By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, Oona Zenda, KFF Health News

Lydia Romero strained to hear her husband’s feeble voice through the phone.

A week earlier, immigration agents had grabbed Julio César Peña from his front yard in Glendale, California. Now, he was in a hospital after suffering a ministroke. He was shackled to the bed by his hand and foot, he told Romero, and agents were in the room, listening to the call. He was scared he would die and wanted his wife there.

“What hospital are you at?” Romero asked.

“I can’t tell you,” he replied.

Viridiana Chabolla, Peña’s attorney, couldn’t get an answer to that question, either. Peña’s deportation officer and the medical contractor at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center refused to tell her. Exasperated, she tried calling a nearby hospital, Providence St. Mary Medical Center.

“They said even if they had a person in ICE custody under their care, they wouldn’t be able to confirm whether he’s there or not, that only ICE can give me the information,” Chabolla said. The hospital confirmed this policy to KFF Health News.

Family members and attorneys for patients hospitalized after being detained by federal immigration officials said they are facing extreme difficulty trying to locate patients, get information about their well-being, and provide them emotional and legal support. They say many hospitals refuse to provide information or allow contact with these patients. Instead, hospitals allow immigration officers to call the shots on how much — if any — contact is allowed, which can deprive patients of their constitutional right to seek legal advice and leave them vulnerable to abuse, attorneys said.

Hospitals say they are trying to protect the safety and privacy of patients, staff, and law enforcement officials, even while hospital employees in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon, cities where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted immigration raids, say it’s made their jobs difficult. Hospitals have used what are sometimes called blackout procedures, which can include registering a patient under a pseudonym, removing their name from the hospital directory, or prohibiting staff from even confirming that a patient is in the hospital.

“We’ve heard incidences of this blackout process being used at multiple hospitals across the state, and it’s very concerning,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, the deputy director of immigrant and racial justice at the California Immigrant Policy Center, an advocacy group.

Some Democratic-led states, including California, Colorado, and Maryland, have enacted legislation that seeks to protect patients from immigration enforcement in hospitals. However, those policies do not address protections for people already in ICE custody.

More detainees hospitalized

Peña is among more than 350,000 people arrested by federal immigration authorities since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. As arrests and detentions have climbed, so too have reports of people taken to hospitals by immigration agents because of illness or injury — due to preexisting conditions or problems stemming from their arrest or detention.

ICE has faced criticism for using aggressive and deadly tactics, as well as for reports of mistreatment and inadequate medical care at its facilities. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told reporters at a Jan. 20 news conference outside a detention center he visited in California City that he spoke to a diabetic woman held there who had not received treatment in two months.

While there are no publicly available statistics on the number of people sick or injured in ICE detention, the agency’s news releases point to 32 people who died in immigration custody in 2025. Six more have died this year.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to a request for information about its policies or Peña’s case.

According to ICE’s guidelines, people in custody should be given access to a telephone, visits from family and friends, and private consultation with legal counsel. The agency can make administrative decisions, including about visitation, when a patient is in the hospital, but should defer to hospital policies on contacting next of kin when a patient is seriously ill, the guidelines state.

Asked in detail about hospital practices related to patients in immigration custody and whether there are best practices that hospitals should follow, Ben Teicher, a spokesperson for the American Hospital Association, declined to comment.

David Simon, a spokesperson for the California Hospital Association, said that “there are times when hospitals will — at the request of law enforcement — maintain confidentiality of patients’ names and other identifying characteristics.”

Although policies vary, members of the public can typically call a hospital and ask for a patient by name to find out whether they’re there, and often be transferred to the patient’s room, said William Weber, an emergency physician in Minneapolis and medical director for the Medical Justice Alliance, which advocates for the medical needs of people in law enforcement custody. Family members and others authorized by the patient can visit. And medical staff routinely call relatives to let them know a loved one is in the hospital, or to ask for information that could help with their care.

But when a patient is in law enforcement custody, hospitals frequently agree to restrict this kind of information sharing and access, Weber said. The rationale is that these measures prevent unauthorized outsiders from threatening the patient or law enforcement personnel, given that hospitals lack the security infrastructure of a prison or detention center. High-profile patients such as celebrities sometimes also request this type of protection.

Several attorneys and health care providers questioned the need for such restrictions. Immigration detention is civil, not criminal, detention. The Trump administration says it’s focused on arresting and deporting criminals, yet most of those arrested have no criminal conviction, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and several news outlets.

Taken outside his home

According to Peña’s wife, Romero, he has no criminal record. Peña came to the United States from Mexico in sixth grade and has an adult son in the U.S. military. The 43-year-old has terminal kidney disease and survived a heart attack in November. He has trouble walking and is partially blind, his wife said. He was detained Dec. 8 while resting outside after coming home from dialysis treatment.

Initially, Romero was able to find her husband through the ICE Online Detainee Locator System. She visited him at a temporary holding facility in downtown Los Angeles, bringing him his medicines and a sweater. She then saw he’d been moved to the Adelanto detention center. But the locator did not show where he was after he was hospitalized.

When she and other relatives drove to the detention facility to find him, they were turned away, she said. Romero received occasional calls from her husband in the hospital but said they were less than 10 minutes long and took place under ICE surveillance. She wanted to know where he was so she could be at the hospital to hold his hand, make sure he was well cared for, and encourage him to stay strong, she said.

Shackling him and preventing him from seeing his family was unfair and unnecessary, she said.

“He’s weak,” Romero said. “It’s not like he’s going to run away.”

ICE guidelines say contact and visits from family and friends should be allowed “within security and operational constraints.” Detainees have a constitutional right to speak confidentially with an attorney. Weber said immigration authorities should tell attorneys where their clients are and allow them to talk in person or use an unmonitored phone line.

Hospitals, though, fall into a gray area on enforcing these rights, since they are primarily focused on treating medical needs, Weber said. Still, he added, hospitals should ensure their policies align with the law.

Family denied access

Numerous immigration attorneys have spent weeks trying to locate clients detained by ICE, with their efforts sometimes thwarted by hospitals.

Nicolas Thompson-Lleras, a Los Angeles attorney who counsels immigrants facing deportation, said two of his clients were registered under aliases at different hospitals in Los Angeles County last year. Initially, the hospitals denied the clients were there and refused to let Thompson-Lleras meet with them, he said. Family members were also denied access, he said.

One of his clients was Bayron Rovidio Marin, a car wash worker injured during a raid in August. Immigration agents surveilled him for over a month at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a county-run facility, without charging him.

