Editor’s note: This story is the first installment in a series about the people helping immigrants in the face of elevated ICE activity across Colorado. More to come this week.
DURANGO
The sun has not yet spilled onto the roads winding through the Animas Valley as elementary school kids, oversized backpacks on their small frames, gather at the bus stop at the edge of their mobile home park.
In the low light, it’s easy for dark, unfamiliar cars to lurk in the shadows.
At 6:10 a.m., E.B. — a woman trained to spot those vehicles — pulls up to the bus stop, just outside downtown Durango. She is a volunteer, arriving at dawn to watch for immigration officials as the kids head off to school. It’s her first stop along a 30-mile loop where trained volunteer “confirmers” stand with kids until the bus arrives and wait for them when they’re dropped off after school.
There are about 30 such volunteers in La Plata County, joining the ranks of people across the state whose concerns about often seemingly random immigration enforcement have led them to stand with kids, watch as their parents walk them to school, or keep a lookout amid the otherwise mundane rhythms of everyday life.
On a fraught national landscape where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel have cast a wide net to detain and deport immigrants, and where their tactics have triggered protest and violence, the volunteers push back against the incursion into their community.
Four months have passed since masked immigration officials pulled three Colombian asylum seekers — a father, his 15-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter — from their car while on their way to school. ICE has detained at least 42 people in Durango and neighboring towns of Ignacio, Cortez and Pagosa Springs since January 2025, according to local immigration advocates. Twelve have been detained since the start of this year.
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the network of volunteers alerting their community to ICE activity in southwestern Colorado has steadily grown. Now, the confirmers, part of a broader immigration response effort, stand watch at bus stops in the bitter cold and through late-season storms, filling a role the children may not fully understand, but that is rooted in a shared sense of unease.
E.B., a “Neighborhood Watch” volunteer looks at a sheet of known ICE vehicles while starting a route in Durango, Colorado, on Monday, April 6, 2026. (Josh Stephenson/Special to The Colorado Sun)E.B.’s bright yellow vest cuts through the dim morning as she flicks on the interior light in her car to study a list of vehicles that other volunteers have flagged as possible immigration enforcement. A Durango resident of 20 years, she asked to be identified by her nickname because she fears retaliation — not only from immigration officials, but from neighbors who oppose her efforts in the town of 19,000 that has become a hotbed of friction between ICE agents and local activists.
A whistle hangs around her neck.
“A lot of the abductions are outside city limits,” E.B. says before driving north, farther into the valley.
At her school bus stops, she greets the children with a smile and asks about their weekend plans. But her attention keeps returning to the road — scanning for cars without license plates, windows tinted too dark, listening for the low hum of an idling engine along a private drive.
Unlike volunteers who respond to reports of ICE activity after sightings are called in, the volunteers at the bus stops take a more proactive approach. They monitor areas where parents and children may be vulnerable while documenting enforcement activity, informing people of their constitutional rights and connecting them with community resources.
For many, the role is as emotionally taxing as it is practical.
“It’s both literal grieving — obviously so many people have died in detention — but also an ambiguous grieving, not only for the people that have been kidnapped, but also for loss of community and loss of safety and feeling safe in our community, as both confirmers and our targeted community,” said E.B., a former multilingual teacher.
“It used to be a very safe family place.”
Since the “Neighborhood Watch” group started keeping vigil in the mornings and afternoons, ICE sightings have become less frequent, she said. Once the kids climb onto the bus and nothing seems amiss, she texts her Signal group — “All clear” — then pulls back onto the road.
“We tell everybody a lot that this job is pretty boring and just 99% of the time, we’re like, all the bus stops are clear,” she says. “Which is good, right? That’s what we want.”
The volunteer response network is driven by a pervasive anxiety reflected nationwide. In 2025, more than 1 in 7 adults in immigrant families with children said immigration concerns were increasing their children’s emotional distress, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit think tank. The burden is especially heavy in mixed-status households, where 25% reported heightened stress, but it extends beyond them — affecting 15% of families with a mix of green card holders and citizens, and even 8% of families made up entirely of citizens.
