President Donald Trump’s administration contracted last month with The GEO Group to operate a dormant prison in Hudson as an immigrant detention center for at least six months, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.

The documents, released by the ACLU on Thursday after a Freedom of Information Act request, are the clearest indication yet that federal immigration authorities have prioritized reopening the facility in Hudson, located about 30 miles northeast of Denver, as they ramp up detention capacity in Colorado in pursuit of Trump’s mass deportation plans.

The dormant Big Horn Correctional Facility, formerly known as the Hudson Correctional Facility, is a 1,200-bed prison that operated for a span of just five years after its 2009 opening. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract for “comprehensive detention services” at the facility was issued to The GEO Group on Dec. 1, 2025, but the amount and terms of the contract are redacted in the documents.

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The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to inquiries about the released documents or when the Hudson facility might reopen. The documents also contain a previous $39 million contract for The GEO Group to operate the facility for the six-month period beginning in April of last year, but the prison remained empty.

ACLU advocates criticized the government’s heavy redactions of the released documents, with Tim Macdonald, the ACLU of Colorado’s legal director, demanding “more transparency into how (ICE officials) plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to imprison more people who have not been convicted of any crime.”

In his second term, Trump has pledged to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” aiming to remove all of the estimated 12 million immigrants in the country without permanent legal status, regardless of how long they have been in the country, the legal status of their family members or whether they have criminal records.

Colorado is currently home to only one ICE detention center, an Aurora facility also operated by The GEO Group. The Hudson facility is one of six potential new sites for ICE detention under consideration in Colorado, a list that also includes the dormant Huerfano County Correctional Center in Walsenburg and the Southern Ute Indian Adult Detention Center in Ignacio. The three new facilities would expand ICE’s Colorado footprint by a total of 2,560 additional beds, tripling its detention capacity in the state.

The latest records obtained by the ACLU also contain a document known as a “Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition,” or JOFOC, which is required when the federal government awards a contract without a competitive bidding process — but the 98-page file is completely redacted.

In August, following the passage of $45 billion in funding for expanded immigration detention in Republicans’ spending and tax cut law, GEO Group chairman George Zoley spoke during an earnings call about the “attractive opportunity for investors” presented by “the unprecedented growth opportunities we anticipate will materialize over the balance of this year and next year.”

“The documents we received from ICE fail to answer fundamental questions about the agency’s planned expansion for the Denver field office,” Scott Medlock, a senior staff attorney with the Colorado ACLU, said in a statement. “With Congress allocating unprecedented resources and funding to ICE and DHS, the public deserves to know how the federal government intends to use this infusion of money.”