“I wanted to see my son’s birth,” Finol Marquez told The Denver Post in Spanish through a translator. But his detention made that impossible.

The Post interviewed Finol Marquez, 28, when he was detained at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Aurora and again after he was forcibly returned to Venezuela, seeking to understand the removal process from his perspective.

His account of his processing before deportation included an assertion that, under pressure, he unwittingly signed a document admitting to being a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, which he said wasn’t true.

When asked on April 3 — the day before he was deported — why Finol Marquez had been detained, ICE said it was because he was an “illegal alien” but declined to share information on where he was being deported to and when he was scheduled to be removed. Later, ICE did not directly respond to questions about the document cited by Finol Marquez.

Finol Marquez’s deportation means his wife Ariagnny, two daughters and one infant son are left in Lakewood, wondering what’s next. Ariagnny, 31, declined to use her last name out of a fear that she’ll be deported, too. She has applied for asylum in the U.S.

“I’m here with my three kids,” she said in Spanish. “I have no financial support.”

The exact numbers of recent detentions and deportations under President Donald Trump’s stepped-up enforcement operations remain unclear due to a lack of federal transparency. Confirmation of the whereabouts of deportees has been piecemeal, with advocacy groups, lawyers and news organizations sporadically releasing names and locations based on available information.

Recently, local immigration assistance organizations and a report by CBS News confirmed that Nixon Azuaje-Perez, a Venezuelan migrant teen living in Colorado, was sent to an El Salvadoran prison. More than 200 migrants — many of them Venezuelan — have been transported to a maximum-security prison in the Central American country.

Federal officials have said they’re criminals and members of Tren de Aragua, but advocates have challenged those claims and questioned authorities’ reliance on tattoos as signifiers of gang affiliation.

In the end, Finol Marquez was returned to Venezuela, which reached an agreement late last month to resume accepting repatriation flights from the U.S.

Arrested in driveway

Years before Finol Marquez’s detainment, he and Ariagnny met because they’re from the same neighborhood in Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas. They’ve been together for almost a decade and wed about two years ago.

After making the four-month journey from their home country to the United States, they arrived in September 2023 and were part of the wave of Venezuelan migrants who traveled to Denver after crossing the border. They spent a year and a half starting new lives in Colorado before Finol Marquez was detained.

He said immigrants had successfully come to the U.S. for college and job opportunities, so he felt welcomed under then-President Joe Biden’s administration.

Back then, “the country was different,” he said.

Ariagnny applied for asylum and submitted her work permit paperwork. Finol Marquez applied for asylum, too, but a judge denied it.

On the morning of March 20, several unmarked vehicles pulled up outside the family’s home, according to videos shared with The Post. Both uniformed and plainclothes ICE agents apprehended Finol Marquez in his driveway.

He said they asked him questions in English, which he didn’t understand, and indicated for him to lift his hooded sweatshirt to examine his tattoos. Finol Marquez said he has a tattoo dedicated to his daughter.

Then, with his car keys and cell phone confiscated, he was put in handcuffs and loaded into a white Jeep, video footage shows. Ariagnny, who was pregnant at the time, looked on.

Finol Marquez confirmed that he had an active deportation order from last year and said it was the result of an unpaid traffic ticket. Without a work permit, he said he didn’t have the money to settle the fine.

Finol Marquez said after he was detained, he was taken to the ICE field office in Centennial where officials asked him to sign paperwork in English. Finol Marquez initially refused, but he said he felt pressured and ultimately signed it.

Later, he received a copy of the documents in Spanish, he said. They included a confession that stated he was a member of Tren de Aragua, he said, adding that other detained Venezuelans had also signed that paperwork.

“I’m a little worried,” he told The Post from the facility.

The Post has spoken with several immigration organizations about the alleged documents, but it was unable to obtain a copy and independently verify the claim. ABC News has also reported claims from detained Venezuelan men that they were compelled to sign confessions about being gang members.

When asked about the allegation, a local ICE spokesperson, who has declined to be quoted by name, did not directly respond. In a statement, the agency said it takes very seriously its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in its custody, and the allegation was not in keeping with ICE policies, practices and standards of care.

The agency previously shared the same statement for another Post story about detainees in Aurora.

At that detention facility, Finol Marquez said Mexicans, Guatemalans and other Venezuelans were among the people held there. He recalled one officer who spoke Spanish and helped him, but he also remembers arguing with another officer over whether he actually came to the U.S. to work.

“In reality, there was a lot of racist officials that treated us badly,” Finol Marquez said in a follow-up interview.

A statement sent by the GEO Group, a private contractor that runs the Aurora facility, said the company strongly rejected allegations of racism, pointing to its zero-tolerance policy with respect to staff misconduct or discrimination.

The statement said that, as a service provider to ICE, the GEO Group is required to follow performance-based national detention standards set by the Department of Homeland Security, including those governing the treatment of people in ICE custody.

The removal process

Finol Marquez’s removal left him and his loved ones with questions throughout the process.

Once he was moved from the Aurora facility, Ariagnny said she went days without hearing from him, and her biggest fear was “that he was taken to El Salvador.”

Finol Marquez said that possibility was also top of mind for him.

Before leaving Colorado, he said he asked an official where they were taking him, and that person responded that he’d find out in Texas.

Finol Marquez said he spent the entire day traveling on a plane — from Colorado to Washington state to Utah to Nevada to Arizona. There, he was given a cot, a pillow, a sandwich and water, he said.

The next morning, officers put Finol Marquez in metal handcuffs, leg irons and a belly chain, he said. Finol Marquez said another Venezuelan who spoke English asked an officer where they were going and was told to Florida, then Texas.

After another day of plane travel, Finol Marquez said he rode in a van for hours through Texas. At the final destination, other buses full of people arrived.

“What’s going to happen to us?” Finol Marquez remembered thinking. “Are they going to send us to El Salvador?”

He said he asked officers and didn’t receive responses. The detainees began boarding a plane: first women, then children, then men, Finol Marquez said. He estimates that more than 300 people were loaded onto the aircraft.

“It was scary because I didn’t know where they were going to take me,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment about Finol Marquez’s claims of government pressure to sign a Tren de Aragua confession and its lack of communication about what country he was being deported to during the removal process.

On the plane, Finol Marquez said he received a cookie, an apple and water, but his access to a restroom was limited.

After hours in flight, passengers recognized Venezuelan terrain below and started to cheer, Finol Marquez said. American officers removed his chains before landing, he said. He was then processed by Venezuelan officials.

Now that he’s returned to his motherland and been reunited with relatives, Finol Marquez said he’s feeling “good, thanks to God.”

He said his plan was to return to Venezuela eventually. But he didn’t want to do it so soon — or leave his family alone in the process.

“In reality, I didn’t think they would treat me like this,” he said, referring to the U.S. government representatives.

He said he wants his wife and children to come back to Venezuela. Ariagnny is also considering that option.

“To tell the truth, I have a lot of fear,” she said, “and I have thought about going back myself.”

