Opinion: As Trump targets immigrants, Colorado laws, officials in crosshairs

Countless elected officials in Colorado must consider themselves vulnerable to personal legal liability and even arrest, based on the Trump administration’s dramatic escalation this week of immigration enforcement tactics.

Administration officials have shown that there is no limit — and certainly no limit imposed by the Constitution — to the methods they’ll pursue to undertake mass deportations. Since almost the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, federal immigration authorities have acted with impatience or disregard for due process and court rulings. The most visible victims of this abuse of power have been immigrants, including some who were living in the U.S. legally but were deported anyway.

But now public officials are coming under attack, including leaders in elected office in Colorado, based on an executive order Trump signed Monday. The language in the executive order is wildly hostile. It frames the actions of targeted individual officials — not just jurisdictions — as crimes. Their efforts “often violate federal criminal laws, including those prohibiting obstruction of justice, harboring or hiring illegal aliens, conspiring against the United States, and impeding federal law enforcement.” One passage accuses some “state and local officials” of engaging in “a lawless insurrection” against the U.S. government.

That’s an exceedingly serious accusation.

Sarah Parady, an at-large member of the Denver City Council, presumably is in the ambit of the executive order. She also has an informed perspective on it, since she is a lawyer who has litigated constitutional matters and once clerked for a federal judge in the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Given the nature of the Trump administration, she had anticipated the kind of threats directed at officials like her that are contained in the order.

“I think weaponized prosecutions are just part of the authoritarian playbook. They always go in that direction, and they always use that against whomever their political enemies are, and that’s what this is about,” she said.

The development gives new urgency, in addition to the general emergency the MAGA agenda presents in the state, to resistance activities throughout Colorado, especially in cities like Denver that immigration extremists label a “sanctuary.”

The executive order directs Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, and Kristi Noem, his secretary of Homeland Security, to publish a list of states and cities they determine are “sanctuary jurisdictions.” It is all but certain Denver will make the list, since the Trump administration has already singled it out for retribution. The administration has already yanked $24 million in grants for Denver over the city’s purported sanctuary policies. In March, Republicans hauled Denver Mayor Mike Johnston before a U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing to answer for what they claimed, largely through misinformation, were “obstructionist policies” around federal immigration enforcement. One of Colorado’s own Republican members of Congress, Gabe Evans has declared that “Denver and Colorado are sanctuary jurisdictions.”

Anti-immigration zealots view several Denver policies as providing improper assistance to immigrants — what local officials would characterize as commonsense, safety-promoting, humane measures — such as a 2017 ordinance that enacted restrictions on local cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. 

There’s every reason to take the executive order seriously. The administration has undertaken its immigration enforcement with evident contempt for constitutional limits, and its efforts have landed hundreds of people — who were afforded minimal or no due process, including U.S. citizens and permanent residents — in detention. Some ended up in a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador, from which they might never be able to leave. Federal agents recently arrested a Wisconsin judge they claim obstructed immigration officials who wanted to detain a man in the judge’s courtroom.

An actual prosecution against an official like Parady or other Denver officeholders might be unlikely, because obstruction and other statutes the Trump administration suggests they’ve violated do not plausibly cover actions they’ve taken. To make an arrest, federal law enforcement officials would need to establish probable cause and obtain a warrant signed by a judge, Parady noted. That would constitute a strong check on abuse of the legal system.

But the threat of arrests does its own damage.

“It’s an effort to chill the speech and even the votes, or actions in the interest of our constituents, of elected leadership,” Parady said. “I can hardly imagine anything more dangerous to the politics of the country than trying to basically … terrorize your political opponents. But I am not terrorized by this.”

She added that Denver elected officials “just need to keep doing our jobs on behalf of the people that elected us.”

The executive order is not just an assault on public officials. More importantly, it’s an act of oppression against the people, including immigrant residents, of Denver and Colorado.

The laws of the city and state are the people’s laws, and public officials are the people’s representatives. Local statutes and ordinances were adopted according to the people’s will, and an authority that thwarts it through unconstitutional maneuvers amounts to a menace that is the people’s ultimate responsibility to defeat.

Editor’s note: This opinion column first appeared on Colorado Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.