In November, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to curb the use of blackout policies for patients under civil immigration custody at county-run hospitals. In a statement, Arun Patel, the chief patient safety and clinical risk management officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said the policies are designed to reduce safety risks for patients, doctors, nurses, and custody officers.

“In some situations, there may be concerns about threats to the patient, attempts to interfere with medical care, unauthorized visitors, or the introduction of contraband,” Patel said. “Our goal is not to restrict care but to allow care to happen safely and without disruption.”

Leaving patients vulnerable

Thompson-Lleras said he’s concerned that hospitals are cooperating with federal immigration authorities at the expense of patients and their families and leaving patients vulnerable to abuse.

“It allows people to be treated suboptimally,” Thompson-Lleras said. “It allows people to be treated on abbreviated timelines, without supervision, without family intervention or advocacy. These people are alone, disoriented, being interrogated, at least in Bayron’s case, under pain and influence of medication.”

Such incidents are alarming to hospital workers. In Los Angeles, two health care professionals who asked not to be identified by KFF Health News, out of concern for their livelihoods, said that ICE and hospital administrators, at public and private hospitals, frequently block staff from contacting family members for people in custody, even to find out about their health conditions or what medications they’re on. That violates medical ethics, they said.

Blackout procedures are another concern.

“They help facilitate, whether intentionally or not, the disappearance of patients,” said one worker, a physician for the county’s Department of Health Services and part of a coalition of concerned health workers from across the region.

At Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, nurses publicly expressed outrage over what they saw as hospital cooperation with ICE and the flouting of patient rights. Legacy Health has sent a cease and desist letter to the nurses’ union, accusing it of making “false or misleading statements.”

“I was really disgusted,” said Blaire Glennon, a nurse who quit her job at the hospital in December. She said numerous patients were brought to the hospital by ICE with serious injuries they sustained while being detained. “I felt like Legacy was doing massive human rights violations.”

Handcuffed while unconscious

Two days before Christmas, Chabolla, Peña’s attorney, received a call from ICE with the answer she and Romero had been waiting for. Peña was at Victor Valley Global Medical Center, about 10 miles from Adelanto, and about to be released.

Excited, Romero and her family made the two-hour-plus drive from Glendale to the hospital to take him home.

When they got there, they found Peña intubated and unconscious, his arm and leg still handcuffed to the hospital bed. He’d had a severe seizure on Dec. 20, but no one had told his family or legal team, his attorney said.

Tim Lineberger, a spokesperson for Victor Valley Global Medical Center’s parent company, KPC Health, said he could not comment on specific patient cases, because of privacy protections. He said the hospital’s policies on patient information disclosure comply with state and federal law.

Peña was finally cleared to go home on Jan. 5. No court date has been set, and his family is filing a petition to adjust his legal status based on his son’s military service. For now, he still faces deportation proceedings.

©2026 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Savannah Guthrie told the potential kidnappers of her mother Nancy Guthrie on Saturday that the family is prepared to pay for her safe return, as the frantic search for the 84-year-old Arizona resident has entered a seventh day.

“We received your message, and we understand. We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her,” she said in a video posted on social media, flanked by her siblings. “This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay.”

The “Today” show host was referencing a message that was sent to the Tucson-based television station KOLD on Friday afternoon, according to Kevin Smith, a spokesperson for the FBI office in Phoenix.

KOLD said it received an email related to the Guthrie case on social media that day but declined to share specific details about its contents as the FBI conducted its review.

The station was one of multiple press outlets that received alleged ransom letters during the week. At least one letter made monetary demands and established Thursday evening and the following Monday evening as deadlines.

In a news conference Thursday, law enforcement officials declined to affirm that the letters were credible but said all tips were being investigated seriously. They also said one letter referenced Nancy Guthrie’s Apple watch and a specific feature of her property.

The video released Saturday was the third this week that pleaded with potential kidnappers.

No suspects identified

Investigators think Nancy Guthrie was taken against her will from her home just outside Tucson last weekend. DNA tests showed blood on Guthrie’s front porch was a match to her, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos has said. Authorities have not identified any suspects or ruled anyone out.

The sheriff said Friday that he was frustrated that a camera at Nancy Guthrie’s home was not able to capture images of anyone the day she went missing.

Investigators have found that the home’s doorbell camera was disconnected early Sunday and that software data recorded movement at the home minutes later. But Nancy Guthrie did not have an active subscription, so none of the images were able to be recovered.

“It is concerning, it’s actually almost disappointing, because you’ve got your hopes up,” Nanos told The Associated Press in an interview. “OK, they got an image. ‘Well, we do, but we don’t.’”

President Donald Trump, speaking on Air Force One on Friday, said the investigation was going “very well.”

“We have some clues that I think are very strong,” Trump said, while en route to his Florida estate. “We have some things that may be coming out reasonably soon.”

Investigators return to scene

They were back in Nancy Guthrie’s neighborhood on Friday.

The sheriff’s department posted on social media to say access was restricted to the road in front of the home to give investigators space. Journalists staked out there were directed to move.

The Catalina Foothills Association, a neighborhood group, told residents in a letter that authorities were resuming searches in the area immediately.

“I know we all stand together in our collective disbelief and sadness and greatly appreciate your willingness to speak with law enforcement, share camera images and allow searches of your properties,” the association president said in the letter.

The sheriff said Thursday that investigators have not given up on trying to retrieve camera recordings.

“I wish technology was as easy as we believe it is, that here’s a picture, here’s your bad guy. But it’s not,” Nanos told the AP. “There are pieces of information that come to us from these tech groups that say ‘this is what we have and we can’t get anymore.’”

The sheriff also said he had no new information about the note to the TV station or other purported ransom letters sent to some media outlets, saying the FBI is handling that side of the investigation.

Meanwhile concern about Nancy Guthrie’s health condition has grown, because authorities say she needs vital daily medicine. She is said to have a pacemaker and have dealt with high blood pressure and heart issues, according to sheriff’s dispatcher audio on broadcastify.com.

“Her conditions, I would imagine, are worsening day by day,” Nanos said. “She requires medication. And I have no way of knowing whether they’re getting that medication to her.”

The kidnapping has captured the attention of Americans, including Trump, who said he was directing federal authorities to help investigate.

___ Weber reported from Los Angeles.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — For days, Luis Ramirez had an uneasy feeling about the men dressed as utility workers he’d seen outside his family’s Mexican restaurant in suburban Minneapolis.

They wore high-visibility vests and spotless white hard hats, he noticed, even while parked in their vehicle. His search for the Wisconsin-based electrician advertised on the car’s doors returned no results.

