Rep. Ryan Gonzalez had already made up his mind. He'd listened to the testimony about people dying in immigration detention, about overcrowded facilities and spoiled food, about a broken federal system that had ground on for decades. He wasn't unmoved — he said so explicitly. But when it came time to explain his no vote on HB 26-1276, the legislation requiring humane health and safety standards at immigration detention facilities, Gonzalez made the calculation that Colorado's financial situation had to come first.
"I don't want to jeopardize federal funding," he said, his voice carrying the weight of someone who clearly didn't love the choice he was making. "You represent — Garcia, you mentioned the terrible financial situation we're in right now. We are when we're trying to make cuts to other departments, higher ed, Medicaid infrastructure. We cannot jeopardize federal funds."
It was the defining moment of a long, draining afternoon in the Colorado House Finance Committee on April 13, 2026 — a hearing that opened with a relatively simple recovery house reform and closed with one of the more charged debates the committee had seen this session. Three bills. Three different fights. And a room full of people trying to decide what a state can and can't do when the federal government refuses to act.
Bad Actors in Recovery Houses
The session opened with SB 26-113, sponsored by Rep. Michael Carter, a former criminal defense attorney who represents a district that includes at least one recovery home. The bill's premise was deceptively straightforward: remove the third-party contractor currently sitting between the state's Behavioral Health Administration and Colorado's network of recovery houses, and let BHA regulate those houses directly.
Carter didn't mince words about why the current system had failed. Operators were double-billing Medicaid on behalf of clients. They were threatening vulnerable residents with eviction if they didn't pay up. And BHA — already funding the oversight — couldn't actually do anything about it because the third party was in the way. "BHA said, 'We don't have the ability to regulate them other than calling the police,'" Carter explained. "Why don't you just give us direct — just take out that bureaucracy and allow us to regulate them directly?"
The bill also carried Amendment L15, which explicitly allows BHA to place individuals on probation inside recovery homes — a provision Carter said was already implicit in the bill but that stakeholders wanted written in plainly. The amendment sailed through without objection.
But Rep. Hartsook had a question that the room couldn't fully shake: if the state is eliminating a layer of overhead, why does the fiscal note show costs increasing in the out years?
"I would think we'd be saving money because if BHA is going to take it over now itself, they don't have to pay any of that overhead cost for the third party," Hartsook pressed. "That's what I'm trying to reconcile on the fiscal note."
Carter acknowledged BHA would need to hire staff, but it was Rep. Garcia who stepped in with the cleaner answer: the bill shifts funding from the general fund to a cash fund, so the entities themselves cover the cost of licensing going forward. The fiscal note wasn't showing new spending so much as a reorganization of who pays.
The committee was mostly persuaded. SB 26-113 passed 7-3 and moved to the Committee on Appropriations as amended. Hartsook, along with Brooks and Gonzalez, voted no.
A 107-Page Bill With No Fiscal Note
If SB 26-113 was a scalpel, SB 26-144 was something closer to a surgical reconstruction of Colorado's entire property tax lien system. Rep. Camacho, one of the sponsors, opened with what amounted to a pitch: "This bill is 107 pages, but it has no fiscal note. So that in and of itself should really make you think about pushing this bill through."
The bill exists because of Tyler v. Hennepin, a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upended how governments handle surplus equity in property tax cases. In that case, a Minnesota homeowner owed roughly $15,000 in back taxes. The county seized her home, sold it for $40,000, and kept every dollar above the tax debt. The Supreme Court ruled that violated the Fifth Amendment: government can collect what it's owed, but the surplus belongs to the property owner.
Colorado took initial steps to comply after the ruling, but county treasurers implementing those changes found gaps, inconsistencies, and — in at least one instance — a direct statutory conflict. The bill standardizes processes across all counties, requires a public auction before any treasurer's deed can be issued, and ensures surplus equity actually gets back to property owners.
