Together Colorado Sues Town of Hudson Over GEO Group's Big Horn ICE Detention Facility Zoning

Faith nonprofit Together Colorado filed suit July 23, 2026 in Weld County District Court against the Town of Hudson, challenging the 2,700-bed GEO Group “Big Horn” ICE detention facility as not a permitted use under Hudson’s Land Development Code — no special use permit was ever sought or granted for the conversion. ICE had already signed the $528.6M five-year contract with GEO Group on July 9 (2026-07-09–geo-group-529m-hudson-colorado-big-horn-detention-contract) to convert the shuttered Hudson Correctional Facility, nearly doubling Colorado’s ICE detention capacity. Town officials had claimed they lacked authority to intervene in a federally-contracted facility; the lawsuit directly contests that claim, with Weld County resident Janet Carlson joining as co-plaintiff.

Docket. Case No. 2026CV30875, Weld County District Court (901 9th Ave, Greeley, CO 80631). Full caption: Together Colorado and Janet E. Carlson v. Town of Hudson, Town of Hudson Town Council, Town of Hudson Planning Commission, and Jennifer Woods (in her official capacity as Town of Hudson Planning Director). Plaintiffs are represented by Towards Justice (David Seligman, Rachel Dempsey, Alexander Hood). The complaint (filed 2026-07-22, dated) pleads three claims: (1) C.R.C.P. 106(a)(2) mandamus — Hudson has a clear, nondiscretionary duty to enforce its own Land Development Code and has refused to; (2) C.R.C.P. 106(a)(4) certiorari review of quasi-judicial action — Hudson allegedly let the facility proceed without any local zoning review, denying plaintiffs notice/hearing/appeal rights; (3) C.R.C.P. 57 declaratory judgment on whether federal law preempts local zoning. Plaintiffs seek expedited review, a declaration that the facility is not a permitted I-3-zone use, and an order compelling Hudson to enforce its code. A filed suit is not a win: as of this entry (through the town’s last posted council minutes, 2026-08-05), CourtListener’s federal/RECAP corpus has zero coverage of this state-court case (VerifiedAbsence, bounded to that corpus only — state civil dockets are outside CourtListener’s coverage), the Colorado Judicial Branch’s own public docket-search tool (coloradojudicial.gov/dockets) is a dynamic form that a scripted fetch cannot submit (a genuine access limitation, not a verified absence of docket activity), and no news reporting located identifies a hearing date, injunction motion, or ruling. Status is: filed, unresolved.

The “no authority” claim, in the town’s own words and its own record. Hudson’s position was not improvised for the lawsuit — it traces back at least to a Jan. 21, 2026 Town Council meeting, five and a half months before GEO’s contract was even signed, where more than 70 speakers used the public-comment period (the item was not on the agenda) to press the town to act; the town’s own minutes record that “no formal action was taken as the matter was not a scheduled business item.” By the July 15, 2026 regular meeting, Town Manager Bryce Lange opened the meeting by reading a prepared statement into the record: “the town is not a party to the agreement regarding federal immigration detention operations and does not have authority to approve or deny decisions made under federal authority” (Town of Hudson official minutes, 2026-07-15) — this is the precise “no-authority” claim the lawsuit’s mandamus and certiorari claims are built to contradict. That same meeting’s public-comment period included a direct request that the town place “a formal, recorded vote regarding the facility on a future meeting agenda” — confirming no such vote had occurred as of July 15. An Executive Session to receive legal advice on Big Horn was placed on the July 15 agenda but tabled to August 5; per the town’s Aug. 5 minutes, that Executive Session was never reached — “as a result of the sudden adjournment, the remaining agenda items — including Council Comments and Executive Session — were not addressed.” The same Aug. 5 meeting adopted Resolution No. 26-38, a new formal policy restricting public comment at Council meetings to two minutes, on a 4-3 vote — read in context as an institutional response to the sustained, disruptive turnout over Big Horn (the July 15 meeting was itself briefly halted by protest noise outside Town Hall). No Hudson Town Council vote approving, denying, or imposing a moratorium on the Big Horn conversion itself has occurred in any posted minutes through August 5, 2026; minutes for the Aug. 19, 2026 meeting are not yet posted to the town’s Agenda Center as of this research pass.

This is a legal theory distinct from the NEPA/environmental-review challenges that have paused warehouse conversions elsewhere (Surprise, AZ; Williamsport, MD) — it argues municipal zoning authority survives federal end-use, testing whether a town’s own land-development code can constrain a facility already under signed federal contract, just two weeks after the deal closed. A ruling either way will bear directly on the dozens of other GEO Group and CoreCivic conversions moving through similar local-permitting gaps nationwide.

Local opposition is organized at the Town of Hudson level, not Weld County government. No Weld County Board of County Commissioners hearing, vote, or statement on Big Horn has surfaced in reporting as of this entry. Hudson town officials (chamber of commerce, town manager, Mayor Pro-Tem Matt Cole) have consistently taken the position that the town “has no control over federal operations” and Cole publicly dismissed this lawsuit as “wasting taxpayer dollars” (Colorado Politics, 2026-07-29). Weld County’s own institutional posture toward Big Horn — as opposed to Hudson’s — remains a documented absence in current sourcing, not a confirmed neutral or supportive stance.

Sourcing note on the minutes. Both the town’s Jan. 21 and July 15 minutes PDFs have no text layer and were retrieved via OCR (evidence-search flags this explicitly as “NOT verbatim, NOT human-verified”). The OCR extraction is corroborated word-for-word on the load-bearing quotes (“no formal action was taken,” the July 15 no-authority statement) against independent press paraphrase (KUNC/BizWest for Jan. 21; Colorado Sun for the July 15 “does not have approval authority” formulation), so the substance is treated as reliable, but exact minor phrasing/punctuation in the minutes should be treated as approximate pending a human check against the source PDF.