On Tuesday, when their Nissan returned to the lot outside his restaurant, Ramirez, 31, filmed his confrontation with the two men, who hide their faces as he approaches and appear to be wearing heavy tactical gear beneath their yellow vests.

“This is what our taxpayer money goes to: renting these vehicles with fake tags to come sit here and watch my business,” Ramirez shouts in the video.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to inquiries about whether the men were federal immigration officers. But encounters like Ramirez’s have become increasingly common.

As the sweeping immigration crackdown in Minnesota continues, legal observers and officials say they have received a growing number of reports of federal agents impersonating construction workers, delivery drivers and in some cases anti-ICE activists.

Not all of those incidents have been verified, but they have heightened fears in a state already on edge, adding to legal groups’ concerns about the Trump administration’s dramatic reshaping of immigration enforcement tactics nationwide.

“If you have people afraid that the electrical worker outside their house might be ICE, you’re inviting public distrust and confusion on a much more dangerous level,” said Naureen Shah, the director of immigration advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is what you do if you’re trying to control a populace, not trying to do routine, professional law enforcement.”

A ‘more extreme degree’ of deception

In the past, immigration authorities have sometimes used disguises and other deceptions, which they call ruses, to gain entry into homes without a warrant.

The tactics became more common during President Donald Trump’s first term, attorneys said, prompting an ACLU lawsuit accusing immigration agents of violating the U.S. Constitution by posing as local law enforcement during home raids. A recent settlement restricted the practice in Los Angeles. But ICE deceptions remain legal elsewhere in the country.

Still, the undercover operations reported in Minnesota would appear to be a “more extreme degree than we’ve seen in the past,” said Shah, in part because they seem to be happening in plain sight.

Where past ruses were aimed at deceiving immigration targets, the current tactics may also be a response to the Minnesota’s sprawling networks of citizen observers that have sought to call attention to federal agents before they make arrests.

At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, the city’s central hub of ICE activity, activists told The Associated Press they had seen agents leaving in vehicles with stuffed animals on their dashboards or Mexican flag decals on their bumpers. Pickups with lumber or tools in their beds were also frequently spotted.

In recent weeks, federal agents have repeatedly shown up to construction sites dressed as workers, according to Jose Alvillar, a lead organizer for the local immigrant rights group, Unidos MN.

“We’ve seen an increase in the cowboy tactics,” he said, though he noted the raids had not resulted in arrests. “Construction workers are good at identifying who is a real construction worker and who is dressing up as one.”

Using vintage plates

Since the start of the operation in Minnesota, local officials, including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, have said ICE agents had been seen swapping license plates or using bogus ones, a violation of state law.

Candice Metrailer, an antiques dealer in south Minneapolis, believes she witnessed such an attempt firsthand.

On Jan. 13, she received a call from a man who identified himself as a collector, asking if her store sold license plates. She said it did. A few minutes later, two men in street clothes entered the shop and began looking through her collection of vintage plates.

“One of them says, ‘Hey, do you have any recent ones?’” Metrailer recalled. “Immediately, an alarm bell went off in my head.”

Metrailer stepped outside while the men continued browsing. A few doors down from the shop, she saw an idling Ford Explorer with blacked out windows. She memorized its license plate, then quickly plugged it into a crowdsourced database used by local activists to track vehicles linked to immigration enforcement.

The database shows an identical Ford with the same plates had been photographed leaving the Whipple building seven times and reported at the scene of an immigration arrest weeks earlier.

When one of the men approached the register holding a white Minnesota plate, Metrailer said she told him that the store had a new policy against selling the items.

Metrailer said she had reported the incident to Minnesota’s attorney general. A spokesperson for DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

A response to obstruction

Supporters of the immigration crackdown say the volunteer army of ICE-tracking activists in Minneapolis has forced federal agents to adopt new methods of avoiding detection.

“Of course agents are adapting their tactics so that they’re a step ahead,” said Scott Mechkowski, former deputy director of ICE enforcement and operations in New York City. “We’ve never seen this level of obstruction and interference.”

In nearly three decades in immigration enforcement, Mechkowski said he also hadn’t seen ICE agent disguising themselves as uniformed workers in the course of making arrests.

Earlier this summer, a spokesperson for DHS confirmed a man wearing a high-visibility construction vest was an ICE agent conducting surveillance. In Oregon, a natural gas company published guidance last month on how customers could identify their employees after reports of federal impersonators.

In the days since his encounter, Ramirez, the restaurant worker, said he has been on high alert for undercover agents. He recently stopped a locksmith who he feared might be a federal agent, before quickly realizing he was a local resident.

“Everybody is on edge about these guys, man,” Ramirez said. “It feels like they’re everywhere.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump wants to keep home prices high, bypassing calls to ramp up construction so people can afford what has been a ticket to the middle class.

Trump has instead argued for protecting existing owners who have watched the values of their homes climb. It’s a position that flies in the face of what many economists, the real estate industry, local officials and apartment dwellers say is needed to fix a big chunk of America’s affordability problem.

“I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes, and they can be assured that’s what’s going to happen,” Trump told his Cabinet on Jan. 29.

That approach could bolster the Republican president’s standing with older voters, a group that over time has been more likely to vote in midterm elections. Those races in November will determine whether Trump’s party can retain control of the House and Senate.

“You have a lot of people that have become wealthy in the last year because their house value has gone up,” Trump said. “And you know, when you get the housing — when you make it too easy and too cheap to buy houses — those values come down.”

But by catering to older baby boomers on housing, Trump risks alienating the younger voters who expanded his coalition in 2024 and helped him win a second term, and he could wade into a “generational war” in the midterms, said Brent Buchanan, whose polling firm Cygnal advises Republicans.

“The under-40 group is the most important right now — they are the ones who put Trump in the White House,” Buchanan said. “Their desire to show up in an election or not is going to make the difference in this election. If they feel that Donald Trump is taking care of the boomers at their expense, that is going to hurt Republicans.”

The logic in appealing to older voters

In the 2024 presidential election, 81% of Trump’s voters were homeowners, according to AP VoteCast data. This means many of his supporters already have mortgages with low rates or own their homes outright, possibly blunting the importance of housing as an issue.

Older voters tend to show up to vote more than do younger people, said Oscar Pocasangre, a senior data analyst at liberal think tank New America who has studied the age divide in U.S. politics. “However, appealing to older voters may prove to be a misguided policy if what’s needed to win is to expand the voting base,” Pocasangre said.

Before the 2026 elections, voters have consistently rated affordability as a top concern, and that is especially true for younger voters with regard to housing.