That anxiety can quickly become tangible when enforcement hits close to home. A single detention can ripple through a community, said La Plata County volunteer Anna Lauer Roy, who has heard from parents who kept their children home from school out of fear after ICE activity.
“We haven’t seen any detentions happen in any of the neighborhoods … since we started doing this,” said Lauer Roy, a psychologist who works full time with asylum-seeking refugees in her day job. “Obviously we can’t say why that is, but it feels good that’s the case.”
Each morning, she walks up and down the streets of a community where parents escort their children to school, turning back once she reaches the crossing guard. She knows she can’t stop an ICE arrest, but hopes volunteers who “watch them like hawks” — and videotape them — encourage agents to follow protocols.
“I just think that education is the key — and so (we’re) trying to make sure that kids know that we want them to go to school,” Lauer Roy said. “We’re right there with them, waking up when it’s time for them to go to school, walking to school if it’s cold out.”
Lauer Roy and the other confirmers are carrying out that work as ICE faces renewed scrutiny in Colorado over warrantless arrests. Last week, a federal judge ordered the agency to retrain officers after finding they had violated a previous court order limiting arrests without judicial warrants.
The last day of school is Friday, but volunteers say their watch will continue through the summer to keep an eye on the roads as parents head to work and shuttle their children to camps, practices and other small rituals of daily life.
LEFT: Enrique Orozco-Perez, co-executive director of Compañeros, holds a sign in protest while monitoring activity outside the ICE facility in Durango. RIGHT: An up-close view of the whistle and anti-ICE pin adorned by Orozco-Perez. (Josh Stephenson/Special to The Colorado Sun
Detained on the way to school, work
Among the 42 people detained by ICE in Durango, all but two were detained without a judicial warrant, according to data from Compañeros, Four Corners Immigrant Resource Center and the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. Advocates said a document was presented before one detention, though they are still investigating what it was. Data for the remaining person was not available.
Only about 10% of those detained had criminal histories, said Aye Maldonado, a legal services specialist for Compañeros — and even those were limited to misdemeanors, often from years or decades ago. In a separate case, she said, a woman applying for citizenship ran into complications because of a drunken driving arrest from when she was in her 20s, nearly two decades earlier. No one detained had been charged with any felonies.
Even a minor history of brushes with the law can deter people from seeking legal protection. Applying for relief means sharing personal information with the government — information that can be used against them.
“They could say, ‘We’re not giving them a visa. We’re going to detain her because she’s a criminal,’” Maldonado said.
The risk extends to some of the very protections designed to help vulnerable immigrants. Under the Violence Against Women Act, survivors of domestic violence can self-petition for legal status without their abuser’s knowledge. But advocates say those safeguards are faltering.
“We’re submitting applications for visas that are supposed to protect victims and it’s now doing the opposite,” said Enrique Orozco-Perez, co-executive director of Compañeros. “That’s the scary part. We’re going back to a time where reporting becomes a threat.”
More than half of the 42 detainees — 23 people — were detained while leaving their homes, while five were on their way to work, at work or returning home, and five were on their way to school, data from immigrant advocacy groups show.
None were arrested at a bus stop, but some parents were detained not far from them, while driving their kids to and from school — prompting volunteers to add more bus stops to their daily monitoring locations.
Enrique Orozco-Perez, co-executive director of Compañeros, far left, meets with volunteers, clockwise from top, M Carrasco-Songer, Tirzah Camacho, Spenser Snarr, and Jay Conlon while speaking with a reporter in Durango on Monday, April 6, 2026. (Josh Stephenson/Special to The Colorado Sun“ICE is looking for the hard workers, the people who are working in the restaurants or the cleaning companies or in construction,” said Lady Carolina Diaz, legal services manager. “They are not looking for criminal immigrants, like drug trafficking.”