Endless barriers exist preventing the start of construction and there’s a $3.2 billion price tag to build a high-speed railway along the I-25 corridor. But even with the steep timeframe and cost, the benefits will far outweigh the miles of red tape and over two decades that this commuter rail project has navigated.

Constructing fast, efficient public transportation should be more than a bottomless pit our tax money falls into. With estimated rapid increases in the state’s population and global temperatures, we need high-speed railways now more than ever.

The United States is woefully behind on public transportation. Last semester, I studied abroad in Scotland, where there were multiple bus routes to campus, trains across the country, and plane tickets to most of Europe for under 100 pounds.

Coming back to Colorado was a rough transition, to say the least.

I drive from Colorado Springs to Denver and back at least once a week. Few terms besides “insane” describe how the one-hour-and-fifteen-minute commute makes me feel.

On one of my loathsome drives to Denver, I put on the Ezra Klein podcast, where he was serendipitously talking about high-speed railways. Delays in constructing railways occur across the country, not just in Colorado, I learned. Klein outlined the problems of building a train in California and how “it took the High-Speed Rail Authority four requests for possession and two and a half years of legal wrangling to get… (a) little spit of land.”

In 2004 (the year I was born), the state passed the FasTracks ballot initiative, which was intended to build a light rail or commuter rail from Denver to Longmont. In a press release last year, Gov. Jared Polis’ administration admitted that “for 20 years voters have been paying for rail service that they have not received” and “the project has stalled due to a lack of adequate funding.”

State leaders decided they wanted to get the train project back on track.

The Denver-Longmont segment could be completed by 2029, and the entire train is estimated to be completed by 2035. Even though it’s ten years away, with federal and funding hold-ups, I question whether I will see this train before I’m middle-aged.

In 2021, Colorado passed Senate Bill 238, which established the Front Range Passenger Rail District. This new transportation district has the ability to put ballot measures before voters to ask for money. A ballot measure may even come on the 2026 ballot asking Colorado voters for funding.

Former President Joe Biden passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which gives funding to projects like high-speed rail. The Infrastructure Act money could be critical to provide funding for building the train, but these grants come with stipulations that local funding has to match 10% to 20% of what the infrastructure bill gives, according to Nancy Burke, spokesperson for the Front-Range Passenger Rail District.

After that, it can take two to six years for train cars to go into operation because they need to be refurbished and meet safety standards set by the Federal Railroad Administration, Burke explained. The district will need to acquire the land needed to build stations, figure out scheduling, and do all of this while working with different local organizations and municipalities.

When it comes to actually building the train, the district is using existing freight rail tracks, which helps speed up the process, but the state will still have to build sidings — places where the train can pull over if there are multiple trains on the track at once.

Gov. Polis rode a test train from Denver to Longmont in March of 2024, a public relations stunt, promising to fulfill the 2004 promise of a train through the Front Range Passenger Rail district. It’s scheduled to be completed four years after the press and politicians crammed into a car and declared they “broke that barrier.”

The year 2029 is also the year the Colorado legislature mandates that the Service Development Plan be completed for the entire project. However, construction cannot even begin until the plan is finished, and the state must still navigate through muddy federal waters.

The district will enter the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) stage where, with public involvement, the district figures out how to minimize harm to the environment. Once that gets approved, they can enter the final planning and development stages.

By 2035, the Front-Range Passenger Railway is estimated to be completed, according to Burke. “Things are moving fast for a project of this size. We have to keep our eyes on the prize for future generations,” Burke said.

But Trump is cutting NEPA and firing a lot of the employees that would be helping approve these plans and could interfere with federal funding. This may cause the process to take even longer.

Between the current administration, government bureaucracy (that DOGE is not fixing), and America’s adoration of driving cars, a train serving the Front Range is an uphill battle.

I wish I could say I was writing this piece altruistically — that my passion about climate change, my empathy for commuters, and my love of smart growth and affordable transportation supersedes my absolute hatred for driving down I-25. It doesn’t, and I want to be able to take a train across the state.

Sofia Joucovsky studies international political economy with a minor in journalism at Colorado College.

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The announcement about opening federal land to private data center companies coincided Thursday with Energy Secretary Chris Wright‘s visit to NREL, where he toured research labs, gave a 10-minute talk to employees and discussed plans for the agency, including the push to provide more data storage capacity for advancing technology.

The Energy Department has identified an 11-acre site located west of the Flatirons main campus, near the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, that “would be an ideal location for a data center facility,” according to a “Request for Information on Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure on DOE Lands” posted online Thursday.

The list of locations identified as potential hosts for data centers included storied nuclear research facilities in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as well as sites in Idaho, Missouri, Washington and Illinois.

“So we’re saying we have a bunch of land. Tell us where you would like to build on these lands. Let’s make a deal. Build a data center. Build the energy that supplies that grid. Maybe share some expertise and intelligence. Maybe share some of your computing power there with our national labs,” Wright said during a news conference. “I think there’s a lot of room for things to be done here with just a more creative, common-sense framework that we’re trying to bring to this government.”

The NREL campus has enough land, power, water and broadband capability to host a 100-megawatt data center, and construction could begin as early as this year, the request-for-information document said.

“Through this project, NREL could help the U.S. establish global AI dominance and accelerate the transformation of the U.S. data center industry by dramatically reducing construction timelines, enabling the U.S. to rapidly deploy critical AI infrastructure at scale,” the document said. “NREL aims to establish a site where a developer can continue its usual business operations while using the site as a proving ground. The approach would not only allow the developer to focus on its business objectives but also provide national stakeholders with valuable insights into accelerating AI data center construction and power deployment, paving the way for future industry innovations.”

In a 20-minute news conference, Wright said the intention is to invite private companies onto federal land to do business in a public-private partnership. That could mean the federal government leases the land to a company or the data center developer reserves some of its capacity for NREL’s work, because the federal lab also relies on data centers.

“It would be a commercial arrangement using our land to get some value out of it with a private company,” Wright said.

NREL’s Flatirons Campus is a 305-acre site where more than 1,000 people research and invent ways to improve and strengthen the energy grid. It has enough space to add several hundred thousand square feet of additional buildings.

The Trump administration’s move follows an executive order signed in January by outgoing President Joe Biden that sought to remove hurdles for AI data center expansion in the U.S. while also encouraging those data centers, which require large amounts of electricity, to be powered with renewable energy.

While President Donald Trump has since sought to erase most of Biden’s signature AI policies, he made clear after returning to the White House that he had no interest in rescinding Biden’s data center order.

“I’d like to see federal lands opened up for data centers,” Trump said in January. “I think they’re going to be very important.”

While the tech industry has long relied on data centers to run online services, from email and social media to financial transactions, new AI technology behind popular chatbots and generative tools requires even more powerful computation to build and operate.

A report released by the Department of Energy late last year estimated that the electricity needed for data centers in the U.S. tripled over the past decade and is projected to double or triple again by 2028, when it could consume up to 12% of the nation’s electricity.