The testimony from county treasurers was unanimously supportive. Holly Ryan, chief deputy public trustee in Douglas County — and by her own account the person who drafted much of the legislation — testified in an "amend status," meaning Douglas County supported the bill but had concerns. She'd identified what she called "a complete problem": a paragraph on page 41, lines 23-26 appeared to allow county officials and their families to buy property at deed sales under Title 11.5. But page 68, lines 3-4 explicitly stated that a treasurer acting in their individual capacity must not bid at a public auction held under that same section. The two provisions flatly contradicted each other.
Lane Yakovetto, the Routt County Treasurer who helped shepherd the bill through stakeholder meetings, clarified the intent: county employees shouldn't participate in the tax lien process — consistent with existing law — but should be allowed to bid at the final property auction to help establish fair market value. Without their participation, she argued, you might distort what the property is actually worth.
Rep. Zokaie had a different concern: were the fees in the bill new, or just reorganized? Rep. Camacho initially couldn't answer — "that was not reflected in our stakeholding of this" — and deferred to the treasurers. Ryan clarified that the fees aren't being increased; they're being moved from their current location under public trustee statutes to the appropriate place under treasurer statutes. The request to let those fees increase every two years on odd years, aligned with public trustee fees, is new — but it's a procedural alignment, not a dollar increase.
Rep. Brooks, before the vote, urged the sponsors to keep working with Ryan and Douglas County on the statutory conflict. Camacho said he was willing to address any remaining issues. The committee voted 10-0 to send SB 26-144 to the Committee of the Whole with a favorable recommendation — the only unanimous vote of the day.
The Bill That Split the Room
By the time HB 26-1276 came up, the afternoon had already been long. But the energy in the room shifted the moment Rep. Garcia began explaining what the bill was about.
The legislation requires any new or ongoing immigration detention facility in Colorado to meet humane practices standards, subject to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment inspections funded by fees charged directly to the detention facilities — not the state. The sponsors argued this made it a zero-cost bill: what comes in from fees covers what the state spends on inspections.
But the bill had started out as something much broader. Before the hearing, sponsors filed Amendment L11, which stripped sections 1, 4, and 5 from the bill. Gone were transparency requirements for multi-jurisdictional task forces, and gone were provisions that would have prohibited using Colorado airports, trains, and bus systems for deportation purposes. Rep. Velasco explained it plainly: the original provisions either created too much duplicative work, required information state agencies might not have, or raised constitutional questions the sponsors weren't ready to litigate.
What remained was section 2 and the detention facility health and safety framework — and even that drew fire.
Profit Motives and Dead Detainees
The testimony in support was unflinching. Jennifer Piper, who works for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker peace and justice organization, had spent nearly two decades watching the Aurora GEO Group detention facility expand from 500 to 1,500 beds. She explained the structural problem with for-profit detention in terms that made the committee go quiet.
"The more you cut costs, the bigger your profit is," she said. "So if you feed people less, if you provide less medical care on site, if you ignore or treat medical conditions with just ibuprofen, all of that cuts your costs and increases your profits. The federal contracts that the US Government makes with these corporations don't have any mechanisms for punishments for conditions that don't meet the standard. So in the contracting, if you don't meet the standard, there's no penalty, there's no profit motive to do better in these facilities."
Witnesses cited 45 to 46 deaths in ICE detention facilities since the start of 2026, and noted that more than three-quarters of ICE facilities are operated by for-profit corporations. Multiple witnesses referenced conditions at the Aurora ICE detention facility specifically, citing local news reports from March and April 2026 about hunger, health problems, and a public health investigation during which facility staff allegedly blocked health officials from conducting interviews.
Andrea Loya of Casa de Paz, an organization that meets people released from the Aurora detention center, offered a sobering observation: "The only reason why Colorado does not have a death in the last 15 months here in Colorado is because people are being released to Casa de Paz before they meet that — we are seeing the sickest people being released into community."
