If federal immigration authorities are allowed to open a second detention center in Colorado, it will represent a political and moral failure of state leaders and residents.

ICE operates one detention center in Colorado, an Aurora site of reported inhumane conditions where many immigrants caught up in the Trump administration’s lawless mass deportation efforts are locked away. Now ICE plans to open another northwest of Denver in rural Hudson, where detainees would be subject to the same cruel conditions but even more isolated from legal resources, advocates and public scrutiny.

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What goes on at ICE detention centers is abominable. ICE is the out-of-control, homicidal expression of the fascist essence of Trumpism, and its detention centers are the Bastilles of MAGA America. As with the World War II-era incarceration camps for Japanese Americans, the country one day will feel deep shame that ICE’s network of lockups was ever allowed to exist. Coloradans will regret inaction someday if they don’t address this ethical blight by blocking its expansion.

Reports of inhumane conditions at the detention center in Aurora long predate the second Trump administration, but they have become more urgent since the administration began to pursue what President Donald Trump called the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Earlier this year, immigrant advocates reported ICE’s food offerings in Aurora left detainees underfed and malnourished. This week, Adams County health officials said detention center operators stonewalled their investigation into an inmate’s confirmed case of tuberculosis, apparently in violation of state law, and are unsure if more cases exist. ICE authorities since last year have assiduously avoided accountability, such as with their repeated attempts to block lawful unannounced inspections by members of Congress.

This echoes conditions at ICE facilities around the country, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be any different at the proposed Hudson facility.

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Coloradans can “attack and stop” the effort to site a new ICE detention center in Colorado. Failure to try is a form of complicity.

Life inside the facilities is rotten, but worse, the purpose they serve is reprehensible. Despite the lie from federal officials that the deportation program targets the “worst of the worst,” it is in fact a racist effort to boot from the country as many nonwhite residents without permanent authorization as possible. About 65% of people arrested by ICE in Colorado last year didn’t even have a criminal record. The Aurora facility, like ICE detention centers everywhere, is for many detainees a way station that precedes transfer to foreign countries or prisons. About 12 Aurora detainees last year were sent to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador.

The administration has repeatedly trampled the Constitution to pursue deportations, including by denying detainees basic due process rights. Last month, the Trump Justice Department fired a Colorado immigration judge. No official reason was given, but it’s plain the judge angered top officials when she followed the law and granted bond hearings to eligible immigrants.

How can Coloradans stand for more of this?

“We have seen a complete failure by the Trump Administration in operating ICE detention centers with any decency, accountability or transparency,” U.S. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado said in a social media post this week about the Hudson facility. He said he will “work towards preventing the opening of this facility.”

This is the critical test: Will Bennet and other Coloradans actually do the work to prevent the opening of the facility, or is the outrage just rhetoric?

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They’re not helpless. The administration’s doomed plan to convert empty warehouses into mass detention centers illustrates that public pressure, legal challenges and municipal obstruction can be highly effective means of resistance. Community pressure helped scuttle ICE’s plans to use a Virginia warehouse and a Texas warehouse for detention. Salt Lake City leaders sued the Department of Homeland Security over its plans for a large-scale immigration detention center, which are now on hold. Portland, Oregon, leaders invoked land-use rules to oppose the ICE presence there.

“The warehouses were a quick concept to scale up mass deportation,” John Fabbricatore, who was the ICE field office director in Denver during the first Trump administration, told The New York Times last month. He added that “the left was able to throw up immediate roadblocks,” and the warehouse detention plan “was the easiest point for the Democrats to attack and stop that effort.”

Coloradans — from residents to Hudson town council members to state lawmakers to Governor Jared Polis to members of the state’s congressional delegation — can “attack and stop” the effort to site a new ICE detention center in Colorado. Failure to try is a form of complicity.