The United States, under both presidents, has been speeding up efforts to license and build a new generation of nuclear reactors to supply carbon-free electricity.

While Biden’s executive order focused on powering AI infrastructure with clean energy sources such as “geothermal, solar, wind and nuclear,” Thursday’s statement from Trump’s energy department focused only on nuclear. But in a lengthy request for information sought from data center and energy developers, the agency outlines a variety of electricity sources available at each site, from solar arrays to gas turbines.

Colorado already is asking how it will be able to provide enough electricity for the surging demand for data centers as it phases out coal-burning power plants.

Data centers come with controversy, especially in the American West, where water is a valuable but vanishing resource. Data centers use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to cool their facilities. They also require an enormous amount of electricity, which often requires the burning of more fossil fuels, creating more greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate climate change.

A 100-megawatt data center would use enough electricity to power about 20,000 homes.

When asked from where NREL would draw enough water and electricity to support a 100-megawatt data center, Wright said the Energy Department would ask private developers to also build the electrical capacity to run their systems. A map included with the request for information shows nearby Xcel Energy substations as well as additional space for windmills, solar and battery storage.

“You’re going to co-locate power,” Wright said. “You’re going to build a data center, and you’re going to build the power and resources to power it.”

He did not answer where the necessary water would come from.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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The U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday that the temporary duty assignments began immediately and will rotate every 90 days in field offices that include Albuquerque, Phoenix, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Portland, Oregon, and Jackson, Mississippi.

The FBI will be working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit, tribal authorities and federal prosecutors in each of the states.

“Crime rates in American Indian and Alaska Native communities are unacceptably high,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “By surging FBI resources and collaborating closely with U.S. attorneys and tribal law enforcement to prosecute cases, the Department of Justice will help deliver the accountability that these communities deserve.”

Work to address the decades-long crisis stretches back to President Donald Trump’s first term, when he established a special task force aimed at curbing the high rate of killings and disappearances among Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

President Joe Biden issued his own executive order on public safety in 2021, and then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched efforts to implement the Not Invisible Act, charging a federal commission with finding ways to improve how the government responded to Indian Country cases. Public meetings were held around the country as part of the effort.

In 2023, the Justice Department established its Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons outreach program, dispatching more attorneys and coordinators to certain regions to help with unsolved cases.

In past years, the FBI’s Operation Not Forgotten had deployed about 50 people. This year, it’s 60.

According to federal authorities, the FBI’s Indian Country program had 4,300 open investigations at the beginning of the fiscal year. That included more than 900 death investigations, 1,000 child abuse investigations, and more than 500 domestic violence and adult sexual abuse cases.

The operation in the past two years has supported more than 500 investigations, leading to the recovery of 10 children who were victims and the arrests of more than 50 suspects.

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He’s writing a book. He’s spending time with his family in Denver and helping out on the Salazar family ranch in the San Luis Valley.

And the former U.S. senator and interior secretary is thinking through his next move.

“I know what the options are. I could run for governor, and I might. I could run for national office and there’s only one and I might do that: the presidency,” Salazar said. “I want to listen to the people and see what their feelings are, what went wrong. How could we have gotten to this point in American history where we’re turning back the clock on 70 years of civil rights?”

Salazar is also concerned that the 25% percent tariffs imposed on Mexico and Canada will unravel the integrated economy in North America that has benefitted all the countries. The potential for trade wars ignited by the tariffs will endanger one of the world’s most important trading blocs, he said.

While in the U.S. Senate, Salazar was part of a bipartisan group that steered a comprehensive immigration reform bill through the chamber in 2007. The bill, which included beefing up security at the border and a path to citizenship for people in the U.S. illegally, died in the House and legislation the following year didn’t even make it out of the Senate.

Salazar believes making the U.S.-Mexico border secure is important and he favors deporting criminals, but said the Trump administration’s “weaponization” of the issue and the deportations are hurting people and will hinder efforts to find common sense solutions.

Salazar, 70, headed Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources; served as state attorney general; U.S. senator; interior secretary in the Obama administration; and as ambassador to Mexico.

“I’m looking forward to being on the playing field,” Salazar said. “It may be that I’m just an adviser in helping correct the direction that we’re in.”

But first, he wants to finish his book. The working title is “Borderland: Making America Great, a United and Inclusive America.” Although part of that might have a familiar ring, Salazar pointed out that there’s no “again” in the title.

“It’s a march toward a more perfect union. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last 70 years,” Salazar said.

However, that progress is at risk given the policies of the Trump administration, Salazar said. He believes the executive orders eliminating government programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, are wrong.

“That’s an America I have worked for all of my life,” Salazar said. “Whenever I talk about an inclusive America, it means you have to have everybody at the table, not just the billionaires.”

Salazar recalled a speech by former Gov. Roy Romer, whose administration he served in. Romer gave a speech in the late 1980s in Lamar where the crowd was mostly white and conservative.

“Romer said we should not just tolerate our diversity, we should celebrate our diversity. He was ahead of his time,” Salazar said.

A photo of Romer and his wife with Salazar and his family hangs on the wall of an office in Salazar’s northwest Denver home. Pictures of Salazar with former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden are mixed with family photos and portraits of his mother and father. His chairs from his Senate and Department of the Interior offices ring his desk.

Salazar’s cowboy hat, which along with boots and bolo tie is a signature part of his wardrobe, has its own place in the large book shelf behind his desk. Salazar’s wife, Hope, dropped by the office to greet visitors while one of three granddaughters played downstairs.

An official homecoming for Salazar is set for Sunday at the Denver Art Museum. Colorado Senators and fellow Democrats Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper organized the event.

“Ken’s contributions to our community — and our nation — run just as deep as his roots here in Colorado. He sets a high bar for what it means to be a public servant,” Hickenlooper said in a statement. “We couldn’t be more excited to have him back home after his time representing the U.S. in Mexico.”

“A true son of the San Luis Valley, Ambassador Salazar served our state and country with honor. No one has fought harder to protect our iconic Western landscapes, or been a greater champion for Colorado’s farmers and ranchers,” Bennet said in an email.

Salazar, a moderate who sometimes went against the grain of his own party, agreed with some of the criticism of the Democrats’ response to Trump pushing the boundaries of executive power. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s recent vote for the Republicans’ short short-term spending bill unleashed outrage from people who wanted Democrats to defy the administration’s cutting of federal agencies and employees.

“I think Democrats have to do what (House minority leader) Hakeem Jeffries and John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet did and that’s fight and resist what Donald Trump is doing,” Salazar said.

He said he’s proud of all the Democratic members of Colorado’s congressional delegation. Still, he believes Democrats have to address Americans’ fears about secure borders. Salazar said the Biden administration finally took steps that slowed illegal border crossings to numbers lower than the last months of the first Trump administration.

Salazar supports a border-security agreement with Canada and Mexico that would be similar to the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement negotiated by Trump in his first term as president.