Booker Lightman, 30, a software engineer in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, who identifies politically as a libertarian Republican, said the shortage of housing has been a leading problem in his state.

Lightman just closed on a home last month, and while he and his wife, Alice, were able to manage the cost, he said that the lack of construction is pushing people out of Colorado. “There’s just not enough housing supply,” he said.

Shay Hata, a real estate agent in the Chicago and Denver areas, said she handles about 100 to 150 transactions a year. But she sees the potential for a lot more. “We have a lack of inventory to the point where most properties, particularly in the suburbs, are getting between five and 20 offers,” she said, describing what she sees in the Chicago area.

New construction could help more people afford homes because in some cases, buyers qualify for discounted mortgage rates from the builders’ preferred lenders, Hata said. She called the current situation “very discouraging for buyers because they’re getting priced out of the market.”

But pending construction has fallen under Trump. Permits to build single-family homes have plunged 9.4% over the past 12 months in October, the most recent month available, to an annual rate of 876,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Trump’s other ideas to help people buy houses

Trump has not always been against increasing housing supply.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump’s team said he would create tax breaks for homebuyers, trim regulations on construction, open up federal land for housing developments and make monthly payments more manageable by cutting mortgage rates. Advisers also claimed that housing stock would open up because of Trump’s push for mass deportations of people who were in the United States illegally.

As recently as October, Trump urged builders to ramp up construction. “They’re sitting on 2 Million empty lots, A RECORD. I’m asking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get Big Homebuilders going and, by so doing, help restore the American Dream!” Trump posted on social media, referring to the government-backed lenders.

But more recently, he has been unequivocal on not wanting to pursue policies that would boost supply and lower prices.

In office, Trump has so far focused his housing policy on lobbying the Federal Reserve to cut its benchmark interest rates. He believes that would make mortgages more affordable, although critics say it could spur higher inflation. Trump announced that the two mortgage companies, which are under government conservatorship, would buy at least $200 billion in home loan securities in a bid to reduce rates.

Trump also wants Congress to ban large financial institutions from buying homes. But he has rejected suggestions for expanding rules to let buyers use 401(k) retirement accounts for down payments, telling reporters that he did not want people to take their money out of the stock market because it was doing so well.

There are signs that lawmakers in both parties see the benefits of taking steps to add houses before this year’s elections. There are efforts in the Senate and House to jump-start construction through the use of incentives to change zoning restrictions, among other policies.

One of the underlying challenges on affordability is that home prices have been generally rising faster than incomes for several years.

This makes it harder to save for down payments or upgrade to a nicer home. It also means that the places where people live increasingly double as their key financial asset, one that leaves many families looking moneyed on paper even if they are struggling with monthly bills.

There is another risk for Trump. If the economy grows this year, as he has promised, that could push up demand for houses — as well as their prices — making the affordability problem more pronounced, said Edward Pinto, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.

Pinto said construction of single-family homes would have to rise by 50% to 100% during the next three years for average home price gains to be flat — a sign, he said, that Trump’s fears about falling home prices were probably unwarranted.

“It’s very hard to crater home prices,” Pinto said.

Colorado’s labor force shrank 0.6% year-over-year last month, a monthly decline matching the pace seen during the Great Recession. After flatlining in August, the labor force, those working or looking for work, has been retreating since September. For the year, 20,280 people vanished from its ranks, mostly in the fourth quarter.

That has never happened outside a severe recession or economic shock like the COVID-19 pandemic.

From April 2020 to March 2021, workers removed themselves from the labor force in record numbers. Giving up a paycheck to avoid landing on a respirator seemed like a fair trade-off to many older workers during the pandemic. The defections were unprecedented, triggering a 3.4% drop in the labor force in July 2020. But they were short-lived. People returned once restrictions eased and vaccines became available.

Another 12-month stretch of a draining labor pool occurred from September 2009 to August 2010 during the housing crash and Great Recession. People couldn’t easily replace the jobs they lost. Many gave up trying. That contributed to annual declines of 0.7% and 0.6% during the worst months.

The mother of all Colorado labor force deflations happened from July 1985 to June 1989. It started during a severe oil and gas downturn, which was followed by a lending crisis, which was followed by a collapse in commercial real estate and home values. It was such an ugly period economically that companies and people packed their bags and left the state in droves.

The year-over-year drops reached a high of 0.9% and 0.8% in 1989, but most months ran lower, with some positive months mixed in. But all those Colorado natives kept graduating from high school and college. The unemployment rose to as high as 8.4% in December 1985 and January 1986. The workers who stayed gutted it out. Better times returned in the 1990s.

There is no health crisis keeping people home, no recession triggering major layoffs and no collapse in a pillar of the state economy. So what might be driving the decline in the number of workers?

The easy out is to blame statistical noise. The household survey — used to determine the size of the labor force and the unemployment rate — is subject to revisions. The federal government shutdown in October might have mucked things up. Below-average snowfalls might have reduced demand for resort workers. The list goes on.

But the decline is large and accelerating, and it started before the shutdown. It likely reflects a real shift, said Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“I think the current softening could be a mixture of both the market (demographics) and policy,” he said.

One demographic piece involves more workers retiring. The mirror doesn’t lie. Colorado’s population is getting older. The long-predicted silver tsunami may finally be sucking workers out of the labor pool. But aging is a slow-moving trend, not akin to an earthquake.

Migration is a more plausible force behind what is happening. Colorado lost 12,100 more people than it gained from other states in the year through June 30, according to a population update Tuesday from the U.S. Census Bureau.

That trend may have accelerated in the second half of the year based on what is happening to the labor force. Colorado’s net domestic migration is down sharply since the pandemic. Blame higher housing costs and fewer job opportunities. More longtime residents appear to be picking up and moving out. Last year, Colorado became one of five states with significantly more outbound than inbound moves, according to a survey by United Van Lines.

From the reopening of the economy following the pandemic through 2024, Colorado saw big increases in the number of people arriving from other countries. Migration to Colorado historically has been 80% domestic and 20% international. That ratio flipped this decade, according to the State Demography Office.

In the 12 months through June 30, the state’s net international migration of 15,356 was enough to offset the loss of 12,100 domestically last year. The combined number was weak, but it wasn’t negative. For the last several years, it appears international migration helped mask the weakness the state was facing on the domestic side.

And the mask has been removed. This is where policy shock comes into play.

Voters, upset with the immigration surge and inflation, elected Donald Trump to office. His administration has moved quickly to shut down flows across the border and remove illegal immigrants. The administration has also tightened down on legal channels of immigration, requiring more vetting and in-person interviews, delaying application processing and even reversing earlier green card approvals.

