anecdotally, Piper says she has heard that most migrants targeted in recent enforcement activities arrived in the U.S. over the past few years.
And during the Feb. 5 raid at Denver’s Cedar Run Apartments, a “disproportionate” number of Mauritanians were picked up, Piper said.
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