The Democratic party also needs to take seriously the feeling that a lot of rural America has been left behind, Salazar said. He sees the evidence every time he drives to the family ranch near Manassa in the San Luis Valley. “Almost everything is shut down.”

The Salazar family’s roots in northern New Mexico and the San Luis Valley in southwest Colorado stretch to four centuries, about 250 years before the land was part of the U.S.

“As rural America dies on the vine, those places become redder and redder,” Salazar said. “The Republican Party, in my view, doesn’t really care. They talk a good game.”

But the Democratic Party “has not been very effective at showing its presences or concerns about rural America.”

Updated March 21, 2025, at 7 p.m. to add comment from Sen. Michael Bennet.

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Seven years ago, Erica Green learned through a Facebook post that her brother had been shot.

She rushed to check on him at a hospital run by Denver Health, the city’s safety-net system, but she was unable to get information from emergency room workers, who complained that she was creating a disturbance.

“I was distraught and outside, crying, and Jerry came out of the front doors,” she said.

Jerry Morgan is a familiar face from Green’s Denver neighborhood. He had rushed to the hospital after his pager alerted him to the shooting. As a violence prevention professional with the At-Risk Intervention and Mentoring program, or AIM, Morgan supports gun-violence patients and their families at the hospital — as he did the day Green’s brother was shot.

“It made the situation of that traumatic experience so much better. After that, I was, like, I want to do this work,” Green said.

Today, Green works with Morgan as the program manager for AIM, a hospital-linked violence intervention program launched in 2010 as a partnership between Denver Health and the nonprofit Denver Youth Program. It since has expanded to include Children’s Hospital Colorado and University of Colorado Hospital.

AIM is one of dozens of hospital-linked violence intervention programs around the country. The programs aim to uncover the social and economic factors that contributed to someone ending up in the ER with a bullet wound: inadequate housing, job loss, or feeling unsafe in one’s neighborhood, for example.

Such programs that take a public health approach to stopping gun violence have had success — one in San Francisco reported a fourfold reduction in violent injury recidivism rates over six years. But President Donald Trump’s executive orders calling for the review of the Biden administration’s gun policies and trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans have created uncertainty around the programs’ long-term federal funding. Some organizers believe their programs will be just fine, but others are looking to shore up alternative funding sources.

“We’ve been worried about, if a domino does fall, how is it going to impact us? There’s a lot of unknowns,” said John Torres, associate director for Youth Alive, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit.

Federal data shows that gun violence became a leading cause of death among children and young adults at the start of this decade and was tied to more than 48,000 deaths among people of all ages in 2022. New York-based pediatric trauma surgeon Chethan Sathya, a National Institutes of Health-funded firearms injury prevention researcher, believes those statistics show that gun violence can’t be ignored as a health care issue. “It’s killing so many people,” Sathya said.

Research shows that a violent injury puts someone at heightened risk for future ones, and the risk of death goes up significantly by the third violent injury, according to a 2006 study published in The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection and Critical Care.

Benjamin Li, an emergency medicine physician at Denver Health and the health system’s AIM medical director, said the ER is an ideal setting to intervene in gun violence by working to reverse-engineer what led to a patient’s injuries.

“If you are just seeing the person, patching them up, and then sending them right back into the exact same circumstances, we know it’s going to lead to them being hurt again,” Li said. “It’s critical we address the social determinants of health and then try to change the equation.”

That might mean providing alternative solutions to gunshot victims who might otherwise seek retaliation, said Paris Davis, the intervention programs director for Youth Alive.

“If that’s helping them relocate out of the area, if that’s allowing them to gain housing, if that’s shifting that energy into education or job or, you know, family therapy, whatever the needs are for that particular case and individual, that is what we provide,” Davis said.

AIM outreach workers meet gunshot wound victims at their hospital bedsides to have what Morgan, AIM’s lead outreach worker, calls a tough, nonjudgmental conversation on how the patients ended up there.

AIM uses that information to help patients access the resources they need to navigate their biggest challenges after they’re discharged, Morgan said. Those challenges can include returning to school or work, or finding housing. AIM outreach workers might also attend court proceedings and assist with transportation to health care appointments.

“We try to help in whatever capacity we can, but it’s interdependent on whatever the client needs,” Morgan said.

Since 2010, AIM has grown from three full-time outreach workers to nine, and this year opened the REACH Clinic in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. The community-based clinic provides wound-care kits; physical therapy; and behavioral, mental and occupational health care. In the coming months, it plans to add bullet removal to its services. It’s part of a growing movement of community-based clinics focused on violent injuries, including the Bullet Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis.

Ginny McCarthy, an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Colorado, described REACH as an extension of the hospital-based work, providing holistic treatment in a single location and building trust between health care providers and communities of color that have historically experienced racial biases in medical care.

Caught in the Crossfire, created in 1994 and run by Youth Alive in Oakland, is cited as the nation’s first hospital-linked violence intervention program and has since inspired others. The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, a national network initiated by Youth ALIVE to advance public health solutions to gun violence, counted 74 hospital-linked violence intervention programs among its membership as of January.

The alliance’s executive director, Fatimah Loren Dreier, compared medicine’s role in addressing gun violence to that of preventing an infectious disease, like cholera. “That disease spreads if you don’t have good sanitation in places where people aggregate,” she said.

Dreier, who also serves as executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Gun Violence Research and Education, said medicine identifies and tracks patterns that lead to the spread of a disease or, in this case, the spread of violence.

“That is what health care can do really well to shift society. When we deploy this, we get better outcomes for everybody,” Dreier said.

The alliance, of which AIM is a member, offers technical assistance and training for hospital-linked violence intervention programs and successfully petitioned to make their services eligible for traditional insurance reimbursement.

In 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive action that opened the door for states to use Medicaid for violence prevention. Several states, including California, New York, and Colorado, have passed legislation establishing a Medicaid benefit for hospital-linked violence intervention programs.

Last summer, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis, and the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act earmarked $1.4 billion in funding for a wide array of violence-prevention programs through next year.

But in early February, Trump issued an executive order instructing the U.S. attorney general to conduct a 30-day review of a number of Biden’s policies on gun violence. The White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention now appears to be defunct, and recent moves to freeze federal grants created uncertainty among the gun-violence prevention programs that receive federal funding.

AIM receives 30% of its funding from its operating agreement with Denver’s Office of Community Violence Solutions, according to Li. The rest is from grants, including Victims of Crime Act funding, through the Department of Justice. As of mid-February, Trump’s executive orders had not affected AIM’s current funding.

Some who work with the hospital-linked violence prevention programs in Colorado are hoping a new voter-approved firearms and ammunition excise tax in the state, expected to generate about $39 million annually and support victim services, could be a new source of funding. But the tax’s revenues aren’t expected to fully flow until 2026, and it’s not clear how that money will be allocated.

Trauma surgeon and public health researcher Catherine Velopulos, who is the AIM medical director at the University of Colorado hospital in Aurora, said any interruption in federal funding, even for a few months, would be “very difficult for us.” But Velopulos said she was reassured by the bipartisan support for the kind of work AIM does.