“The slowdown in U.S. population growth is largely due to a historic decline in net international migration, which dropped from 2.7 million to 1.3 million in the period from July 2024 through June 2025,” said Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for Estimates and Projections at the Census Bureau, in a news release Tuesday. “With births and deaths remaining relatively stable compared to the prior year, the sharp decline in net international migration is the main reason for the slower growth rate we see today.”

Lewandowski notes that the labor force shrank in a dozen states in December, and 19 states had growth rates below 1%. Wyoming led the country on the downside with a 2.5% decline. Vermont and Wisconsin also dropped more than 2%. Illinois, Virginia and Connecticut had declines above 1%.

“I certainly think the lack of international migration has to be playing a role as we don’t have replacements,” said Richard Wobbekind, a senior economist with the Business Research Division, of the shrinking labor force.

More older workers are retiring each year. Years of a subdued birth rate mean fewer young adults are entering the workforce. Colorado has become less attractive to young adults living in other states, and with each passing year, there are fewer of them to recruit. Now immigration has been throttled.

That may explain why the state’s unemployment rate has managed to drop significantly despite fairly weak job growth. It fell from 4.6% a year ago to 3.8%. Normally, a falling unemployment rate is associated with a strong job market. But job gains are a little over a third of their historical pace since 1990. The last two years have been the weakest outside of a recession.

Over the past year, nonfarm payrolls increased by 23,000, with 18,900 of those jobs coming in the private sector and governments adding 4,100 jobs, according to the December employment report from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

That is only a little better than the 22,100 jobs added in 2024. The pace of hiring, at 0.8%, is one of the slowest outside the last three recessions, but it was double the U.S. rate of 0.4%.

Job growth was enough to push the number of nonfarm workers in the state above 3 million for the first time, according to the report. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that as of June 30, the state’s population had crossed 6 million people. One out of every two residents in the state is collecting a paycheck from an employer who pays premiums for unemployment insurance.

A little over two-thirds of residents over age 16 in Colorado, 66.9% to be precise, described themselves as working or actively looking for work in December. That ratio, called the state’s labor force participation rate, has been falling for two years and is now at its lowest level since October 2020. It remains one of the highest rates in the country.

Wobbekind said he doesn’t think the drop in participation explains the shrinkage of the workforce. People aren’t dropping out like they tend to do during a downturn.

Instead, the big drop in migration, both domestic and international, might be influencing the share of the overall population that is in the prime working age range. And if working-age adults are leaving, that might explain why the labor force is shrinking.

That means helping their people, they say, and specifically tackling high rates of diabetes and obesity that affect their tribal nation and many other Indigenous communities.

It also means restoring their land and the river that has been intrinsically linked with their people for millennia.

“We are Native people tied to the resources and rhythms of the Eel River,” Parker said. “Our health is connected to the river.”

Now, the tribal nation is confronting the Trump administration over the river’s future and fighting some of its regional allies to reclaim water rights that have been overlooked for a century.

The struggle is taking place as the entity with a dominant stake in the river for generations, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., seeks to give up in Lake and Mendocino counties its network of Eel River dams and a linked hydropower plant. The move has triggered a federal review that has pitted the tribes, together with environmental groups in favor of dam removal, against farming interests, reservoir supporters and the Trump administration, which has taken a dim view of dam demolition.

The tribes never had much of a say when those dams went up starting 118 years ago, but they have been heavily involved in talks in recent years geared to planning for the future of the Eel River. Due to a century-old diversion that links the Eel River to the Russian River in the south — and to farms and about 100,000 residents who rely on the upper Russian for drinking and irrigation supplies — those talks have drawn in a host of sometimes competing interests, including counties and farm and fishery groups with a wider scope of interest across the North Coast.

Our “water rights were completely ignored,” Parker said of his ancestors. “The Round Valley Indian Tribes were very much in survival mode when the dams were built and the diversions began.

“It started in 1905 when W.W. Van Arsdale posted a note along a tree saying he had a right to appropriate more than 100,000 acre-feet of Eel River water to put into the Russian River basin,” Parker said. “That’s how it all started.”

PG&E has informed federal officials it wants to decommission Scott and Cape Horn dams and give up the aging, associated hydropower plant, offline since 2021, that has helped get Eel River water through Mendocino County’s Potter Valley into the Russian River basin.

In 2022, the power company applied to surrender its operating license to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, which oversees the nation’s hydropower projects. The utility giant followed through with formal plans to FERC in June 2025.

Historically, FERC has had the final say and has not stood in the way of dam removal, though Congress and the White House have.

Years from now, the tribes and their allies hope their efforts will lead to the nation’s next big dam removal project, freeing the headwaters of California’s third longest river to revive its beleaguered salmon and steelhead trout runs — and the culture and economy of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, said John Bezdek, an attorney for the seven-tribe nation.

“The fishery declined with the significant diversions of water into the watershed,” Bezdek said. “It was a source of subsistence and culture. This is a fishing tribe. That was taken away from them.”

Farming interests and others in the region, however, are against dam removal, pointing to downstream ripples for irrigators and drinking water customers, the loss of reservoir water for aerial fire suppression and the blow to the hundreds of Lake County residents and visitors around the largest of those reservoirs, Lake Pillsbury, a destination for boaters and hunters.

They secured a powerful ally late last year in the Trump administration, which raised its objections to dam regulators in a Dec. 19 letter from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. She warned that “if this plan goes through as proposed, it will devastate hundreds of family farms and wipe out more than a century of agricultural tradition in Potter Valley. Without it, crops fail, businesses close and rural communities crumble.”

Rollins also said that her department would work with the Department of the Interior to bring “real solutions” for water security to the North Coast.

The Round Valley tribes responded Jan. 14 in a letter to those two agencies, spotlighting a familiar slight: Rollins’ failure to acknowledge or even mention the tribes’ “senior water and fishing rights, much less our culture, our economy and our way of life.”

“We are reminding the departments … that the discussions going back to DC have been one sided and that we have been left out of the conversation,” Parker said in an interview with The Press Democrat.

Tribes to DC: Respect local solution

Just as dam removal opponents, including Lake County itself, are lobbying the administration to intervene and block federal sign-off on PG&E’s plans, the tribes and their allies are asking Washington, D.C., to allow a locally brokered water pact to proceed.

Known as the two-basin solution, it solidified a 30-year framework under which diversions from the Eel River to the Russian River would continue after dam removal, at least in periods of high flows, and only if there’s enough water in the Eel to support its salmon and steelhead runs. The pact supporters, including many local governments and water providers, agreed to construct a new diversion facility to support those operations, and to return water rights to Round Valley Indian Tribes who, as the first people in the area, have seniority rights to Eel River flows.

