Lost with no documents, immigrants released from ICE’s Aurora detention center rely on nonprofit for help ...Middle East

This story is the third installment in a series about the people helping immigrants in the face of elevated ICE activity across Colorado. See also:

At bus stops across Durango, these volunteers try to shield families from ICE

A 3-person team tracks ICE activity on the I-70 mountain corridor, alerting the Latino community in real time

AURORA

Sitting on a couch in a one-story house near the immigration detention center in Aurora on a recent rainy weekday, J.R.V. began to retether himself to the life he was ripped from nearly five months ago.

At his feet, tan work boots were in a plastic bag with his name written in Sharpie. He had last worn them on a Saturday morning in December when a sheriff’s deputy arrested him as he was driving to a construction site in Florida. They were a reminder of how quickly life changed.

J.R.V., 40, spent about three days at the county jail followed by 12 at Alligator Alcatraz, the infamous, new immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades, where he said detainees suffered in freezing conditions. From there, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him on a four-day odyssey by airplane to detention centers in Texas and Arizona with a stop in Louisiana — chained at the hands, feet and the waist with little access to a bathroom — before he arrived in Aurora.

He never saw his driver’s license, passport or work permit again.

After 127 days there, during which he got little sleep and struggled to stay connected to his family, a guard inside the Aurora detention facility, operated by the private prison company GEO Group, awoke him saying, “You’re going home.”

At about 11:30 a.m. on April 29, he walked outside at the busy intersection of Peoria Street and East 30th Avenue, in front of a vehicle emissions testing site. All the guards gave him were the belongings he had on him that day five months before, when he was driving to work.

At the nearby house, the home base of Casa de Paz, a nonprofit organization that helps detained immigrants and their families, J.R.V. charged his phone so he could call his wife in South Florida and tell her he was out. He’d have to wait to talk to his children, 12 and 9, both U.S. citizens, until they were home from school, he said. Then, he called his lawyer to tell her the news.

Without the help of Casa de Paz, he doesn’t know what he would have done.

J.R.V., who did not want his full name used because he fears retaliation from immigration officials, is one of hundreds of people released from ICE detention each year that Casa de Paz helps with basic necessities.

Mission shifted as immigration policy evolved

The organization started in 2012, offering a one-bedroom apartment where people from out of town could stay while they were visiting their loved ones at ICE’s detention center in Aurora, said executive director Andrea Loya. Since then, Loya said the organization, which received nonprofit status in 2016, has helped more than 20,000 people from over 82 countries.

As national immigration policy has evolved, so has Casa de Paz’s mission. As needs changed, the group began helping families set up commissary accounts for their detained loved ones and giving detainees funds to make phone calls inside the facility.

In 2023, the group helped about 4,400 people released from the detention center amid a huge influx of immigrant arrivals to Colorado. In 2024, they helped about 2,000, and last year, they helped about 600 people as the Trump administration released far fewer detainees. 

A Colorado Sun review of detention data obtained from ICE and published by the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law’s Deportation Data Project shows that the number of people released from the Aurora immigration detention facility has plummeted while the number transferred to other detention centers has increased since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.

Meanwhile, ICE arrests in Colorado have skyrocketed. Federal immigration agents arrested three times more people in Colorado per day on average last year compared with 2024, according to the data.

So far this year, Loya said Casa de Paz has helped about 440 people, on track to be more than last year, but still far fewer people than they helped just three years ago. As the Aurora detention facility has turned into a one-way turnstile, Casa de Paz has found new ways to support the families of those detained.

Last year Casa de Paz began receiving calls from loved ones with questions about the immigration process and detention, and so they added resources to the center’s website that includes links to family preparedness and know-your-rights packets.

The majority of the organization’s funding comes from individual donors, according to Loya. At times it has been difficult for Casa de Paz to get local grants because many of the people they help are not residents of Colorado, although that has changed over the last year. Loya said the organization saw an uptick in donations after President Donald Trump’s election wins in 2016 and 2024.    

Last year, most people released from the detention center that sought help from Casa de Paz were from Mexico, followed by India, Egypt, Turkey and Venezuela.

Each day, program coordinators sit in a white van parked on the street behind the Aurora detention facility, waiting for people walking out. Most look like J.R.V.: confused, carrying plastic bags filled with their belongings. 

At the nearby nonprofit center, coordinators offer water, a warm meal, snacks, a backpack and suitcase, a phone charger, and a change of clothes. They pay for transportation within Colorado and help book long distance travel paid for by the person traveling. For families visiting loved ones inside, volunteers offer snacks and toys for kids to play with while they wait, a new service since they started seeing more Colorado residents being detained last year.

The work is just one example of how Coloradans are helping people cope with the ramifications of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The emotional and psychological toll of being imprisoned away from family members wears on people, said Loya.

“One of the most alarming things for us is how sick individuals are when they are released and the difference from the human they were when they entered detention,” she said.