“People want to oversimplify the problem and just say, ‘If we get rid of guns, it’s all going to stop,’ or ‘It doesn’t matter what we do, because they’re going to get guns, anyway,’” she said. “What we really have to address is why people feel so scared that they have to arm themselves.”

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U.S. District Judge Myong Joun sided with Colorado and seven other states that had requested a temporary restraining order. The states argued the cuts were likely driven by efforts from President Donald Trump’s administration to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Trump, a Republican, has said he wants to dismantle the Education Department, and his administration has already started overhauling much of its work, including cutting dozens of contracts it dismissed as “woke” and wasteful.

Education Department plans to lay off 1,300 employees as Trump vows to wind the agency down

The plaintiffs argued the federal Education Department abruptly ended two programs -- the Teacher Quality Partnership and Supporting Effective Educator Development — without notice in February. They said the two programs provided upwards of $600 million in grants for teacher preparation programs, often in subject areas, such as math, science and special education. They said data has shown the programs had led to increased teacher retention rates and ensured that educators remain in the profession beyond five years.

Joun, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, a Democrat, found that the cancelations violated administrative law by failing to give a clear explanation and that the states are at risk of lasting harm because they’re already having to cancel teacher training programs and lay people off.

“The record shows that if I were to deny the TRO, dozens of programs upon which public schools, public universities, students, teachers, and faculty rely will be gutted,” he wrote, using the acronym for temporary restraining order.

Laura Faer, arguing on behalf of the plaintiffs for California, told Joun on Monday that a temporary restraining order was urgently needed because the freeze on grants was already leading to staff being laid off and program being halted.

“The situation is dire right now,” she told the court. “As we speak, our programs across the state are facing the possibility of closure, termination.”

California is joined by Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin.

Adelaide Pagano, representing Massachusetts, argued the Education Department lacked the authority to cancel the grants and its move was not in accordance with the law. The form letters to grantees, she said, failed to provide a clear and reasonable explanation for the cancellations and wrongly changed the criteria in the middle of the grant process, something they could consider for future funding but not money already allocated.

Michael Fitzgerald, representing the government, insisted the Education Department was well within its authority to cancel the grants over the programs suspected of violating federal anti-discrimination laws and no longer aligning with the department’s priorities. He also argued there was no need for immediate relief, since grantees could recoup their frozen funds if they prevail in their lawsuit.

___

Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington contributed.

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But here she was again, on the steps of the Capitol on a cold, cloudy and windy January day, pleading with the state’s leaders to create stronger environmental laws to protect Colorado’s most vulnerable and pollution-impacted communities.

“We know environmental racism exists. You’re killing us,” said Millard-Chacon, who leads the environmental group Womxn from the Mountain. “I’m honestly tired of regulatory systems that think we should wait. At this point, we’re not going to wait. We will go back to the streets because I’m expecting that Trump will make it worse.”

Millard-Chacon went on to call out Gov. Jared Polis and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for what she sees as weak responses to the climate crisis that is causing more smog in metro Denver, more intense wildfires across the state, hotter weather and more contaminated drinking water — especially in disproportionately impacted neighborhoods like Commerce City, where so much of the industry that creates pollution exists.

“I know what CDPHE’s method is and I’m sick of it,”  Millard-Chacon later told The Denver Post in an interview. “If we are going to meet the moment and face the threats from the federal government that weaken our cause, we’re going to need CDPHE to bring welcome relief and step up and do their jobs.”

As President Donald Trump and his new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, begin weakening the agency, those in Colorado who fight for clean water, air and land say it’s more important than ever for the state’s leaders to fill the gap — especially when it comes to environmental justice and protecting the people who live in the state’s most polluted neighborhoods.

Colorado is in a position to stand up for those people because it is one of just 12 states that has a law defining environmental justice and outlining how state regulators should use it to influence decisions.

Since the Colorado Environmental Justice Act was passed by the legislature in 2021, the state health department has created an 11-person Office of Environmental Justice, an advisory board and a task force. It now requires businesses to complete an environmental justice impact analysis when they apply for air-pollution permits, and it maintains a database that helps the public track permitted pollution.

Most of the work is available in English, Spanish and other languages upon request.

Skeptical about Colorado’s commitment

But those who fight the daily battles over environmental policy are skeptical that Polis, his appointed air and water commissions and the Department of Public Health and Environment have the will to tackle environmental justice in a meaningful way.

Too often, state officials pat themselves on the back about their environmental justice work, but when faced with hard decisions that would curb pollution — such as denying more permits — they lack resolve, said Guadalupe Solis, environmental justice director at Cultivando, a public health nonprofit based in Adams County.

“Our reliance on them and our hope to rely on them is bleak,” Solis said.

Officials at CDPHE declined interview requests from The Post, but, in an emailed statement, spokeswoman Gabi Johnston wrote, “We are steadfast in our commitment to serving all Coloradans, ensuring every community has a healthy environment to thrive in — as well as acknowledging that some communities are more polluted than others and therefore need more resources.”

The department maintains that it is a national leader in environmental justice and that it was the subject of a recent EPA civil rights compliance review because of that status.

“The EPA came to us and said it was interested in learning more about the work that we have done in regards to air permitting and civil rights,” CDPHE spokeswoman Kate Malloy said in an email to The Post. “EPA said it felt Colorado would be a good example to highlight and that we could work together to advance this issue, so we voluntarily agreed to fully participate in the review in order to share more information with EPA. The review was not the result of a complaint, as it typically is.”

As for Polis, he already is pushing against Trump’s budget cuts that target renewable energy and is defending other programs that help improve the climate, said Eric Maruyama, a spokesman for the governor. He pointed out legislation and executive orders aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and statewide investments in clean energy.

“Governor Polis is committed to protecting Colorado’s clean air, keeping our communities healthy and safe, with or without the federal government,” Maruyama said in a statement. “Colorado has been and will continue to be a national leader in environmental protection, justice and on climate. No matter who is in the White House or Congress, Colorado will continue to lead on air quality and clean energy.”

While the EPA did not determine the state health department had violated people’s civil rights in its permitting and enforcement of polluters, it did get the agency to agree to sign a resolution pledging to change how it reviews permits for major polluters such as Suncor Energy. Those changes must be approved by the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission and would require companies that hold Title V air-pollution permits to undergo more public scrutiny whenever they want to make changes that could impact their emissions.

KC Becker, appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the EPA’s Region 8 office in Denver, said the civil rights compliance review was initiated by the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights because a study found Colorado had some of the highest COVID mortality rates among communities that also had high levels of air pollution.

The agreement was a priority of hers and she insisted it be signed before she resigned on Jan. 20.

Becker focused on Suncor’s Commerce City oil refinery during her tenure, ordering a study that determined Suncor had more malfunctions than other comparable refineries and twice sending its Title V permits back to the state for review after environmental groups objected to certain provisions.

