This op-ed by Quentin Young appeared on Colorado Newsline on April 24, 2025.
In 18th century France, the Bastille came to represent the malignancy of the monarchy. Built as a fortress in Paris, the imposing structure had become, under the Bourbon kings, a state prison into which a capricious royal authority could disappear disfavored residents without warning or due process.
Some of the detainees had committed no offense other than to express views the king deemed seditious or dangerous. The conditions were squalid. Many prisoners were stripped of their ability to communicate with anyone on the outside.
The Bastille symbolized all that was inhumane, repressive and rotten in the reign of Louis XVI, which is why it was a primary target, both in principle and practice, of the liberty-minded revolutionaries who crushed the monarchy and remade French government and society.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Colorado is reminiscent of the Bastille. The center is a regional analog, and its remit is narrower than was its French counterpart’s. But, under the Trump administration, its purpose is no less emblematic of the cruel whims of a despot, and it operates equally as an intolerable trespass on the people’s conscience.
Known formally by ICE as the Denver Contract Detention Facility, the center is located on Oakland Street in Aurora. It’s run by a profit-making private contractor, The GEO Group.
Immigration rights advocates have long alleged that living conditions at the center are deplorable and that detainees are mistreated.
“I think that a lot of the strategy that they have there in that detention center is to try to make the living conditions so bad that you will want to deport yourself and not wait for the legal process. They’re not focused on treating them in a humane way,” the brother of a detainee told researchers in 2023.
Also that year, immigration rights groups filed a complaint with federal authorities, urging them to investigate reported misuse of solitary confinement at the center. Democratic U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, who represents the center’s district, became so alarmed by disturbing accounts of poor conditions at the center that he undertook his own oversight actions.
He has encountered resistance to transparency from ICE at every turn, but he managed at least to extract bare-minimum information about the place. During an in-person inspection in March, he reported that 1,243 detainees were confined there and that they were mostly from Mexico, India and Venezuela.
The ICE detention center is hardly the only place designed to lock away human beings that has faced complaints about poor living conditions. It took the rogue immigration enforcement policies of the second Trump administration to make the center singularly eligible for comparison to its French antecedent.
The center is one of several sites around the country where immigration enforcement authorities have sent hundreds of immigrants, often without any warning, meaningful due process or transparency. These facilities are becoming black sites where constitutional values are exchanged for MAGA depravity and lawlessness.
In March, ICE agents arrested longtime Denver resident Jeanette Vizguerra during her break at work at Target, and she’s been detained and awaiting deportation at the Aurora detention center ever since. Federal authorities claim the Mexican national is subject to a removal order from more than a decade ago, but her lawyers dispute the premise of her detention. They have persuasively argued in federal court that she was targeted solely for her vocal support — constitutionally protected speech — for immigration rights. In other words, she expressed views that America’s aspiring king deems dangerous, and his henchmen caged her for it.
Two other Aurora detainees, both asylum seekers who have not been charged with any crime, filed a lawsuit in federal court saying they fear they could be deported. Authorities allege the men have ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, but not only do both men reject that charge, one of them fled Venezuela after TdA members murdered his wife’s father and uncle.
A lawyer for the two men told reporters this week that more than 100 people detained in Aurora, including his clients, are at risk of being deported under President Donald Trump’s March invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that has been used on only three previous occasions and only during war.
These detainees are afforded limited communication to people beyond the prison walls, face unlawful deportations, and are being deprived of meaningful due process.
Worse, the lawyer said that at least 11 people who were detained in Aurora have already been removed to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador. That’s the prison where U.S. authorities, who proudly refuse to do anything to reverse their error, mistakenly sent Maryland resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, as well as hundreds of others.
The Aurora detention center symbolizes all that is inhumane, repressive and rotten about the Trump administration, and Coloradans who want to preserve democracy and the rule of law cannot abide its presence in the state.
The most celebrated day of the French Revolution is July 14, 1789. That’s when residents of Paris stormed the Bastille, marking the end of this symbol of government tyranny. The date is now a French national holiday. The attack on the prison involved reckless violence that in no way should be emulated. But what is admirable about the event is the people’s courageous defiance of grave government abuses.
American institutions have utterly failed to shield Americans from the Trumpist sewage of corruption and unchecked power, which more than any other site in Colorado the Aurora detention center exemplifies.