The Unfunded Mandate Gambit
Owen Brigner, representing the Colorado Municipal League, testified in opposition to specific sections of the bill — particularly what remained of the reporting requirements in Section 2, which he characterized as duplicative and potentially ambiguous. CML, he said, represents 99 percent of Colorado's towns and cities, and many of those municipalities would have to build new tracking systems, create new policies and procedures, and meet tight reporting deadlines — all without any state funding to do it.
Rep. Soper seized on that. In an extended dialogue with Brigner, he methodically built a record: yes, the reporting requirement would cost something; yes, Colorado law and the state constitution both say the General Assembly can't impose unfunded mandates on local governments; yes, if there's no funding attached, local governments may legally refuse to comply.
"In the future," Soper said, "where we have — let's say this conversation is actually listened to for the record by litigation, the Attorney General's having to defend the fact that the General Assembly clearly had notice that there is a constitutional provision and a statute — that if it's not funded, local governments do not have to comply or fulfill that obligation. Would you say that this is adequate notice that the General Assembly knew good and well that this constitutional provision existed?"
Brigner said yes.
Rep. Marshall pushed back with a different frame. If the actual marginal cost of complying is negligible — essentially CCing the Judiciary Committee on an email already going to the Department of Public Safety — it wouldn't constitute a good-faith basis for refusal. He pressed Brigner to estimate the extra cost of adding a CC line to an email. Brigner declined: "I would not be comfortable making that estimate because it wouldn't be a good faith estimate."
A Vote, Explained
There was also the question of who could actually enforce the law. Rep. Gonzalez asked what risks arose if enforcement authority wasn't clearly limited to the Attorney General's office. Garcia acknowledged the concern — and acknowledged that it had arrived too late to fix.
"We barely received that information today at like 12:15," Garcia said. "So we did not have time to work through that or confer with the AG's office to make sure that we were doing so in a correct way." The sponsors committed to working on clarifying language offline.
When the vote came, it was 6-4. Camacho, Garcia, Marshall, Stewart, Zokaie, and the chair voted yes. Brooks, Gonzalez, Hartsook, and Soper voted no.
Rep. Marshall's yes vote was notable. A self-described moderate who said he frequently finds himself between the extremes, Marshall drew a clear line: private detention facilities are not federal facilities, and Colorado has every right to regulate what happens inside them.
"They're not federal facilities. They're private areas that can be and should be under the health, safety and protection of the state government," he said. "So reaching in there and taking care of that issue, I would applaud both of you, even though I know it's very painful to give up the other parts where again, I don't think we can or should interfere with the federal government's areas where it's in their areas."
Gonzalez, for his part, was equally candid about what made his no vote hard. His parents are immigrants. He has undocumented people in his community. He said he wants a fair and humane immigration system. But he looked at Colorado's budget — the cuts to higher education, Medicaid, infrastructure — and decided he couldn't take the risk.
What Happens Next
All three bills now move to their next stops. SB 26-113 heads to the Committee on Appropriations as amended — meaning it still has to clear that committee before it can go to the full House floor for a vote. SB 26-144, the property tax bill, goes to the Committee of the Whole, where it will get its second reading before the full House; Rep. Brooks urged sponsors to keep working with Holly Ryan and Douglas County to resolve the statutory conflict between pages 41 and 68 before that process concludes. HB 26-1276 also goes to Appropriations, where sponsors have committed to working with CML on clarifying that enforcement authority rests exclusively with the Attorney General's office.
If HB 26-1276 ultimately passes both chambers and is signed into law, Colorado would become one of the few states requiring CDPHE inspections of immigration detention facilities, funded by fees charged to those facilities rather than taxpayers. For the people currently held at the Aurora ICE detention center — and anyone detained in future facilities — that could mean enforceable health and safety standards where none currently exist at the state level. If the bill dies somewhere in the process, those facilities remain subject only to federal oversight, in a contracting environment that witnesses testified provides no financial penalty for failing to meet health standards.