El Paso, Weld counties — along with Aurora — are removed from DHS’s list of immigration ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’

Two conservative Colorado counties — Weld and El Paso — along with the city of Aurora have been removed from a list of “sanctuary jurisdictions defying federal immigration law” a day after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued it.

And there are likely more removals in Colorado to come.

Drew Sexton, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert’s office, said the Republican congresswoman and her staff “have been working around the clock with state legislators, county commissioners and DHS” to get jurisdictions that have passed resolutions declaring they cooperate with federal immigration authorities off the list.

Boebert, who represents the Eastern-Plains-based 4th Congressional District, said in an interview Friday that she had successfully worked with the White House and federal officials to get the two counties, as well as the city of Aurora, off the list.

She said she’d started calling individual counties when she saw the list’s contents and that she’d successfully removed Douglas County before the list was published. Boebert said she was still trying to get a better understanding of how the list was compiled.

“It’s possible that there was outdated information that was being used — I don’t know exactly who was involved and what information was used to determine who goes on the list. That’s something I’m working on the discovery of,” she said.

Boebert said she’s now working to remove other Eastern Plains counties from the list, including Kit Carson, Baca, Logan and Bent.

DHS’s list of “sanctuary jurisdictions” now includes Colorado as a whole, plus 39 of the state’s 64 counties and 14 towns and cities, including traditional liberal strongholds such as Denver and Boulder, but also a number of conservative jurisdictions. They were among more than 500 jurisdictions identified across the country that fell into the category.

“These sanctuary city politicians are endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a news release this week.

The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted communities, states and jurisdictions that it says aren’t doing enough to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it seeks to make good on President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to remove millions of people in the country illegally.

Colorado has enacted several state laws that limit the degree to which local law enforcement and governments can cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

Delanie Bomar, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, said the Republican freshman is “personally invested in advocating for law enforcement in cities and counties, such as Weld County, who do their job despite being under Colorado’s sanctuary state ruling policies.”

And she said his office is “in talks with the other jurisdictions in the 8th Congressional District,” including Adams County and Northglenn, both of which were placed on the sanctuary list Thursday.

Weld County, in a Friday news release, applauded Boebert and Evans for their “work throughout the night and this morning” to excise the county from the list.

The county last year adopted in its code a section that disallows “appropriations from general fund, capital expenditure fund, special revenue funds or proprietary funds for the specified purpose of providing emergency sheltering of illegal aliens within Weld County,” according to the news release.

Trump signed an executive order on April 28 requiring the secretary of Homeland Security and the attorney general to publish a list of states and local jurisdictions that they considered to be obstructing federal immigration laws. The list is to be regularly updated.

Federal departments and agencies, working with the Office of Management and Budget, would then be tasked with identifying federal grants or contracts with those states or local jurisdictions that the federal government identifies as “sanctuary jurisdictions” and suspending or terminating the money, according to the executive order.

If “sanctuary jurisdictions” are notified and the Trump administration determines that they “remain in defiance,” the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security are then empowered to pursue whatever “legal remedies and enforcement measures” they consider necessary to make them comply.

There’s no specific or legal definition of what constitutes a “sanctuary jurisdiction.” The term is often used to refer to law enforcement agencies, states or communities that don’t cooperate with immigration enforcement.

Gov. Jared Polis has long denied that Colorado is a sanctuary state, even reiterating that last week as he signed a bill that further limits federal immigration authorities’ access to public buildings in the state and local governments’ ability to share information with those authorities.

The Trump administration is already suing Colorado and the city of Denver over previous laws limiting local governments’ interaction with federal immigration authorities.

Denver Post reporter Seth Klamann contributed to this report.

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