Hailed by supporters as historic when it was finalized in early 2025, the deal sought to rectify wrongs that disadvantaged tribes and harmed Eel River fisheries, signatories said.

“Our tribal members work and live in the broader regional community and despite the historic injustice to our tribal community, an ‘all or nothing approach’ is simply not realistic,” Parker wrote to the secretaries.

Parker and Russ said it was better to come together with partners and collaborate on a solution.

“We decided at the time we could spend the next 20 years arguing about what’s right and what’s wrong,” Russ said. “We decided collectively to focus on our commonalities so that maybe our kids and grandkids wouldn’t be fighting this war. We started to figure out what would be beneficial for everyone.”

But the deal has many staunch opponents, and few more visible these days than Cloverdale Vice Mayor Todd Lands, who has made his opposition to the pact and to dam removal a central part of his campaign for a seat on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. In January, he accompanied Secretary Rollins at an American Farm Bureau Federation conference in Anaheim, speaking out against the two-basin solution and appealing to the Trump administration to intervene.

“The two-basin solution does not guarantee water,” Lands told The Press Democrat. He fears the change from year-round to seasonal diversions will not be enough to fill Lake Mendocino, which helps sustain dry-season flows in the upper Russian River, the main source of drinking water for communities stretching from Ukiah to Healdsburg.

“This will cause drought conditions, not allow cities to replenish their water systems for fire and public use, and cause disease in the (Russian) river basin,” Lands said. “People will have to decide between showers and laundry and will not be able to have their own gardens as a food source.”

He also echoed shared concerns among dam removal opponents that the Round Valley Indian Tribes would cease all diversions “if the goals of the water supply and fish in the Eel River are not met.”

Those fears were inflamed in December when a California-based attorney for the Round Valley Indian Tribes told a group of Potter Valley farmers that diversions would one day end — comments that were caught on video and circulated widely.

In an interview with The Press Democrat, Bezdek, the tribal attorney based in Washington, D.C., sought to clarify that statement.

“Obviously if the fishery doesn’t recover, that will be a problem for us,” he said. “But we believe the best science is available and it says that we can do this.”

Parker and Russ elaborated.

“We believe everything is integrated,” Russ said. “The other side is saying we are putting fish before people. But we need healthy fish for a healthy balance for people. We are trying to create a healthy ecosystem for healthy people.”

Critical resource over millennia

The Round Valley coalition, made up of the Yuki, Pit River, Little Lake, Pomo, Nomlacki, Concow and Wailacki tribes, trace their ancestry in the area to “the beginning of time,” Bezdek said.

The Eel River and its tributaries served as the center of Indigenous culture, religion and trade.

“Our elders used to tell us stories about seeing so many fish that you could walk on their backs,” Bezek said. “Now, when we fish, we barely see a fish. Our ecosystem has just been decimated.”

As they told Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in their Jan. 14 letter, the tribal nation seeks to bring back the health of the river and their community.

“If the river is not healthy, the community is not healthy,” Russ said.

Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt, who has close ties to the region’s farming industry, has heard the concerns of those opposed to dam removal, including their fears the tribe will end all diversions.

He isn’t buying that claim.

“There’s no automatic termination and no single entity can end diversions,” Rabbitt said. “The whole thing is a collaborative effort.”

Rabbitt, who read the Round Valley Indian Tribes’ letter, said he supported their effort “to set the record straight” and “establish a position within all the noise that’s going on. That’s vitally important.”

At the same time, he understood people’s fears and reservations.

“I will admit, I’m not a huge fan of taking down dams, but ultimately it isn’t my decision,” he said. “But then it’s ‘OK, what happens if you’re on your soapbox in the corner, it comes down and there’s no agreement for diversion? Then what?’

“We have to move forward.”

Rabbit is board president of the entity created by the pact outlining a post-dam future, the Eel-Russian Project Authority. Its aim for fish, he said, is “making sure both runs” — the Eel’s and the Russian’s — “are healthy. Our goal is to keep the diversion active and to do it in a responsible, collaborative way.”

Parker said collaboration is key and he shared his hope the Trump administration will work with the tribes and Eel-Russian Project Authority.

A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture said it had received the tribes’ letter and “looks forward to formally responding to President Parker on this important topic.” The Department of the Interior declined to comment.

Bezdek said both secretaries have reached back out to him and are trying to coordinate dates to discuss a way forward.

“We were here before Sonoma County and Mendocino County and we will be here after they are gone,” Parker said. “PG&E’s decision to decommission the project is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring fairness. We know we won’t be adequately compensated, but the two-basin solution is the first step to heal those wounds and remedy this historical wrong.”

President Donald Trump’s racist social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticized the video as offensive.

The Republican president’s Thursday night post was deleted Friday and blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation’s first Black president and first lady. The deletion, a rare admission of a misstep by the White House, came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post. After calls for its removal for being racist — including by Republicans — the White House said a staffer had posted the video erroneously and it had been taken down.

The post was part of a flurry of social media activity on Trump’s Truth Social account that amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite courts around the country and a Trump attorney general from his first term finding no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome.

Trump has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric — from feeding the lie that Obama was not a native-born U.S. citizen to crude generalizations about majority Black countries.

The post came in the first week of Black History Month and days after a Trump proclamation that cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.”

An Obama spokeswoman said the former president, a Democrat, had no response.

‘An internet meme’

Nearly all of the 62-second clip, which was among dozens of Truth Social posts from Trump overnight, appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as the 2020 presidential votes were tallied. At the 60-second mark is a quick scene of two primates, with the Obamas’ smiling faces imposed on them.

Those frames were taken from a separate video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. It shows Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a jungle primate eating a banana.

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Leavitt said by text.

Disney’s 1994 feature film that Leavitt referenced is set on the savannah, not in the jungle, and it does not include great apes.

“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt added.

By noon, the post had been taken down with responsibility placed on a Trump subordinate.

The White House explanation raised additional questions about the control of Trump’s social media account, which has also been used to levy import taxes, threaten military action, make domestic policy announcements and intimidate political rivals. The president often signs his name or initials after policy announcements.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about its process for vetting posts and how it guarantees that the public knows when Trump himself is posting.

Mark Burns, a pastor and a prominent Trump supporter who is Black, said Friday afternoon on X that he had spoken “directly” with Trump about the post. He recommended to Trump that he fire the staffer who posted the video and publicly condemn what happened.