So far, Trump has not appointed a replacement, but Becker said it is safe to assume that Suncor won’t receive as much attention from the EPA under the new administration. Which leaves monitoring and enforcement up to Colorado, she said.

“Critical backstop for clean air and clean water”

The state health department’s Air Pollution Control Division is capable if it makes it a priority, she said.

“I think CDPHE could fill in the gaps, but for them it would mean hiring more people to closely review permits,” Becker said. “It really will take focusing in on the permitting staff and being as transparent with that information and being as inclusive with the public as they can. It also means taking a good hard look at enforcement.”

But there’s a $1 billion state budget crunch and every agency across Colorado is being forced to make cuts, including CDPHE. On the environmental side of the department, only the Air Pollution Control Division has been targeted for a budget reduction, Malloy said.

The cuts include the elimination of a $38.5 million electric school bus grant program and 19 vacant positions, which would save $2.5 million in the 2025-26 budget, she said. No environmental justice vacancies are being put on hold.

In 2022, the EPA downgraded the northern Front Range to being in severe violation of national air-quality standards, which prompted the General Assembly to infuse the Air Pollution Control Division with money. The state expected more companies to fall under federal Title V air permit standards following the downgrade, meaning more oversight and more paperwork for regulators.

The division hired more than 100 full-time employees with that budget increase, but there have been fewer Title V permit applications than expected, Malloy said. So the division is eliminating those 19 unfilled jobs.

Joe Salazar, a former state representative who fought a gasoline storage facility’s expansion last year as an attorney for Adams County School District 14, said the state will be stretched thin by the budget crunch and must find creative ways to fund climate-related projects.

“We’re going to have to have leaders including the governor and others who are committed to environmental concerns and environmental justice,” Salazar said.

Over the years, the EPA has forced Colorado and companies that have ruined land, water and air to clean up, said Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. Those cleanups include abandoned mines and chemical weapons manufacturing sites.

“The EPA is a critical backstop for clean air and clean water for Colorado. The state can’t do it all on its own,” Nichols said. “They’re the ones who wag their fingers at the state at times to say, ‘Whoa, you’re not doing this right.’ ”

But Nichols said he lacks confidence in the state’s willingness to crack down on polluters. He has been especially disappointed in a lack of resistance, thus far, from Polis in denouncing Trump’s tearing down of the EPA.

“I’d like to hear that he’s got us. He’s got our backs,” Nichols said. “That, in the face of Trump’s efforts to erase our environmental bedrock, he’s got a plan.”

Severe violator of ozone standards

One example of the state’s failure is the ongoing violation of ozone standards across the northern Front Range.

Colorado has known for years that it has dirty air, yet continues to record excessive pollution that creates the blanket of smog that contributes to climate change and makes it harder to breathe, especially for those who suffer from asthma and other lung diseases. Those failures also cause summer gasoline prices to go up for drivers because the federal government requires a different blend of gasoline and increases regulations for businesses.

And while Polis and his administration tout their environmental chops, their critics insist it’s not enough, saying regulators often cater to polluters when creating new rules that are supposed to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

As one example, critics point to a 2023 rulemaking that required the state’s 18 largest manufacturers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but created what environmentalists describe as a pay-to-pollute system through which companies can buy and sell credits on an exchange market.

Meanwhile, the state continues to issue drilling permits for oil and gas companies, said Micah Parkin, co-founder of 350 Colorado, a group that promotes alternatives to fossil fuels.

Parkin said she hopes there will be a shift as Polis finishes out his second term, but she fears Colorado may have to wait on a new administration.

“Our state leaders and our regulatory agencies are going to have to take their jobs of protecting public health far more seriously than they are at protecting the fossil fuel industry,” she said. “But that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

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KC Becker, a former Colorado House speaker who was President Joe Biden‘s political appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 8 in Denver, raced to secure one more agreement with Colorado regulators before she resigned on Inauguration Day, as is customary for federal political appointees.

She had made it a priority of her tenure to enforce the federal Clean Air Act’s jurisdiction over the Suncor Energy oil refinery in Commerce City — one of the state’s largest polluters, with a long history of violations — and she wanted the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to take a step that could lead to more public notification and input on permits for major polluters.

She got the needed signature five days before Trump took office.

“I thought it was important because having more public transparency on these major permits is just going to lead to better air quality, and, because of that, better health for communities that carry the biggest burden of bad air quality,” Becker said. “I figured if we didn’t get it done before we left, it would fall by the wayside.”

The agreement exemplifies how a presidential administration’s decision to prioritize environmental justice can influence state policy, in this case giving people living in highly polluted neighborhoods a stronger voice when it comes to regulating industries that make them sick. It also illustrates how Colorado has benefited from strong federal oversight even when it has one of the more robust environmental justice laws in the country.

Yet the agreement between the EPA and CDPHE is not a done deal. Colorado’s air quality regulators still must write a proposed policy, present it to a state commission for approval and then follow it once it’s in place.

There will be no penalty if Colorado fails to follow through, especially with the sharp transition to a new administration that is now dismantling the EPA’s environmental justice branch — making it even more vital for the state to commit to protecting people who live in neighborhoods that bear the brunt of air and water pollution, advocates said.

“I am concerned. Without EPA’s oversight we’re going to have to be very diligent in pushing CDPHE to do the right thing,” said Ean Tafoya, vice president of state programs for GreenLatinos.

Environmental advocates say the returning president made it clear on Day 1 that he has little interest in supporting the EPA’s mission to protect air, water and land, especially in communities such as Commerce City, where the residents suffer a disproportionate burden of pollution from industries that all Americans rely on for gasoline, cement and other industrial products.

Trump rescinded two of Biden’s executive orders that had prioritized environmental justice shortly after he was sworn into office. The dismantling continued from there.

The president’s decision to freeze EPA funding via grants created by Congress and the Biden administration is undergoing a legal challenge, but, if successful, would strike programs to address methane pollution from oil and gas wells, train workers for the clean energy sector, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, and clean up asbestos and other contaminants from public property.

Trump’s new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has pledged to slash the agency’s budget as major workforce reductions are hitting agencies across the federal government. Ten people who specialize in environmental justice in the EPA’s Denver office already have been put on administrative leave.

Zeldin issued a memo Feb. 4 titled “Powering the Great American Comeback” that outlines five pillars that will guide the agency’s work. While the first pillar is to provide “clean air, land and water for every American,” the other four address industry and economic needs — restoring energy dominance, permitting reform, making America the artificial intelligence capital of the world, and reviving American auto jobs.

When asked about the agency’s commitment to environmental justice under Zeldin, EPA spokesman Richard Mylott said in an email, “EPA will follow the law and our statutory duties to protect human health and the environment.”

But Colorado environmentalists are skeptical that the Trump administration will protect the environment, especially since the president has scoffed at the science of climate change.

