Overview:
Following a decrease in usage during the Biden administration, the Colorado ICE hotline has seen a significant increase in usage under Trump.
Raquel Lane-Arellano is a dispatcher at the Colorado Rapid Response Network’s (CORRN) ICE hotline. Every other Sunday, she is on-call for at least twelve hours to respond to reports of ICE activity and questions from family members of people who have been detained by ICE. She provides resources and support to people at risk of deportation.
Lane-Arellano is also the communications manager at the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC) and has volunteered with the hotline for more than five years. Her first call? Last Sunday, when she fielded about 20.
“The moment that your phone rings and it’s the hotline, it’s really overwhelming, you know that you’re maybe getting in touch with somebody who is scared, and you’re trying to be calm and give them good information,” said Lane-Arellano. “There’s a lot of rumors on social media. The big thing ICE wants is for people to be afraid and for people to self-deport because they can’t live with the anxiety.”
Anyone in Colorado can call the hotline at 1-844-864-8341 to report ICE activity. CIRC started the initiative during the first Trump administration, but it shrank significantly during the Biden presidency because of less attention on ICE and deportations.
Since November, CIRC has been working with CORRN to reestablish the hotline and recruit volunteers to prepare for President Trump’s promised mass deportation agenda, which includes plans for large-scale raids in Aurora.
While ICE says they’re going after undocumented criminal offenders, “collateral arrests” of undocumented people without a criminal background who are present at a raid site are commonplace. Racial profiling of Latinos is also well documented and has led to the detention of legal immigrants and even U.S. citizens.
The ICE Denver Field Office did not respond to Bucket List’s request for comment by the time of publication. ICE’s broad scope has caused widespread fear across immigrant communities, so when Lane-Arellano picks up the phone, she tries to focus on specifics.
“When someone’s scared or nervous, they might say, ‘I saw,’ and then they’re very vague,” Lane-Arellano said. “‘I saw black cars, then agents outside,’ it’s like, okay. Can you tell me how many black cars and did they have any logos? Sometimes they can’t answer those kinds of questions, but I do feel like it is helpful to bring them into [something] concrete, like, ‘Here’s the information I need from you. Here’s what we’re going to do.’”
Lane-Arellano estimates that CORRN has more than a thousand volunteers across the state. If the dispatcher determines that the report is credible, they send out an alert to confirmers and legal observers in the area who can check out the site of the reported sighting.
Confirmers are primarily responsible for verifying whether the law enforcement personnel are actually ICE agents. If ICE is present, they try to de-escalate the situation and document vehicle plate numbers, badge numbers and law enforcement presence from other agencies. CORRN then shares this information on their social media.
“We’re getting a lot of calls from people that are very scared, and a lot of times it’s not ICE,” said Caitlin Trent, political director at CIRC. Trent also noted the significance of confirmers. “Law enforcement acts very differently if they know that a white lady who knows their rights is asking them questions, ‘Where is your warrant? Why are you here? Who are you here for?’ versus if no one is there to keep eyes on them,” she said.
Legal observers are the third point of contact. Unlike confirmers, they do not interact with ICE at all. They document the personal details of detained individuals and get contact information of family members or other points of contact. CIRC uses these records to document trends in ICE activity and, in some cases, in court proceedings.
Trent, who has volunteered as both a confirmer and legal observer with the hotline since 2017, lives in Denver and receives multiple alerts from the hotline each day. Earlier this week, she responded to a report of ICE at a middle school, which was ultimately a false alarm. The last time she encountered an ICE agent while working with the hotline was outside a Colorado courthouse during the first Trump administration.
“I was just tailing him around, trying to be super chatty and just acting like I’m having a good old time with him,” Trent said. “Like, ‘What’s up, buddy? La la la.’ He tried to lose me by going up and down stairs a bunch of times, but I was in better shape than he was. He left and didn’t pick anybody up.”
Misinformation around raids has proliferated over the past several weeks, and many hotline calls, like the one Trent responded to, are not confirmed ICE sightings. Some, Lane-Arellano said, cite second- or third-hand information that isn’t reliable enough to warrant a follow-up. Of all the calls she fielded last Sunday, she sent volunteers to respond to three, emphasizing the importance of verifying information before sharing.
“We don’t want to create more fear, so what we’re asking people to do is to try to suss it out yourself,” Lane-Arellano said. “Try to go into those kinds of social media posts and find out if there’s any real concrete information. Resharing those, I think, just benefits ICE. They want people to be terrified and to think that they are everywhere.”
Still, rumors about ICE presence at schools or workplaces may dissuade families from picking up kids or going to work.
“People are halting their lives right now because they don’t know if they should or shouldn’t be afraid,” Trent said. “We’re trying to both get the hotline out there but also start to train the public for what to look for and how to confirm if it’s ICE or not.”
The CORRN network of dispatchers, confirmers and legal observers now spans from Denver to Durango, which was one of the sites Lane-Arellano called confirmers to during her last shift. While Denver has a significant advocacy community, Lane-Arellano and Trent both emphasized how draining the work can be and the ongoing need for volunteers.
“It’s only been one week, and it was the longest week of my life,” Lane-Arellano said while pointing out that some volunteers were directly impacted. “Some people are making their own family preparedness packet as they’re trying to help other people get those resources,” she said.
Choosing which notifications to respond to can also feel like a big responsibility, said Trent. “It’s hard to decide when taking care of yourself is more important than, like, no, I need to show up because I don’t know if anybody else is,” she reflected.
Three confirmers responded to the Durango scene, which ended up being city patrol and CDOT setting up a waystation for commercial vehicles. For an area with far fewer volunteers than Denver, the turnout meant a lot to Lane-Arellano.
“I was actually really touched,” Lane-Arellano said. “Something beautiful that I’ve seen in the last few months is that so many people want to be a part of the solution.”
You can report ICE activity to the CORRN hotline at 1-844-864-8341. For verified updates about ICE activity in Colorado, follow the Colorado Rapid Response Network—Immigration on Facebook. To volunteer with the hotline, see their website.