“A strategy to punish people”

J.R.V. lifted a paper plate of Little Caesars pizza to his mouth, food provided by Casa de Paz coordinators as they researched bus routes to help get him home. With no ID, he had no way to fly, and so a $400, three-day Greyhound ride with stops in St. Louis, Nashville and Atlanta was his best bet, they said. One of them downloaded the Greyhound app onto his phone and printed the itinerary for him.

The way home would be expensive and protracted, but after nearly five months behind bars, he was looking forward to it. 

When J.R.V. first arrived at the GEO immigration detention center in Aurora, he said he signed a voluntary deportation agreement, hoping to end his traumatic detention experience as soon as possible. He had agreed to abandon his asylum case and go to Guatemala, a place he has not lived in about 20 years, where his family would meet him. He arrived in the U.S. in 2007 and had applied for asylum in 2022.

The treatment by immigration and police officers so far had been overwhelming.

“They don’t treat you with dignity, with respect, they treat you as if you are another animal, and we aren’t,” he said in Spanish.

An immigration judge encouraged J.R.V. to fight his detention, and now he’s glad he did, he said. He filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court in Denver in March — the last legal remedy available to someone who is incarcerated to challenge their detention — and won. Immigrants filed more habeas cases in the first 13 months of the second Trump administration than in the past three administrations combined, including Trump’s first, according to federal court data reviewed by ProPublica.

J.R.V. doesn’t know why ICE incarcerated him so far from his family, but it made the experience much harder to bear.

“It’s a strategy to punish people and encourage them to leave, saying there’s nothing good for them here,” he said in Spanish. “It’s to make you psychologically suffer, so that people say they don’t want to come back to this country.”

According to the Colorado Sun’s review of ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, ICE appears to be transferring more people between detention centers. The percentage of detainees that ICE transferred to another detention facility from the Aurora detention center jumped to 73% in 2025 from 23% in 2024, according to the data.

A spokesperson for ICE declined to be named or answer questions about the agency’s transfer policy or protocols. He referred questions to the “Detention Management Standards” page on ICE’s website, which says “ICE also takes other factors into consideration — including when an alien has a serious medical condition, is the primary caregiver of minor children, or other humanitarian considerations.” The standards do not say how ICE determines where someone is detained.

As J.R.V. recounted his experience, a Casa de Paz coordinator came into the house with another man who took a seat on the couch. 

J.R., 35, had spent just one night at the ICE detention center in Aurora in an apparent error, he said. The Sun is not using J.R.’s full name because he fears retaliation from immigration officials.

As he laced up his blue tennis shoes with the laces guards had confiscated when he was detained, he told the coordinators he had received a call the day before from someone with ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, an alternative to detention program that tracks people with ankle monitors, saying he needed to come to their office near Cherry Creek Reservoir to have his monitor checked because it wasn’t working correctly.

ICE uses a private company called BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of GEO Group, to monitor about 185,000 immigrants with ankle monitors and virtual check-ins while their immigration cases play out.

ICE had put the ankle monitor on J.R. about 20 days earlier when he and his wife and 10-year-old son, all from Colombia, lost their asylum case at an immigration hearing. The family appealed, he said. 

When he showed up to the office on Yosemite Street, he said ICE officers put him in handcuffs and had him face the wall so he couldn’t see anything. They told him he had a deportation order; he insisted he had appealed. He was supposed to pick up his son from school that day, and the officers didn’t let him call his wife to tell her he wouldn’t be able to do the pickup, he said. They took him out a back door and drove him to the detention facility in Aurora.

ICE took his ID and work permit, he said. He’s worried about holding on to his job as an overnight stocker at Walmart without the documents.

“They were so rude, so inhumane,” he said in Spanish, recounting the last 24 hours that had upended his life. Casa de Paz coordinators intercepted him as he was leaving the detention center, offering him a warm lunch and a way to get home.

J.R. ate a slice of pizza and the Casa de Paz coordinators ordered him an Uber ride to his house in Aurora.

Loya, the Casa de Paz executive director, took notes about J.R.’s experience so she could relay the information to the Colorado Rapid Response Network, an organization that confirms and reports on ICE arrest activity throughout the state.

“Hopefully this information will help prevent this from happening to someone else,” she said.

“Continue with my life”

J.R.V. spent most of his time in detention reading the Bible, he said. Compared to Alligator Alcatraz, the medical care at the Aurora detention center was OK. The food, not so much. Often the staff would serve the rice and beans undercooked. Sometimes, the food made people sick, he said.

For the first 20 days, he slept in a windowless room with one other person. Then, he was transferred to a room with 60 people in bunk beds. Often, he couldn’t fall asleep until about 3 a.m. because people would be coughing, snoring or playing cards. The staff served breakfast at 5:30 a.m., cutting short any rest he got.

Some of the people detained there were so old, well into their 70s, that they could barely walk, he said.

The experience made him value his health and his family, things he said he took for granted before.

“Someone who has been through this experience realizes how important family is,” he said. “First I’m going to hug my family and then I’m going to continue with my life, keep working.”

Data journalist Karen Yi contributed to this report.

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