A sheriff’s deputy in Colorado briefly pulled over Caroline Dias Goncalves before immigration agents detained her. Now county officials are conducting a review.
Questions are surfacing about the immigration detention of a 19-year-old college student from Utah after a traffic stop in Colorado this month.
Caroline Dias Goncalves, a student at the University of Utah, was driving on Interstate 70 outside Loma on June 5 when a Mesa County sheriff’s deputy pulled her over. The stop lasted less than 20 minutes, and “Dias Goncalves was released from the traffic stop with a warning,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release Monday.
Then, shortly after she exited the highway, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped her, arrested her and took her to an immigration detention center.
Dias Goncalves is one of nearly 2.5 million Dreamers living in the United States. The word “Dreamer” refers to undocumented young immigrants brought to the United States as children.
So it doesn’t sound the like the local sheriffs are intentionally targeting people for immigration things in this case, but rather when the traffic stop happened, the data got put into a system that is completely unrelated to ICE, but ICE is apparently using anyway.
I would be curious to know how ICE got access to the sheriffs’ systems. Whomever they’re contracting with needs to have it terminated yesterday, or they might as well be complicit.
It is explicitly illegal in Colorado for state agencies to share data with ICE due to two laws passed in 2021 and 2025
The way the article reads, the Sheriff voluntarily joined the info sharing system in question:
“An administrative investigation from the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office revealed Zwinck was part of a communication group that included local, state and federal law enforcement partners participating in “a multi-agency drug interdiction effort focusing on the highways throughout Western Colorado.””
There’s no contractor to fire here. The Sheriffs office voluntarily joined for drug enforcement efforts. ICE use information shared for drug enforcement for immigration enforcement violating the purpose of the group. The Sheriffs left.
I see this as a good thing. While most of us don’t trust trump’s ICE, this is yet another example of other law enforcement arms also losing trust and cutting ICE off.
Sounds like the structure put in place after 9/11 with Homeland Security is starting to work in the ways predicted….
I am not so sure this is unintentional. Mesa County is the very strange place that brought us Lauren Boebert and Tina Peters. Their respective Wikipedia pages are astounding.
I could see your point about the questionable traffic stop for other possibly illegitimate reasons, but the Sheriffs actions to remove themselves from this information sharing with ICE afterwards is highly suggestive that its not doing the traffic stop for immigration enforcement reasons. I’ll take the small win.
The sheriffs removed themselves because information sharing with ICE is in violation of Colorado law
My take is “plausible deniability”. The sheriffs were delaying their target so that ICE gravy seals can stuff themselves into their KKKop cars and start pursuing their prey.