Hudson, Colorado has 1,600 people, one stoplight, and no grocery store. It is about to get an immigration jail with room for 1,200 detainees.

The Big Horn detention center is going into an empty prison on the edge of town that has sat vacant for more than a decade. The GEO Group, one of the biggest private prison companies in the country, holds a $529 million contract to run it and is already hiring security officers at $35 an hour. It could open as early as September. When it does, it will nearly double Colorado's immigrant detention capacity.

It sits along the border of Colorado's 8th Congressional District, which is represented by Gabe Evans.

Asked about it by The New York Times this month, a spokesperson for Evans declined a request to discuss the issue.

He has been declining to discuss it for a while

This isn't new. On November 21, 2025, about 30 people gathered outside Evans's district office in Greeley with petitions and four written questions about the Hudson facility and about ICE's tactics. The Colorado Times Recorder was there. The door was locked on a Friday morning. Evans's office did not answer the four questions, and did not explain why the office was closed.

One of the people outside, Gina McAffee, put her question this way: "Do you agree with ICE targeting non-criminals?"

Around 1,500 people signed a petition against the facility. Evans supports it. In an August 2025 radio interview he said plainly: "We've got to have these facilities."

That's an answer. It's just not one he'll give to the people standing outside his office.

The 23 seconds

Here's the part that's hard to square.

In early February 2026, ahead of a House hearing on Homeland Security oversight, Evans told CBS Colorado he was going to press ICE hard on how its agents were running raids. He was specific about what bothered him:

"I do have a lot of heartburn over ICE saying that they don't need a judicial warrant to go into somebody's private home."

And he was specific about the law:

"I believe that you need a judicial warrant to go into people's private residences. And I think that's a pretty iron-clad standard that's been established through decades of Supreme Court law."

That was February 6, 2026. The hearing was February 10.

At the hearing, Evans spent his question time on sanctuary cities. Then, with 23 seconds left on the clock, he mentioned that he had "many questions about the memo saying you don't need a warrant to go into the house" — and asked the ICE director whether they could talk about it some other time.

The iron-clad standard established through decades of Supreme Court law got 23 seconds and a request for a follow-up meeting.

He funded all of it

Whatever heartburn Evans has, it has never once shown up in a vote.

He voted for Trump's budget bill, which paid for the mass deportation campaign. He voted for the $70 billion ICE funding package that passed the House by two votes — a bill that not one Republican opposed.

That money bought more than beds. ICE now runs a round-the-clock social media dragnet, subpoenaing the identities of Americans who post criticism of the agency, with nobody charged with a crime. Evans has not objected to that one either.

Every dollar behind the Big Horn detention center, and behind the agents who will fill it, came through votes Evans cast.

Who lives here

Evans's district is about 40% Hispanic — he has said so himself. It is a corner of Colorado where immigrants work the meatpacking plants and the fields. A 1,200-bed detention center 12 miles from the nearest hospital is not an abstraction to those families. It is the building they will drive past.

Some of the people most upset are the ones who put Trump in office. Diana and Ernesto Cruz, who live in Fort Lupton, voted Republican in 2024 because they were fed up with inflation and with the border. They told the Times the crackdown has gone too far and they don't want a detention center down the road. They're voting for Evans's opponent in November.

The town itself says it can't stop it. "We're very limited in our abilities to do anything," town manager Bryce Lange said. "It's already built." Opponents have sued Hudson, arguing the site isn't zoned for an immigration detention center and that 1,200 detainees would overwhelm the town's water, roads and emergency services.

The pattern

This is the same move Evans has made on every issue where his district's interests and his party's demands point in opposite directions.

He voted for the Medicaid cuts, then told Colorado the bill wouldn't hurt anyone's health care and called the warnings "fear mongering" — and a year later nurses named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk. He said he'd grill ICE and used 23 seconds. He supports a detention center his constituents are protesting, and won't say so to a reporter who asks.

There is a version of this job where a member of Congress with genuine concerns about warrantless home entries writes a bill, forces a vote, or at minimum uses his five minutes. Evans has the seat. He has the microphone. He has, by his own account, the heartburn.

What he does not have is a single action to show for it.

Source

"Shame!": An ICE Facility Roils a Tiny Town, With a House Seat in Play — Jack Healy, The New York Times, August 7, 2026. Photo: Colorado Times Recorder, from the November 2025 rally outside Evans's Greeley office.