¶ Garfield County Sheriff's Office and Jail
The Garfield County Sheriff's Office and Jail are central county-level institutions in the current ICE/DHS Garfield County cluster. The record supports direct public statements by Sheriff Lou Vallario about ICE cooperation and legal limits, basic institutional facts about the jail, official self-description of SPEAR, a historically documented 2010 HSI operation, and later public disputes over whether the Sheriff's Office crossed Colorado-law limits on civil immigration-enforcement assistance.
- The Garfield County Jail is located at 107 8th Street in Glenwood Springs.
- The GCSO jail page says the jail opened in December 2001, has capacity for 199 inmates, and holds prisoners for the Sheriff's Office and all law-enforcement agencies within Garfield County.
- The Sheriff's Office operates or anchors SPEAR, a Garfield County-based multi-agency major-crimes task force created from the 2022 merger of TAG and TRIDENT.
¶ ICE and DHS evidence
- In 2010, an ICE archived release said the Garfield County Sheriff's Office provided significant assistance to an HSI-led western Colorado operation and that ERO coordinated detention and deportation for noncitizens being returned.
- In 2024, the Sheriff told the BOCC that GCSO works with ICE by notifying ICE when a person is going to be released, while saying GCSO cannot hold a person longer than the state-law release window once criminal custody no longer supports detention.
- In 2025, the Sheriff repeated that Colorado officers lack federal immigration authority, that local ICE agents review the public jail website, and that the jail tells ICE when a person of interest will be released.
- The GCSO SPEAR page says SPEAR collaborates with HSI as part of its major-crimes and intelligence-led policing model.
The 2026 Towards Justice packet alleges that GCSO and SPEAR assisted civil immigration enforcement through information sharing, detention, transport, jail-release coordination, and non-public access. Those are live allegations in this source layer, not settled findings. The strongest directly supported current statement is narrower: GCSO officially describes a release-notification practice and a general agency-assist posture while also saying it cannot hold people solely for civil immigration status.
- The repo does not yet have a complete GCSO immigration-detainer policy, jail-release policy, jail access policy, or ICE-notification protocol.
- The repo does not yet have detainer logs, ICE request forms, release logs, transfer records, jail surveillance, or body-worn camera exports.
- The repo has SPEAR public description and a case report, but not the complete SPEAR MOU, board approvals, or member-agency IGA records.