Advocates in Aurora say people locked inside the GEO Group-operated ICE processing center are not getting the actual letters and cards their families send. Instead, they report that staff routinely hand out photocopies or scanned printouts while the original envelopes sit in limbo, sometimes for weeks or even months. Those holdups, they warn, are not just annoying. They can mean key documents never make it into immigration court on time.
According to The Denver Post, attorneys with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network and volunteers with Casa de Paz say they have repeatedly seen letters delayed and originals withheld while the facility opens and scans mail, then passes along copies. Advocates showed reporters envelopes postmarked in April that, they said, were only returned to people in detention at the end of June.
Advocates Track Returned Envelopes and Contraband Claims
Monthly welcome team reports from Casa de Paz, which assists people as they leave the Aurora facility, describe a pattern of missing original mail and lengthy delays before items are handed over. The group says stamped self-addressed envelopes have sometimes been labeled contraband and bounced back to senders. Former detainees have also alleged that staff opened legal mail when the intended recipient was not present.
ICE Rules on Mail and Legal Correspondence
Under ICE’s Performance-Based National Detention Standards, incoming letters are supposed to reach detainees within 24 hours and packages within 48 hours, except in unusual circumstances. The rules also say special correspondence or legal mail "may only be opened in the detainee's presence" and that staff "shall neither read nor copy" that mail. Those requirements are laid out in ICE detention standards, and advocates argue that routine scanning of legal mail runs directly into that language.
Operator and Oversight Concerns
The Aurora processing center is run by the GEO Group, which lists the facility on its public roster of locations. Coverage in the Denver Gazette has already drawn attention to how federal contracts and increased detention bed space in Colorado have put GEO’s local operations under a brighter spotlight from lawmakers and community critics.
What Advocates Want Next
Advocates are pressing ICE and GEO to spell out whether mail handling procedures have quietly changed at the Aurora center and, if so, to restore a policy that gets original mail directly into detainees’ hands. They say the backlog is not just a paperwork headache. Natalie Petrucci of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network told reporters that mail delays have led some people to show up in immigration court without crucial evidence. Casa de Paz executive director Andrea Loya added that, "the way the system tries to continually make money off people is not fair." Both points were reported in The Denver Post.
