A new ICE detention center is set to open in a shuttered Colorado jail despite local backlash.

The $85 million annual immigration detention center has seen strong opposition from local communities, while advocates on either side of the issue debate its arrival.

“We expect that our company-leased Big Horn Facility in Colorado will play an important role in helping meet the need for increased federal immigration processing center bedspace,” GEO Group CEO George C. Zoley said in a statement last week on the new detention center.

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The GEO Group is a private company that runs dozens of prisons and immigration detention centers across the U.S. The new ICE detention center in Hudson, Colo., will hold 1,188 beds in what until 2014 used to be a private prison. This comes in addition to the company’s more than 1,500 beds at its other Colorado ICE facility in Aurora.

The new ICE detention center in Hudson comes as part of a $528.7 million contract by the federal government, according to immigration reporting group Project Salt Box. GEO Group reported that the new facility will generate an estimated $85 million in annual revenue but did not respond to requests from The Center Square for additional information on the announced center.

“We are proud of our 40-year public-private partnership with ICE, and we stand ready to continue to assist the federal government in meeting its immigration enforcement priorities,” Zoley said.

In Hudson, a group of about 200 protestors descended on the town hall before a council meeting last week. People demanded the ICE facility not be built. Council members told the crowd that the issue was out of their control as it was a federal facility.

The town of Hudson did not respond to a request for comment on the new ICE facility by The Center Square.

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Those in opposition to the Hudson facility have cited repeated concerns and reports of poor conditions at the Aurora facility. Most recently, the GEO Group had not provided reports about an active tuberculosis case at the facility, according to information from the Adams County Health Department released Tuesday.

Concerns about the new facility echo previous reports of poor conditions at the Aurora ICE detention center operated by the same company.

ACLU of Colorado Legal Director Tim Macdonald told The Center Square that the Aurora facility does not maintain good conditions for detainees.

“The GEO group, which runs the Aurora facility and has deplorable conditions, uses the immigrants who are detained there as a functionally free labor at best, paying them $1 a day,” he said. “[It’s] functional slave labor, and terrible medical availability – people dying in the facility – people getting sick throughout the facility.”

Three deaths have occurred at the ICE Aurora facility, most recently a 39-year-old man in 2022, according to ICE.

Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for conservative limited immigration advocacy group, Federation for American Immigration Reform, disputed that the conditions were poor.

“I've been in DHS and ICE facilities and, I mean they're not luxurious, but there's no indication of human rights violations,” he told The Center Square. “People are being held in detention, and in fact anybody is free to leave anytime if they agree to voluntarily deport.”

Mehlman added that the expansion of ICE facilities like the one in Hudson would deter people considering illegal immigration to the U.S., adding that the local opposition was nothing unique to an ICE facility.

“There are people who say, ‘No, we don't want it,’ – it's sort of, ‘Not in my backyard,’” Mehlman said. “There are all kinds of other facilities like power plants, all of these [infrastructure] things where people raise objections to, and understandably. But the bottom line is that they've got to go somewhere, and the federal government does have the right to put them in the country wherever they see their best fit.”

Opponents to the new ICE center, like the ACLU of Colorado, have said Hudson could be impacted by increased ICE patrols, racial profiling and a negative impact to the local economy by the facility’s use of below minimum wage labor. These have happened near the Aurora center, they contend.

Another concern was the facility’s impact on Hudson's water supply, Macdonald said.

“In some of the planning reports, we [at the ACLU] and others are concerned how they're going to accommodate water use,” said Macdonald. “What impact that has on other existing water users, particularly in light of the wildfires and the droughts that we're experiencing.”