“By and large, we had an EPA we could turn to,” said Joe Salazar, an Adams County attorney and former Democratic state legislator who has worked on environmental issues. “With a Trump administration, No. 1, we might not even have an EPA or, No. 2, we have a blunted EPA or, No. 3, we have an EPA that reverses course and defends polluters in weird ways. We don’t really know what’s going to happen, but we know it’s not going to be good.”

Roots of environmental justice

Environmental justice first became a federal priority during the Clinton administration when the president in 1994 directed the EPA to shift resources to marginalized communities that bore the brunt of pollution.

That directive grew from an increasing understanding in the 1980s and ’90s that people in poor communities that had been built around refineries, factories and landfills were sicker with asthma and other illnesses than people in other neighborhoods, said Chris Winter, an environmental lawyer and executive director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment.

People who live in those more polluted neighborhoods often are Black, Latino or Indigenous; earn less money; live in homes with lower values; and sometimes do not speak English as their first language. Those circumstances make it difficult to move away, forcing children to be raised around polluters such as the Suncor refinery.

Other areas of the state that have been designated as disproportionally impacted communities include Pueblo, the Western Slope and the San Luis Valley.

“Folks who are marginalized in low-income communities have less mobility,” Winter said. “They’re trapped.”

Trump undid Clinton’s order when he took office in 2017, Winter said.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris restored that priority on environmental justice during their administration, creating advisory councils, directing money toward communities overburdened by pollution and creating stronger regulations that cover air quality, asbestos use, coal ash cleanup and PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, which contaminate water.

“Environmental justice is saying let’s focus government efforts around pollution to where it’s needed most,” Becker said. “Where is the pollution the worst? Where is the investment the least? At the end of the day, that’s all environmental justice is asking.”

But Trump and Zeldin are again rolling back policies that benefit those who are most at risk from pollution, Winter said.

The plans to downsize the EPA will strip the agency of scientists and drain it of institutional knowledge on complex environmental laws and how those laws protect land, water, air and people, he said.

Americans also can expect the Trump administration to reframe the story about environmental justice and disproportional impacts, Winter said.

“They’re going to try to downplay the importance or severity of those concerns,” he said. “Changing the narrative will be a part of their playbook.”

The administration also will roll back the EPA’s practice of conducting environmental justice analyses on air- and water-pollution permits, which establish the amount of toxic chemicals that companies can release, leaving those communities to continue drinking more contaminated water and breathing dirtier air than their neighbors.

And it will cut funding for projects such as increased air-quality monitoring in polluted neighborhoods, Winter said.

“That was a big part of the Biden administration,” he said. “Those types of funding opportunities are really important to disproportionately impacted communities to have a say in their communities.”

Major vs. minor modifications of permits

All of those moves are what gave Becker a sense of urgency to get CDPHE to sign that agreement that would put more scrutiny on air permits for big polluters.

“The recognition of the Civil Rights Act intersection with environmental laws was a priority of the Biden administration and we knew it would not be a priority for the Trump administration,” Becker said.

To that end, the EPA’s inspector general under Biden — who has since been fired by Trump — realized the agency had never conducted a review of its compliance with civil rights laws and ordered it to be done.

The EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights studied COVID-19 death rates in cities with poor air quality and found Commerce City and north Denver were among the worst in the nation, Becker said. So the agency picked Colorado as a focus.

Suncor was already on Becker and the EPA’s radar because CDPHE had been slow to renew the Commerce City refinery’s two Title V air permits and because public complaints about repeated permit violations were rampant. Becker thought the EPA could push the state to change the way it reviews those permits, which ultimately must receive EPA approval.

In March 2022, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice informed CDPHE that it was launching a review of the state agency’s Air Pollution Control Division to investigate whether it followed federal civil rights laws in administering the Clean Air Act.

“We looked at Colorado and determined that part of the way Colorado manages Title V permits is that communities are excluded from the process,” Becker said. “We never reached a conclusion that said, ‘You’re violating the Civil Rights Act.’ But we said the process you’ve set up has limited opportunity for public comment. And because the majority of these pollution sources are in low-income, diverse communities, there could be a Civil Rights Act violation.”

Becker’s team at the EPA met with people in the community to hear their complaints and to collect ideas for a resolution. Ultimately CDPHE agreed to change how it addresses minor changes to Title V air permits.

When a company receives a Title V permit, it’s valid for five years. During that period, a company must seek CDPHE and EPA approval if it wants to change the amount of pollution it releases into the air.  But if a company wants to make minor changes that would create more pollution, but below a certain threshold, it does not have to go through the more robust approval process, which includes a public comment period.

The issue has been that polluters avoid more intense scrutiny by claiming they are going to make small changes in the amount of pollution coming from their facility by separating out projects rather than aggregating them into one larger plan, said Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. Those polluters tell the state the changes will be minor, and the state approves the request with no public review.

“What happened is people discovered that small changes that polluters claimed were minor were actually pretty significant,” he said.

Three groups representing the oil and gas industry declined to comment for this story. But in the past, representatives from the industry, chambers of commerce and other trade associations have argued that, while they are committed to protecting the environment, too many government regulations threaten their economic stability and the future of their businesses.

In January, the American Petroleum Institute sent a seven-page memo to the EPA with its priorities for the new Trump administration. The institute’s list included actions on auto emissions, ozone standards, methane emissions and clean water rules. The memo reminded the new administration that the federal government’s regulations “directly shape the industry’s ability to innovate, maintain economic stability and meet evolving energy demands — all while prioritizing environmental protection and public health.”

Over the years, environmentalists like Nichols have accused Suncor of dividing its major alterations into smaller projects to avoid the more intense scrutiny. Environmentalists raised questions about it last year in petitions that asked the EPA to object to both of Suncor’s permit renewals.

Efforts to reach Suncor officials for comment were unsuccessful.

EarthJustice, on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, noted in its petitions that Colorado regulators have allowed Suncor to begin making changes at its Commerce City refinery as soon as it files a minor-modification notice. No modeling was used to determine whether emissions changes would increase the amounts of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides the refinery released and without any public determination as to whether the changes would trigger a violation of federal air quality standards.

The EPA asked the state’s Air Pollution Control Division to revisit those sections of Suncor’s air-pollution permits.

“Colorado ultimately did that analysis when they did the Suncor permit and decided there wasn’t an issue and EPA was satisfied with that,” Becker said.

But Becker and the community wanted to make that process for minor modifications more transparent so the public would know what Suncor is doing.

“We thought CDPHE would be open to this,” Becker said. “It seemed like it wasn’t something CDPHE was going to initiate on their own and we didn’t think the Trump administration would do it.”

The Colorado health department voluntarily agreed to propose a new rule that would change how it reviews those minor modifications to air-pollution permits by creating a process for public notifications and public comment. It would give people who live near the refinery — with the help of groups like the Center for Biological Diversity — a chance to review projects and provide input as to whether they would result in major or minor increases in toxic emissions.