“He knows this is wrong, offensive, and unacceptable,” Burns posted.

Condemnation across the political spectrum

Trump and the official White House social media accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos. As Leavitt did Friday, Trump aides typically dismiss critiques and cast the images as humorous.

Yet while it was still up, Trump’s post drew condemnation from across the political and ideological spectrum — and demands for an apology that had not come by the early afternoon.The Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the assassinated civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., resurfaced her father’s words: “Yes. I’m Black. I’m proud of it. I’m Black and beautiful.” She praised Black Americans as “diverse, innovative, industrious, inventive” and added, “We are beloved of God as postal workers and professors, as a former first lady and president. We are not apes.”

The U.S. Senate’s lone Black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina, called on Trump to take down the post. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Scott, who chairs Senate Republicans’ midterm campaign arm, said on social media.

Another Republican, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, is white but represents the state with the largest percentage of Black residents. Wicker called the post “totally unacceptable” and said the president should apologize.

Some Republicans who face tough reelections this November voiced concerns, as well, feeding an unusual cascade of intraparty criticism for a president who often has enjoyed a strangle-hold over fellow Republicans who stayed silent over some of Trump’s previous controversial statements or fear a public spat with the president or losing his endorsement in a future campaign.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson pointed to Trump’s wider political concerns, asserting that Trump is trying anything to distract from economic conditions and attention on the Jeffrey Epstein case files.

“Donald Trump’s video is blatantly racist, disgusting, and utterly despicable,” Johnson said in a statement. “You know who isn’t in the Epstein files? Barack Obama,” he continued. “You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama.”

A long history of racism

There is a long history in the U.S. of powerful white figures associating Black people with animals, including apes, in demonstrably false and racist ways. The practice dates back to 18th century cultural racism and pseudo-scientific theories in which white people drew connections between Africans and monkeys to justify the enslavement of Black people in Europe and North America, and later to dehumanize freed Black people as an uncivilized threat to white people.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in his famous text “Notes on the State of Virginia” that Black women were the preferred sexual partners of orangutans. President Dwight Eisenhower, discussing the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s, once argued that white parents were concerned about their daughters being in classrooms with “big Black bucks.” Obama, as a candidate and president, was featured as a monkey or other primate on T-shirts and other merchandise.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language similar to what Adolf Hitler said to dehumanize Jews in Nazi Germany.During his first White House term, Trump referred to a swath of developing nations that are majority Black as “shithole countries.” He initially denied using the slur but admitted in December 2025 that he did say it.

When Obama was in the White House, Trump advanced the false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to serve. Trump, in interviews that helped endear him to many conservative voters, repeatedly demanded that Obama produce birth records and prove he was a “natural-born citizen” as required to become president.

Obama eventually released his Hawaii records. Trump finally acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after having won the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii.

But he immediately said, falsely, that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton started those birtherism attacks on Obama

WASHINGTON (AP) — White House border czar Tom Homan’s announcement that enforcement in Minnesota was being unified under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement followed months of internal grumbling and infighting among agencies about how to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Since it was created in 2003, ICE has conducted street arrests through “targeted enforcement.” Homan uses that phrase repeatedly to describe narrowly tailored operations with specific, individual targets, in contrast to the broad sweeps that had become more common under Border Patrol direction in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minnesota and elsewhere.

It is unclear how the agency friction may have influenced the leadership shift. But the change shines a light on how the two main agencies behind Trump’s centerpiece deportation agenda have at times clashed over styles and tactics.

The switch comes at a time when support for ICE is sliding, with a growing number of Americans saying the agency has become too aggressive. In Congress, the Department of Homeland Security is increasingly under attack by Democrats who want to rein in immigration enforcement.

While declaring the Twin Cities operation a success, Homan on Wednesday acknowledged that it was imperfect and said consolidating operations under ICE’s enforcement and removal operations unit was an effort toward “making sure we follow the rules.” Trump sent the former acting ICE director to Minnesota last week to de-escalate tensions after two U.S. citizens were fatally shot by federal immigration officers — one with ICE and the other with Customs and Border Protection.

“We made this operation more streamlined and we established a unified chain of command, so everybody knows what everybody’s doing,” Homan said at a news conference in Minneapolis. “In targeted enforcement operations, we go out there. There needs to be a plan.”

Agencies with different missions and approaches

The Border Patrol’s growing role in interior enforcement had fueled tensions within ICE, according to current and former DHS officials. Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official who was reassigned from Minneapolis last week, embraced a “turn and burn” strategy of lightning-quick street sweeps and heavy shows of force that were designed to rack up arrests but often devolved into chaos.

“Every time you place Border Patrol into interior enforcement the wheels are going to come off,” Darius Reeves, who retired in May as head of ICE’s enforcement and removal operations in Baltimore, said in an interview last year as Bovino’s influence grew.

ICE has also engaged in aggressive tactics that mark a break from the past, especially in Minnesota. An ICE officer fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. Trump administration officials said she tried to run over an officer with her vehicle, an account that state and local officials have rejected. ICE has asserted sweeping power to forcibly enter a person’s home to make arrests without a judge’s warrant, among other controversial tactics.

But ICE’s traditional playbook involves extensive investigation and surveillance before an arrest, often acting quickly and quietly in predawn vehicle stops or outside a home. An ICE official once compared it to watching paint dry.

Bovino, in a November interview, said the two agencies had different but complementary missions and he compared the relationship to a large metropolitan police department. The Border Patrol was akin to beat cops on roving patrols. ICE was more like detectives, doing investigative work.

Asked about the friction, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said, “There is only page: The President’s page. Everyone’s on the same page.”

“This is one team, and we have one fight to secure the homeland. President Trump has a brilliant, tenacious team led by Secretary (Kristi) Noem to deliver on the American people’s mandate to remove criminal illegal aliens from this country.”

ICE gets blamed for Border Patrol’s tactics, official says

Michael Fisher, chief of the Border Patrol from 2010 to 2015, said last year that his former agency’s tactics were more in line with the Republican administration’s goal of deporting millions of people who entered the United States while Democrat Joe Biden was president.

“How do you deal with trying to arrest hundreds and hundreds of people in a shift?” Fisher said. “ICE agents typically aren’t geared, they don’t have the equipment, they don’t have the training to deal in those environments. The Border Patrol does.”

The Border Patrol’s high-profile raids, including a helicopter landing on the roof of a Chicago apartment building that involved agents rappelling down, rankled ICE officials. A U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity said at the time that ICE often gets blamed for Border Patrol’s tactics.

