Exclusive: Report Finds Systemic Atrocities in Colorado Immigrant Jail
The GEO detention center in Aurora keeps immigrants freezing, starving, and waiting — while shareholders cash in.
WASHINGTON — The stories coming out of the Aurora, Colorado GEO detention center sound less like immigration enforcement and more like a bad chapter in America’s conscience. “You could be dying and you wouldn’t know,” one man said.
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That’s how he described the wait for a doctor inside what detainees call simply la hielera — the freezer. The GEO-run facility in Aurora has long been known as one of the cleaner detention centers in the country, but a new community report released Thursday says the shine is just a cover for rot.
The new GEO Accountability Report, published by Colorado Without Cages and the Shut Down GEO Coalition, reads like a ledger of human neglect: sick people denied medicine, pregnant women confined without care, guards who joke while clanking keys at 2 a.m. to keep everyone awake.
And then there’s the food. “Sign or starve,” one detainee said — describing how people were denied meals from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for refusing to sign deportation papers.
The report — compiled from months of interviews and testimony — accuses the GEO Group, a private prison conglomerate, of running a profit-first system that’s stripping people of their health and dignity. Every filled bed, it notes, is another dollar for shareholders.
There are 1,532 beds in Aurora. More than 1,100 are full.
It’s not just the hunger, the cold, or the waiting. It’s the hopelessness. Volunteers describe men who no longer speak, women who’ve given up on calling their families because the phones are cut off when deportation flights leave. Even the facility’s architecture — two annexes split north and south — tells the story: one smells of feces and overcrowding; the other, farther from toilets, reeks only of loneliness.
Since a pair of detainees escaped in March, visits have been curtailed, headcounts have quadrupled, and the “Know Your Rights” classes that once gave people some grasp of due process have been eliminated altogether.
The coalition’s message to Congress is simple: End the contract. Free them all. “Immigrants deserve to fight their cases in the community,” the report concludes. “Not in cages that serve investors.”
When the GEO Group signed its first federal detention contract in 1987, it sold itself as an innovator in “corrections solutions.” Nearly 40 years later, in a concrete block outside Denver, that innovation has become a business model of misery.
The guards go home at the end of their shifts. The people inside Aurora don’t.
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