Connie Garcia grew up in Weld County. She knows its people intimately. So she was a little uneasy as she prepared to canvass the small town of Hudson with flyers last Saturday.
She worried she and other activists would encounter angry MAGA Republicans who wouldn’t agree with their opposition to a possible new immigration detention facility. They carried leaflets with a blunt message: “No concentration camps in Colorado.”
“They're gonna get some pushback,” she said. “It's as red as you can get out here.”
About a dozen people set off in teams to deliver the leaflets to homes and businesses. They were part of a coalition that has been trying to build resistance to new detention centers in the state.
In July, the ACLU released documents that showed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was considering at least six sites in Colorado, including a closed prison facility in Hudson.
The organizers and many of the canvassers were based in Denver, while Garcia lives in Greeley. While many of them were involved in protests at the Capitol during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, they’ve increasingly set their sights outside of the metro area this time around.
They began with a protest in August in Walsenburg, south of Pueblo, over another proposed detention center. Today, Sept. 13, they’ll be back in Hudson for a demonstration at the closed prison.
The canvassers ran into pushback.
The organizers were careful to set boundaries as they entered the town, which has a population of about 1,850 and is about 30 miles northeast of Denver.
“We're leaving the flyers. We're not knocking on doors,” Linda Nabours said as the group gathered in a parking lot by Hudson’s public library. “We wanna just really prioritize being positive and curious. Don't engage if anybody becomes hostile.”
The effort was part of a broader effort called No Concentration Camps in Colorado, a coalition including groups like Indivisible Denver, the ACLU of Colorado and the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Nabours said some locals may support a new ICE facility in town because of the jobs it would offer. Others might be fervently aligned with President Donald Trump’s desire to deport as many as 7,000 people per day.
Hudson is notable for being both heavily conservative politically, while also being home to many immigrants.
Trump took roughly 75 percent of the vote in the area last year, and he was even more popular here in 2024 than in 2020. More than half the town’s residents are Hispanic, and nearly a quarter of its population was born in Latin America, according to Census estimates.
“Hopefully, we can sway people,” Nabours said.
The activists were also hoping to understand the town’s political landscape and look for allies.
Garcia was assigned a route through a residential area, where she said she only interacted with a few people.
“We didn't knock on doors or anything, but I had one gentleman that was sitting out on his porch and I handed him the paper,” she told us. “He looked at it and he handed it back to me. And I go, ‘OK, well you don't want it?’ And he goes, ‘No. I think what they're doing is great.’”
Dana Miller, a longtime Denver activist who organized the canvassing day, said another group encountered a Hudson Town Council member who, she heard, said the effort was a waste of time and a new ICE facility here was a “done deal.”
It turned out to be Councilmember Matt Cole, who told Denverite a pair of people approached him as he was working outside in his neighborhood.
“The prison is already there and the town does not really have any control if they reopen or not,” he wrote us in an email. “All the Town knows for sure is that the owners of the prison would like to reopen, but they’ve been wanting to do that since they closed down in 2014.”
Hudson Correctional Facility could hold 1,256 people, according to records obtained by the ACLU of Colorado.
Cole added that Hudson would be better off with the facility open. And he told us his community doesn’t appreciate out-of-town activists.
“A lot of Weld County residents don't like people from Denver, or other areas, coming in telling them what to do,” he said.
Still, the canvassers found more support than they expected.
Dana Miller and Linda Nabours took on Hudson’s tiny downtown area, stopping into businesses and asking if they could pin flyers to bulletin boards or leave stacks by registers.
People working in two liquor stores, a hair salon, the local meat store and at least one restaurant all politely agreed to take the materials. Some were enthusiastic.
“This has been amazing to come and talk to the people downtown. They've been so kind and open and open to getting information,” Miller said. “One of the things I'm really hopeful about is we have allies all over the place. We think we make assumptions about people, that they're not going to be upset about a potential concentration camp. But a lot of people are really, really upset with the way things are going in our country.”
Not everyone had heard ICE could be coming to town, including Gerardo Gandara, whose family runs a Mexican grocery. It would be bad for business if the prison reopened, he said. His customer base has already begun to fizzle as threats of raids and deportations have grown this year. He said business has been slow this summer — looking more like the winter slow season, or even worse, he said.
“A lot of people are not working. People are leaving to Mexico. And people are afraid to spend money,” he said. “It's bad.”
Bigger picture plans are brewing to keep ICE out of Hudson.
Last Monday, back in Denver, Miller joined a regular meeting of activists with the Party for Socialism and Liberation to report on the canvassing trip.
People she met were “incredible,” she told a crowd gathered at Shorter Community AME Church, “very warm and welcoming.” This movement might yet find a home in Hudson, she suggested.
But other advocates are putting their effort elsewhere. While it would be nice to have local support and protests, a lawsuit is more likely to stop a new detention center, said Julian Camera, an organizer with ACLU of Colorado.
He pointed to “Alligator Alcatraz,” a southern Florida detention center that opened earlier this year. It was ordered to shut down after activists sued over environmental rules. An appeals panel reversed that decision, but an environmental review might still be required if Florida accepts federal money to run the facility.
Camera told the room that ACLU and others are looking for similar opportunities to derail detention projects in Colorado.
“We can't really stop a governmental agency from signing a contract with a private company. We can't do that,” Camera told the room. “We can do our research and find out: What are those little loopholes? Where are they violating laws? Where are they violating policies?”
It matters, he said, to protect the well-being of immigrants picked up by federal agents — and to avoid a situation where a town economy like Hudson’s becomes dependent on incarceration.
But Camera stressed that this fight, to resist ICE detention in Weld County and elsewhere, is bigger than Trump’s presidency.
“I think this could surprise people, especially when it comes to politics, but ICE was seeking proposals from other states as early as September of last year,” he told the room, “meaning that these plans were in the works prior to Trump. This is not a new thing. This is a system thing.”
ICE hopes to double its immigration detention by the end of the year, The Washington Post reported. The Republican-led budget granted $45 billion for immigration detention infrastructure, part of a dramatic increase in ICE funding.
The owners of the Hudson facility believe they could have it open again in a “matter of months,” according to the state ACLU.
It is the largest of the potential new facilities reportedly under consideration in Colorado.
