Gunnison County sheriff vows to quit working with ICE agents
Gunnison County Sheriff Adam Murdie will stop working with federal agents who are deporting residents as part of a national immigration crackdown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“We are not going to deal with ICE. You guys talked me into it. I’m done dealing with them,” Murdie said following two hours of emotional public comment at the Gunnison County commissioners meeting Tuesday.
The promise — one of the first public statements by a Colorado sheriff to end cooperation with federal immigration agents — stirred a standing ovation by residents who spent the morning blasting the sheriff for helping in the federal effort to detain and deport undocumented immigrants.
Murdie, who took over as sheriff in 2022 after running as an unaffiliated candidate, said he was “so afraid of what’s going to happen when they find out that we’re not allowing them to come do their job.”
“They’re going to come into this community and just run rampant, like they do everywhere else,” he said at the Tuesday meeting.
In May, videos on social media showed federal agents picking up apparently undocumented people just released from the Gunnison County jail, cuffing them and rushing them to unmarked vehicles. A group of citizens followed the agents to the car, asking to see warrants and their badge numbers.
Those citizens have rallied in the last several months in an effort that includes public comment at local meetings and more than 400 demonstrators parading down Main Street in Gunnison as part of the national “No Kings” protests in June. On Tuesday, many residents sat at a table with the three county commissioners and urged them to condemn the federal pursuit of immigrants.
Joe Burgess, a local pastor and immigration advocate, was one of dozens of speakers Tuesday asking the county to stop working with any federal officials seeking to deport local residents. Burgess said as many as 60 local residents have been removed from the community by ICE in the last 18 months “under highly questionable if not entirely illegal circumstances” that might include racial profiling and warrantless arrests.
Salif Mahamane, a psychology professor at Western Colorado University, said ICE “is an extremist militarized police force operating outside of all legal and constitutional bounds with impunity.”
“If one person on U.S. soil can be denied due process, anyone can,” Mahamane said. “That’s why the 5th Amendment exists.”
John Czernicki said the local protests gave him hope.
“An attack upon any of our civil rights is an attack upon all of us,” Czernicki said.
Federal retaliation against Gunnison County?
A Colorado law from 2018 limits law enforcement officials from working with ICE outside a criminal investigation – meaning they cannot notify federal immigration officials about possible violations of civil immigration laws.
Undersheriff Josh Ashe on Tuesday said ICE agents have only detained people who were released from the county jail. Residents at the meeting countered him, saying they have videos of locals being detained on the street outside a local church.
Ashe said the sheriff’s office was operating from a sense of “community safety” when deputies notified ICE that undocumented people had been arrested and booked into the county jail.
That sentiment is shared by many Colorado sheriffs. El Paso County Sheriff Joseph Roybal last year said Colorado’s sanctuary policies protecting immigrants “have enabled drug cartels and gang members to prey on undocumented immigrants” and his office’s cooperation with ICE is about public safety and “is not about targeting communities … it’s about protecting us all.”
Murdie, who was born in Gunnison and whose father served as Gunnison County sheriff for 24 years, on Tuesday said he could “feel the humanity” in the commissioners’ boardroom. He said he has struggled “between my humanity, my job, and trying to do the best thing I can do for the community of Gunnison Colorado.”
He warned residents to brace for reprisal from the federal government, adding that he doesn’t “have a problem arresting an ICE agent who is doing something illegal.”
“I think that they’re gonna take it as free rein to come into Gunnison and pull people off the streets from now on,” he said.
Alex Sánchez, the founder and leader of Voces Unidas de las Montañas in Garfield County, said “that is already happening.”
Sánchez estimates hundreds of Colorado residents have been “kidnapped and removed” from their communities by ICE agents in the last 18 months. Sánchez said there are other sheriffs who do not call ICE when a noncitizen lands in their jail. But few speak publicly about their unwillingness to cooperate. His group is eager to discuss the details of Murdie’s plan moving forward.
He applauded Murdie for taking a public stand against the Trump administration’s rural search for working residents who may be violating civil laws around immigration.
“We believe the public has a right to know how our local police are behaving as we all deal with the implications of the Trump administration’s undignified law enforcement operation,” Sánchez said.
David Seligman’s Towards Justice group last year filed a cease-and-desist letter with the Garfield County sheriff, arguing the sheriff’s coordination with ICE violated state law.
“More sheriffs absolutely should be doing this,” Seligman said of Murdie, noting that a sheriff who is a threat to residents without immigration status will not likely field calls for help from those residents. “Doing this is not about Colorado law. It’s about fulfilling your core obligation, which is to see that the people in your county are safe.”
Time to “disagree without being disagreeable”
Commissioner Jonathan Houck, a 20-year public official in the county, said a majority of sheriffs and county commissioners in Colorado “don’t work all that well together,” but in Gunnison County the commissioners and sheriff talk regularly and the sheriff is “continually responsive to many issues in this community.”
Gunnison County’s 17,400 residents are 85% white and 11.4% Hispanic or Latino, according to the latest information from the Census Bureau.
Houck said there are people in the community who are OK with deportations. And until everyone can sit down, talk and “disagree without being disagreeable” and “attack issues without attacking each other” solutions will be elusive.
“In Gunnison County we sit across the table from each other. We solve problems together. That’s who we are,” Houck said, supporting both the anger and civility of the day’s discourse. “We are a nation full of angry people right now and we’re not getting a lot done because our anger stops at anger. It doesn’t lean into civil participation. It doesn’t lean into cooperation.”
Houck said the federal government has widespread impacts on local communities, from food assistance to management of public lands to immigration enforcement. Local officials need to balance the needs of the community with not irking a federal administration that could start “pushing even harder than they have.”
“But you can’t not stand up for people in your community,” Houck said. “We don’t have all the answers but you have a committed group of elected officials at Gunnison County … that’s willing to continue to be in that fray and continue to work to the goals you as a community have.”
Commissioner Laura Puckett Daniels, who is married to a police officer, said “moral clarity” as an elected leader includes “condemning ICE.”
“What ICE is doing is not law enforcement. They are doing something else. It’s upsetting for me to see the conflation of the two roles,” she said, calling the sheriff’s promise to stop working with ICE “a bold commitment.”