Taking our direction from immigrants directly impacted by injustice, AFSC Colorado organizes immigrants and allies to support immigrant justice by resisting deportation, lifting up positive narratives, and successfully advocating for policy change through providing leadership development. We believe our immigrant leaders are experts on the causes of inequality and the transformative changes most needed for liberation. Our work is rooted in an allyship and accompaniment model which leverages the privilege of our citizen members and our organization to effectively partner with immigrant leaders.
We have taken major steps recently towards realizing our vision of a Colorado where policy is defined by those directly impacted, and all people are valued and encouraged to contribute to their communities. AFSC is a leader in promoting intersectional approaches to organizing that recognizes, for example, the many connections between racial justice, labor rights, farmworker rights and immigrant rights. This intersectional approach contributes to major policy wins and cultural shifts.
Deportation and Community Defense
14 Know Your Rights Trainers - offering interactive, skilled trainings in Spanish
Our staff train and support the dispatchers of the Colorado Rapid Response Network, offer Nonviolent Direct Action and security/marshalling trainings
Community Family Preparedness Planning, Monthly meetings for people in deportation or their loved ones, and support on accessing legal support
Accompaniment Network: our citizen members accompany people to court, appointments with Immigration and supervision appointments. We offer moral support and witness, educating our own community on the impacts of our immigration system.
Shut Down GEO Aurora detention center: Since the 1980s, GEO, also known as the Aurora ICE Detention Center, has grown into one of the largest privately-run immigration detention sites in the United States. As of mid-2025, Aurora maintains a capacity of 1,532 beds and cages an average of 1,142 people daily, placing it among the top ten ICE detention centers by population. Reports of medical neglect, including preventable deaths and 911 emergencies, have made GEO a symbol of systemic failure. This space and our tax dollars could be used to make our community more healthy, safe, and happy.
This past year AFSC brought together partners from around the metro Denver area to launch a campaign to prevent the contract renewal in 2026. We are engaging the Aurora community in a listening project through door knocking, building legislative and divestment campaigns and imagining a Colorado without cages. Our campaign provides research and analysis to other site fights across Colorado, from Walsenburg to Hudson, fighting the federal government's efforts to reopen shuttered for profit prisons as immigrant detention centers.
The American Friends Service Committee works for a just, peaceful, and sustainable world free of violence, inequality, and oppression. We join with people and partners worldwide to meet urgent community needs, challenge injustice, and build peace.
In 2006, Colorado passed some of the most oppressive anti-immigrant laws in the country, including several that discriminated against immigrant workers and a “show me your papers” law that required police to report to ICE people suspected of living without documentation. Following the repeal of that law in 2013, directly impacted leaders from Not1More provided critical testimony in meetings with sheriffs. Their analysis and stories led all 64 counties in Colorado to stop engaging in immigration holds — the main form of collusion with ICE — dropping immigration detentions by ICE from 8,000 a year in 2013 to about 1000 in 2016.
Today, Colorado has become a leader in pro-immigrant legislation, thanks to the leadership of immigrants supported by AFSC. Our years of intersectional work culminated in a cultural shift in 2021 when the Colorado Legislature passed a dozen progressive bills to protect and expand the rights of immigrants. Our member leaders were decision makers on two campaigns: establishing a statewide fund to provide universal legal representation for immigrants (building off a similar fund AFSC worked with partners to establish in 2018 in Denver) and a data privacy law that will prevent state agencies from sharing information with federal immigration authorities. Our members helped pass an agricultural workers’ bill of rights that ensures the right to organize and receive overtime pay.
AFSC was the first non-profit to support the grassroots-led Driver’s Licenses for All group, leading to Colorado allowing access to a driver’s license for undocumented immigrants in 2013. Since then, more than 100,000 undocumented Coloradans have accessed a driver’s license, making our roads safer and preventing people from being sucked into the jail-to-deportation pipeline.
Organization name
American Friends Service Committee
1965
Category
Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy, International, Foreign Affairs & National Security
Address
American Friends Service Committee, Colorado 1420 Ogden St. Suite 201Denver, CO, US
Morgan County, CO, US