Meanwhile, Scott Mechowski, who retired in 2018 as ICE’s deputy field office director for enforcement and removal operations in New York, said separately that the Border Patrol was essentially doing roving operations and blanketing an area to question anyone or everyone about their legal status. He considered that an unwelcome contrast to ICE’s traditionally more targeted approach, based on deep surveillance and investigation of suspects.

“We didn’t just park our cars and walk through Times Square going, ‘OK, everybody. Come over here. You’re next, you’re next.’ We never did that. To me, that’s not the way to do your business,” Mechowski said.

Homan offers a narrower approach

As the Border Patrol’s influence grew last year, the administration reassigned at least half of the field office directors of ICE’s enforcement and removals operations division. Many were replaced by current or retired officials from CBP, the Border Patrol’s parent agency.

Homan’s arrival in Minnesota and his emphasis on “targeted enforcement” mark a subtle but unmistakable shift, at least in tone. He said authorities would arrest people they encounter who are not targets and he reaffirmed Trump’s commitment to mass deportation, but emphasized a narrower approach steeped in investigation.

“When we leave this building, we know who were looking for, where we’re most likely to find them, what their immigration record is, what their criminal history is,” Homan said.

On the ground, the mood has not changed much in Minneapolis since Bovino’s departure and Homan’s consolidation of operations under ICE. Fewer CBP convoys are seen in the Twin Cities area, but with ICE still having a significant presence, tensions remain.

On Thursday, The Associated Press witnessed an ICE officer in an unmarked vehicle tail a car and then pull over its driver, only to appear to realize he was not their target. “You’re good,” they told him, after scanning his face with their phones. They then drove off, leaving the driver baffled and furious.

Associated Press writer Mark Vancleave in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

The Smith and Wesson .38 Special revolver that Desmond Holly used in the Sept. 10 attack originally belonged to one of Desmond’s grandparents, the sheriff’s office found, and was kept in a safe in the family’s home.

Desmond’s parents will not be criminally charged in connection with the storage of the gun or their son’s access to it, the sheriff’s office concluded.

Through an attorney, the boy’s parents told investigators on Jan. 23 that the revolver was “rarely seen or used and stored out of sight near the back of a large, locked gun safe,” and that their son “did not have access to the safe, except for brief moments when it was opened by his father,” according to a news release announcing the completion of the investigation.

Douglas Richards, the attorney representing the Evergreen High shooter’s parents, told The Denver Post on Wednesday that he believes Desmond slipped the revolver out of the safe while he was with his father.

“I believe what happened is Desmond and his father were cleaning some of the family firearms, and in a moment when his father was not looking, Desmond took a firearm from the back of the safe that was an heirloom and had not been used by the family, ever,” Richards said. “Because the firearm was never used and was not stored with other firearms in the safe, its disappearance was not noticed until after the tragedy.”

The parents’ DNA was not found on the weapon, which was originally purchased in Florida in 1966.

Richards called the decision not to charge the parents “correct.”

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office acknowledged, in its announcement, “that this was not the outcome many in our community hoped for.”

An email sent to Evergreen High families Wednesday, alerting them to the sheriff’s completed investigation, said victim advocates would be on campus Thursday alongside the school’s mental health and counseling teams.

Sheriff’s officials noted in their news release that investigators were “unable to speak with” Desmond’s parents and implied the family was uncooperative during the probe into the revolver’s origins.

But Richards said Desmond’s parents spoke with investigators at the hospital as their son was dying and answered written questions and follow-up questions from investigators. Richards said he also offered to sit down with investigators to explain how the gun was stored.

“I have… explained from the outset that the firearm in this case was stolen without the knowledge of Desmond’s parents,” Richards said. “…We have cooperated at every single turn, and it was only earlier this (year) that on my own I decided to just send the DA’s office a letter explaining what occurred, which obviously satisfied them that what we had been saying all along was true — that this was a terrible tragedy that was not foreseeable by anyone in Desmond’s family.”

Desmond died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the end of his attack on the high school.

He roamed the halls for about nine minutes and shot in several areas before leaving the building. Desmond wounded a 14-year-old boy who was not publicly identified and 18-year-old Matthew Silverstone; both were seriously injured but survived. Video of the attack shows that Desmond physically grappled with Silverstone before shooting him.

Officials said Desmond acted alone and was “radicalized” before the attack. His social media profiles suggested he was part of a new wave of online extremism that encourages the use of violence to destroy society. The teenager’s accounts were littered with references to white supremacy, antisemitism and violence, with a particular focus on past mass shootings, including the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.

In a photo posted on TikTok a few days before the attack, Desmond posed wearing a black T-shirt with the word “Wrath” written in red across the chest — similar to what one of the Columbine attackers wore. The same post also included an image of the 15-year-old who killed two people and injured six more at a Madison, Wisconsin, school in December 2024.

A post on X about an hour before the Sept. 10 attack on Evergreen High showed an image of a hand holding a revolver.

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The ally of President Trump claimed that ICE agents, who have spearheaded the president’s nationwide mass deportation campaign, could be assigned to prevent supposed election fraud, even though their mission is limited to immigration enforcement.

“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon said this week on his “War Room” podcast. “We’re not gonna sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Bannon even suggested that the U.S. military could be deployed at polling places as part of Trump’s call to “nationalize” elections in more than a dozen Democratic-led states.

“You’ve got to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne on the Insurrection Act,” Bannon said. “You’ve got to get around every (polling place) and make sure only people with IDs, people are actually registered to vote, and people that are United States citizens vote in this election. Full stop. We will not accept anything less.”

Trump has not spelled out exactly what he means by his call to “nationalize” election enforcement. The Constitution says states, not the federal government, are responsible for running elections and ensuring free and fair votes.

Trump and Bannon have repeatedly spewed false claims of widespread voter fraud, especially undocumented immigrants somehow being permitted to vote in droves, despite countless studies showing that it is virtually unheard of.

Republicans are pushing new legislation that would require mandatory proof of citizenship to vote. But Democrats oppose the measure, noting that it’s already a crime for undocumented immigrants to vote and tens of millions of native-born Americans don’t have passports or any other proof of U.S. citizenship.

Voting rights advocates say the real goal of any show of law enforcement force around polling places would be to intimidate Americans, especially Latinos, from exercising their right to vote.

The war of words comes as Democrats are favored to make major gains in the 2026 congressional midterms and have a decent chance of flipping the House and maybe even the Senate.

Republicans hold only a four-vote majority in the House, with political analysts projecting about 20 swing seats up for grabs.

Democrats face a steeper climb in the Senate where they would need to flip four GOP-held seats to take control of the upper chamber.