Immigration facility, run by Geo Group, has resisted county health investigation of confirmed TB case

Colorado’s top health official has given the federal immigration detention center in Aurora until Friday to open its doors to outside health inspectors investigating a confirmed case of tuberculosis.

In the letter sent Tuesday evening, Jill Hunsaker Ryan, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, also asked the Aurora facility’s warden and health administrator to allow inspectors to review medical records for the detainee who contracted the potentially fatal respiratory illness. A positive test result was identified late last month.

She directed officials to provide facility access to inspectors investigating the case, as well as records for other individuals who have been screened for TB and the information necessary to determine the disease’s potential spread.

By Wednesday evening, a CDPHE spokeswoman said facility officials had not yet responded to the requests.

The escalation came amid a nearly three-week standoff between Adams County health officials and the Aurora facility’s operators and federal officials — who, local officials say, have blocked investigators from interviewing detainees, inspecting the facility and reviewing records. Adams County officials issued a public health order last month seeking that information after the Geo Group, which operates the facility, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has ultimate control over it, refused to cooperate.

“These barriers prevent public health officials from determining the scope of potential exposure and taking appropriate steps to protect detainees, employees, contractors, visitors, people who have been transferred or released, and others who may have been exposed,” Hunsaker Ryan wrote to the facility’s leaders in the letter. “Immediate cooperation is necessary for the investigation to proceed.”

A spokesman for Geo Group did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday afternoon. Representatives for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security told The Denver Post earlier this week that there were no active tuberculosis cases in the 1,530-bed facility, though they did not respond when asked if that meant officials had moved any individual who had tested positive.

The agencies have not publicly acknowledged the positive test, which health officials said they identified on June 22 using samples taken from the facility.

CDPHE spokeswoman Hope Shuler wrote in an email to The Post that agency leaders still hoped facility officials would respond to the letter, adding that their goal was “to work collaboratively with GEO.”

“This is how we would treat any potential outbreak of a communicable disease,” Schuler said. “If we are unable to obtain the necessary access and information, we will determine appropriate next steps, but our goal right now is simply to gain access for purposes of determining whether we have an outbreak.”

The standoff is not the first time, in Colorado or elsewhere, that ICE and its detention center contractors have refused access to outside inspectors.

Adams County officials admonished the Aurora facility earlier this year for failing to provide sufficient information for an investigation into a separate suspected outbreak. In Washington state, a federal judge earlier this month ordered Geo to allow state health inspectors into a Tacoma detention center after the facility repeatedly denied them access.

After ICE moved to block members of Congress from conducting unannounced visits to detention centers, another federal judge ordered the Trump administration to grant access to the lawmakers, including Colorado’s U.S. Reps. Jason Crow and Joe Neguse.

Geo has also resisted recent attempts to more tightly regulate the conditions of its facilities. Last month, the company filed a lawsuit challenging a new state law in Colorado that requires regular outside inspections of detention centers; that legislation also covered investigations of communicable diseases.

On Monday, Geo Group announced that it had signed a contract worth up to $528.6 million to open a new detention center in Hudson, on the grounds of a shuttered prison the company once operated