HUDSON, Colo. — Nonprofit Together Colorado and a Hudson resident say they've filed a lawsuit urging the Town of Hudson to use its authority to block the proposed Big Horn immigration detention center, escalating a fight that's been building in the small Weld County town for nearly a year.
READ MORE: Protesters rally in Hudson against planned ICE detention center
The lawsuit, of which the Denver-based nonprofit provided Denver7 a copy and said they filed Wednesday, argues the Town of Hudson has a legal duty to apply its own zoning code to the Big Horn facility the same way it would to any other proposed use, and that Hudson is instead letting ICE and GEO act as if local law simply doesn't apply to them.
"This case is about whether the Town of Hudson is powerless to act in the face of plans to open a 1,200-bed immigration detention facility within its borders. It is not," the filing claims.
The push comes weeks after the Department of Homeland Security awarded The GEO Group a five-year, $528.7-million contract on July 10 to reopen the long-shuttered, 1,200-bed Hudson Correctional Facility as an ICE detention center. Organizers say the deal prioritizes profit over people and deepens injustice in immigrant communities already on edge under stepped-up federal enforcement.
READ MORE: Defunct correctional facility in Hudson to become new ICE detention center
Organizers frame this as the next chapter in a fight that's spanned years: coalitions across race, faith, and background have worked to keep the facility closed since it first surfaced as a potential detention site, an effort that included a Towards Justice request for a meeting with the Hudson Town Council to review what legal options, if any, the town has to intervene.
That question — what power a small town actually has over a federally contracted facility — has already come up directly. At a recent town hall that drew dozens of protesters, a Hudson council member told the packed room that the town isn't a party to the ICE-GEO agreement, doesn't own or operate the facility, and doesn't have authority to approve, deny, or overturn a decision made under federal authority.
The facility itself, about 30 miles northeast of Denver along Interstate 76, would become Colorado's second ICE detention center alongside the existing Aurora facility, nearly doubling the state's detention capacity to roughly 2,720 beds. GEO Group has said the Hudson site — now referred to in agency documents as the Big Horn Correctional Facility — is expected to generate $85 million in annual revenue in its first full year of operation.
The contract itself came only after a long fight for transparency. The ACLU of Colorado sued the Department of Homeland Security last year after the agency refused to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request about its Colorado detention expansion plans, eventually forcing the release of hundreds of pages of heavily redacted records. Those documents showed ICE had already issued GEO Group a $39 million letter contract for six months of services in Hudson as far back as December 2025, months before the announced legal challenge and before the full five-year contract became public.
Advocates have also raised concerns about the Hudson site's remote location, arguing it would create real barriers to legal representation and family visitation compared with the Aurora facility. Casa de Paz, an organization that supports families of detained immigrants, has previously noted that the nearest fire station to the Hudson site is two miles away and the nearest hospital is 12 miles away in Brighton — distances advocates argue raise real questions about the facility's ability to respond to emergencies.
Just last week, the GEO Group provided the following statement to Denver7:
“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,” said GEO Group CEO and founder George C. Zoley in a prepared statement. “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.”
The Town of Hudson did not immediately respond to Denver7's request for comment Wednesday evening.
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