“EPA stepped up and Colorado made concessions”

The state has one year to bring a proposed rule to the Air Quality Control Commission, which creates air pollution regulations that state health officials must carry out. That commission, whose members are appointed by Gov. Jared Polis, is not legally bound by the agreement with the EPA and could reject any proposals submitted. There would be no penalty for Colorado failing to uphold its end of the deal.

While CDPHE signed the agreement with the EPA, the agency continues to maintain that it has a strong environmental justice program and is a national role model for its work.

Colorado is one of 12 states that have environmental justice embedded in state law, and CDPHE manages an environmental justice office that helps carry it out. Since the law was passed in 2021, polluters are required to include environmental justice analyses in their permit applications and do more to notify the impacted communities of their plans.

“CDPHE viewed this partnership with EPA as an opportunity to further examine its civil rights and environmental justice work, and explore potential areas for improvement above and beyond current practice,” department spokeswoman Kate Malloy wrote in an email.

The Air Pollution Control Division plans to file a rule proposal by January, Malloy wrote.

“The agreement itself does not change our process, as it currently, and previously, complies with federal requirements,” Malloy wrote. “We committed to raise the topic of minor modifications with the Air Quality Control Commission. The commission will determine whether to adopt any changes.”

While the agreement could fall through, further weakening protections for Colorado’s most environmentally vulnerable communities, it illustrates the important role the EPA serves in the state, especially when it comes to environmental justice, said Nichols, of the Center for Biological Diversity.

“EPA stepped up and Colorado made concessions,” he said. “It speaks volumes as to how the state doesn’t get it right all the time. They need scrutiny.”

Lucy Molina, an environmental activist who lives in the shadow of the Suncor refinery, started questioning environmental policies several years ago when she realized her family and her neighbors were frequently sick. They suffered from nose bleeds, asthma attacks and cancer. No one seemed to care about their suffering until they started speaking out.

While there is uncertainty over the EPA’s future, she plans to continue participating in marches and rallies and speaking during public meetings.

“This is a matter of life and death. We’ve been fighting for our lives,” Molina said. “This administration — they’re murdering us. We are going to continue to fight for our lives. We’re going to continue to speak our voices and share our stories.”

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U.S. District Judge Daniel Domenico, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017, denied the school district’s request for a preliminary injunction, which would have prevented immigration agents from making arrests on school property.

DPS sued Homeland Security last month, seeking the reinstatement of a policy that had largely prevented immigration arrests at schools. The district argued the possibility of immigration raids instilled deep fear in students and their parents.

“I agree that DPS has shown there’s real confusion and concerns and fears among some portions of those families,” Domenico said in announcing his decision at the conclusion of the hearing in Denver’s federal courthouse. “They have shown they are having to spend time and effort to address those concerns.”

But, Domenico said, DPS did not show that impacts to its schools — including declining student attendance — are specifically due to changes to Homeland Security’s so-called sensitive locations policy rather than broader concerns about the rise in immigration enforcement under the new Trump administration.

“The concern was that there would be no limitations or no protections for schools necessarily and that, under the new memo, I think is an overstatement,” Domenico said, referring to a late-January directive. “The fact that there has been no actions on school property in the time that the memo has been released here or as far as we know anywhere else highlights that fact.”

Legally, he said, the change between prior guidance and the new policy under Trump is not “significant.”

DPS is believed to be the first school district in the nation to sue the Trump administration over the end of a policy the longstanding sensitive locations policy, which was last updated under President Joe Biden in 2021 and also prevented U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from making immigration arrests at churches and hospitals.

“While we are disappointed in the judge’s ruling, it is important to note that he acknowledged the real damages public schools have suffered,” DPS spokesman Scott Pribble said in a statement. “He also acknowledged that there are no fundamental differences between the 2021 and 2025 policy, which had not been known prior to our court filing. DPS was successful in forcing the government to release the new 2025 guidance that had previously been kept from the public.”

The Department of Homeland Security had argued in its court filings in the DPS case that the sensitive locations policy hasn’t fundamentally changed under the Trump administration despite the agency rescinding previous guidance.

On Jan. 31, then-acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello issued a memo that gave ICE personnel the “responsibility for making case-by-case determinations regarding whether, where and when to conduct an immigration enforcement action in or near a protected area.”

Fears grow following ICE raids

But educators across metro Denver have grown concerned about ICE agents showing up in schools since Trump’s re-election in November. The president has promised mass deportations and his anti-immigrant rhetoric has occasionally targeted migrants in Aurora and Denver.

Both cities were sites of high-profile raids last month. ICE and other federal agents didn’t make any arrests at Denver schools on Feb. 5, but at least four DPS students were detained that day, according to the district.

DPS’s lawsuit follows a flurry of others by a variety of states and groups across the nation that are suing the Trump administration because of the president’s various executive actions that affect not only immigration enforcement, but also federal funding and transgender rights.

Several religious groups sued the administration over changes to the sensitive locations policy and a federal judge has narrowly prevented ICE agents from detaining people in certain houses of worship while that case moves forward.

Before his ruling, Domenico expressed his “extreme reluctance” to issue a nationwide injunction, although he noted that judges across the U.S. have been doing so in response to other lawsuits filed against the Trump administration.

Claire Mueller, an attorney representing DPS, argued in favor of the judge issuing a nationwide ruling, saying that it would be inequitable for DPS schools to be protected under a narrow injunction but not other districts, such as neighboring Aurora Public Schools.

The judge repeatedly questioned Mueller and attorneys representing Homeland Security about whether an injunction would have prevented the Feb. 5 raids at Cedar Run Apartments. The complex is located near multiple DPS schools and buses were prevented from picking up students due to the presence of law enforcement that morning, according to district officials.

Mueller told Domenico that while an injunction would not have prevented last month’s raids, DPS schools are being harmed by the uncertainty surrounding the end of the sensitive locations policy.

“Students are afraid to come to schools,” Mueller told the judge. “Parents are afraid to send their kids to school.”

Schools still seen as “protected areas”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado has argued on behalf of Homeland Security that district officials are incorrect in believing previous policy completely prevented enforcement activities at schools. The attorneys noted that while a new policy issued on Jan. 20 was less specific, it still allowed other departments to enact their own policies.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued its own guidance that again defined protected areas to include schools and required supervisory approval before enforcement action could be taken in those protected areas,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote in a court filing.

The federal government doesn’t think there needs to be a “bright-line rule” that says explicitly when immigration agents can make arrests in schools, U.S. Attorney Thomas Isler said during the hearing.

Homeland Security “still recognizes schools as protected areas,” he said.

DPS attorneys argued in their lawsuit that even though arrests haven’t yet occurred on school property, the change in policy has created anxiety among parents and their children and has led families to keep students home from class.

District lawyers argued the drop in attendance “constitutes a clear threat to DPS’s stability” because school funding is calculated based on how many students are in a classroom.

DPS has welcomed more than 4,700 immigrant children into the district’s classrooms in recent years, enough to, at least temporarily, reverse a years-long decline in K-12 enrollment that is occurring because fewer babies are being born.

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