So this is Colorado in 2025: Deputies trying to help federal agents enforce immigration law get punished, sued, and publicly shamed — because helping ICE is now a state-level crime.
Here’s the scene: Mesa County Deputy Alexander Zwinck pulls over a 19-year-old Brazilian nursing student for following too closely behind a semi-truck. Routine traffic stop. He lets her off with a warning. End of story, right? Nope. Minutes later, ICE arrests her for overstaying her visa — because Zwinck had shared her vehicle description and location in a group chat with a joint drug task force that included federal immigration agents.
That’s when the political hammer dropped. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser — the same AG who’s made a career out of turning Colorado into a sanctuary state — sues Zwinck under a brand-new law signed just weeks earlier by Gov. Jared Polis. That law makes it illegal for local cops to share identifying information with federal immigration authorities, even if the feds are dealing with visa violators or criminals.
Zwinck gets slapped with a three-week unpaid suspension. Another deputy, Erik Olson, also gets hit with discipline for doing the same thing. Supervisors are reprimanded. And Weiser? He says he acted on “blatant violations of state law.”
Blatant violations? Or blatant politics?
This is where it gets absurd: These deputies say they thought they were following standard procedure. Olson even testified that it was “routine for ICE to show up on the back end of a traffic stop to do their thing.” In other words, this wasn’t some rogue operation — this was how joint task forces have worked for years.
But Colorado Democrats keep moving the goalposts. First, they limited state agency cooperation with ICE. Now they’ve extended the ban to local governments. The DOJ is already suing Colorado over these sanctuary policies, saying they violate federal law, but that hasn’t slowed anyone down.
Mesa County Sheriff Todd Rowell called out the AG for suing before his own internal investigation was done, calling the move “demoralizing” for law enforcement. And he’s right — how are deputies supposed to do their jobs if they risk lawsuits for simply sharing information with other agencies on a multi-jurisdictional task force?