“They’re finding ways to kind of get our community members out in the open to detain them,” Orozco-Perez added.
Trump has repeatedly said that immigration enforcement efforts under his administration would prioritize immigrants accused of violent crimes.
In a response to several questions from The Colorado Sun, a spokesperson for ICE said in an email that its officers “use many determining factors when investigating immigration crime and making targeted immigration arrests.”
“All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removed from the United States,” a spokesperson who did not provide their name wrote. “While ICE is not subject to previous restrictions on immigration operations at sensitive locations, to include schools, churches and courthouses, ICE does not indiscriminately take enforcement actions at these locations.”
The agency denied The Sun’s request to accompany immigration agents in the field.
A Department of Homeland and Security spokesman disputed the data from immigration advocates and claimed that since January 2025, agents made 69 arrests out of the Durango office, with 48 of those arrests involving people charged or convicted of a crime including sexual assault, domestic violence and driving under the influence.
“ICE does not target schools,” a DHS spokesperson wrote. “This is just another false narrative to try and demonize our brave ICE law enforcement … ICE does NOT target children.”
On the frontlines
Orozco-Perez steers his truck toward an industrial park on the edge of Durango, where the local ICE field office sits inside a converted car wash, enclosed by a chain-link fence. Most days, volunteers walk the perimeter, tracking which cars are parked inside and noting vehicles as they pass through the gates.
“This time of day — when everyone’s heading to work — is when I’m most anxious,” Orozco-Perez said, driving through town on a Monday morning. “It’s when we have the fewest people available to respond.”
That tension is part of what has prompted a broader, coordinated effort that includes weekly protests outside the facility and a volunteer network that accompanies immigrants to court hearings and responds in real time to ICE activity.
Doing this work in a small, rural community carries risks. Many confirmers are known to immigration officials and encounters can quickly turn tense, with a toll that is both mental and physical.
“We can’t look at any cars at all the same way, where we have this lens of scanning, scanning, scanning,” said Tirzah Camacho, a confirmer with the Southwest Rapid Response Network. “Does that look like an agent? Every call you go on is a nervous system beating.”
LEFT: Enrique Orozco-Perez, co-executive director of Compañeros, looks to see what vehicles are present at the ICE facility in Durango on Monday, April 6, 2026. RIGHT: Orozco-Perez writes “ICE KIDNAPS KIDS” with chalk outside the ICE facility in Durango. (Josh Stephenson/Special to The Colorado Sun)
Some volunteers said ICE agents have followed their cars to work. One volunteer was charged with stalking, though a judge later dismissed the case. At a protest last fall, others were pepper-sprayed at close range and dragged across pavement. Volunteers also face pushback from community members who oppose their efforts.
An immigration officer was charged last month with third-degree assault and criminal mischief after the Colorado Bureau of Investigation opened a case into the treatment of a protester seen being put into a chokehold outside the facility in Durango where the Colombian father and his kids were being held.
A DHS spokesperson said ICE officers were trained to use the minimum amount of force to resolve dangerous situations. “Assaulting and obstructing law enforcement is not only a crime, but also dangerous,” the spokesperson said via email.
For immigrant community members involved in the work, those risks carry an added layer of personal exposure.
“It’s difficult for me as an immigrant to actually be in the frontlines like they have been,” said Beatriz Gonzalez, the Western Slope regional director for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which has more than 3,000 volunteers statewide. “And I do as much as I can, but I have a lot of limitations.”
In a rural region, where a report of ICE activity might come from 50 miles away, a “rapid” response network looks different than it does in metro parts of Colorado — but it is no less committed, she said.
“It’s amazing to see that there are a lot of people that have been putting themselves in very dangerous situations,” Gonzales said.
For some, the personal cost is weighed against what is at stake. The feeling of burnout is small when compared with the risk of detention, another confirmer Spenser Snarr said.
“To have the privilege to show up and confront an officer and stand up for folks and still go home at the end of the day, it’s worth it for all of us to take that on,” Snarr said. “It’s important.”
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