Tag: colorado

CHAOS IN COLORADO: Anti-ICE Student Walkout ERUPTS IN VIOLENCE — Counterprotester Kicked on Ground, Man Struck in Head with Metal Bottle, Three Hospitalized

Schools let hundreds of kids walk out Friday to protest enforcing the law. What followed was a shouting match, flying water bottles, a metal bottle to the head, and total disorder at a Denver park.

A coordinated anti-ICE student walkout descended into violence Friday after hundreds of Colorado students abandoned their classrooms and gathered at La Alma-Lincoln Park in Denver.

What organizers promoted as a youth demonstration against President Trump’s immigration-enforcement agenda reportedly produced five assaults or altercations, sent three people to the hospital, and resulted in two graffiti citations.

According to Denver7 reporter Danielle Kreutter, a counterprotester recording the demonstration was knocked to the ground, kicked, and shoved after his camera was apparently knocked from his hand.

Another man carrying a pro-ICE sign was surrounded and chased by student demonstrators. Video showed a metal water bottle being thrown at the man’s head. The bottle struck him, and he fled with students still pursuing him.

Independent journalist @jorgeshottakis on X wrote:

Students throwing frozen water bottles and and physically attacking journalists on the ground. This was a riot.

[…]

I was also attacked by the mob about 10 minutes after this. I seem to have lost my A-cam footage of it and they stole my GoPro. If you have footage of my assault please send it to me. I saw multiple people with cameras around.

This was not harmless “youth activism.” It was mob behavior.

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Colorado college drops charges against student journalists, but speech restrictions remain uncertain

The Community College of Aurora closed its conduct case against student journalists this month, finding them “not responsible” due to unclear rules, after restricting the reporters from interviewing and publishing without prior approval and charging them for continuing those activities.

The student newspaper, FoxTalk, is led by CCA student Andrew Green, who told The College Fix via email that the decision, “is a big step forward.” 

He added that he still doesn’t “know whether the restrictions on interviews, reporting and publishing have actually been lifted.”

“I want the earlier warning reconsidered, and a clear answer about whether we are free to interview students, report and publish. I would much rather spend my time building the newsroom than fighting the college,” he said.

He added that he believes the school and newspaper can have a “good relationship” moving forward, “while FoxTalk still does independent journalism.” 

Green also said he is “working with the Student Press Law Center’s New Voices team to explore legislation around protections for college student journalists in Colorado,” he said. 

“Even if FoxTalk and CCA resolve everything, I would like the next student journalist to have clearer rules than I did,” Green told The Fix. 

A free speech group called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression continues to press the college. 

Program Manager for FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative Marie McMullan said the group is “assessing next steps” and that “until the ban on publication and student disciplinary measures are rescinded, our concerns remain.”

She also said that this “kind of blanket ban on student journalism can’t remain in place, and we continue pushing CCA to change its course.” 

FIRE had sent a demand letter this month to CCA Vice President Reyna Anaya, calling on the school to “drop the charges against any student who chooses not to comply with such unconstitutional demands, and forego further censorial practices.” 

The group alleges that CCA’s directives violated the First Amendment through prior restraint, prior review, compelled speech, and restrictions on associational freedom.

Reached for comment, CCA Executive Director of Communications and Special Initiatives Courtney Butler told The College Fix that the school is still reviewing the matter and is unable to provide additional comment.

FoxTalk was registered under the college on March 13th. In April, Green asked CCA administrators “to confirm whether FoxTalk could seek comment from CCA faculty and staff in their personal capacities without going through Butler’s office,” according to FIRE’s demand letter. 

Dean of Student Success Julie LaRock then informed Green that the newspaper would need to “receive staff approval before identifying themselves as FoxTalk staff, accessing non-public spaces, beginning work on each month’s stories, and publishing any content whatsoever.”

LaRock further advised Green to hold off on additional work until structural coordination with the administration and faculty was established.

On June 3, Green questioned the order to stop FoxTalk from publishing, saying the group still planned to cover the June 30 primary election, including a debate at the University of Denver. 

After an administrator said FoxTalk only had to follow regular student-organization rules, Green assumed they could publish again and wrote to confirm. The administrator replied that the ban was still in place until FoxTalk’s structure was fixed, and also criticized the activities of three members.

On July 14, Green was charged with interviewing students, posting on the FoxTalk website, contacting employees, and ignoring earlier orders. On July 23 he was charged again for not following a college official’s directives. 

McMullan told The Fix that CCA’s rationale for restricting the students is not very common compared to what the group has seen in the past. However, several other schools have similarly tried to restrict student journalists. 

“Repeatedly … universities and colleges subjecting student journalists to investigations, hearings, and punishments for basic newsgathering and publishing, or attempting to wholesale stop students from publishing,” she said.

Morgan State University, for example, implemented a policy that restricts student journalists’ ability to gather news directly, requiring media inquiries to go through the Office of Public Relations and Strategic Communications, The College Fix previously reported. 

McMullan previously told The Fix this policy is a “blatantly” illegal “gag order.”

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JUST WOW: This Is Who Colorado Democrats Are Running Against Conservative Rep. Brandi Bradley — Arrested Mid-Campaign and Hogtied in a Police Van

Video circulating online reportedly shows Colorado Democrat Christian Schilder restrained in the back of a police transport vehicle following his arrest in Texas, an incident that occurred while he was actively campaigning for the state legislature.

Schilder is the Democratic candidate challenging Republican State Rep. Brandi Bradley in Colorado House District 39. The general election is scheduled for November 3, 2026.

Official Colorado campaign records show Schilder filed his candidate affidavit in November 2025 and continues to maintain an active campaign.

According to a published Brazos County booking record, Schilder was booked on May 8, 2026, on reported charges of:

  • Public intoxication, first offense
  • Resisting arrest, search, or transport

The record lists bonds of $300 and $6,000, respectively. Brazos County provides an official online jail-record search portal for public records.

Douglas County Campaign Watch published a graphic that it said reproduced an account from arresting Officer Jonathan Wynn.

According to the officer narrative presented by the organization, Schilder allegedly refused to walk to the patrol vehicle and had to be physically carried by three officers.

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ADF Demands Colorado District Scrap or Overhaul Sex-Ed Curriculum

A national religious-liberty legal organization has sent a formal letter to Colorado’s Roaring Fork School District demanding it discontinue its human sexuality curriculum or, at minimum, overhaul how parents are notified and allowed to exclude their children from it.

Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, sent the letter Tuesday to the Roaring Fork Schools Board of Education and Superintendent Anna Cole, escalating a dispute over the district’s “3Rs” curriculum – short for Rights, Respect, Responsibility – that has simmered in the Roaring Fork Valley for months.

What ADF is alleging

In the letter and in a subsequent social media statement, ADF argued the curriculum exposes children as young as 5 to graphic and ideologically driven material about human sexuality, including anatomical images that are followed by quizzes asking students to identify body parts such a nipple, vulva, and clitoris. The group also said lessons direct young children to discuss how they like to be touched and to reject a binary understanding of gender.

By sixth grade, according to ADF, students are directed to act as “Sex Ed Sleuths” who research sexual-education websites on their own, with parental permission or involvement only addressed after that research is complete.

The letter goes further in the upper grades. In a seventh-grade lesson titled “I Am Who I Am,” the curriculum teaches students that the idea of choosing one’s sexual orientation or gender identity is a myth, and students are required to affirm that concept on a worksheet, according to ADF.

Eighth graders, the letter states, fill out a separate worksheet rating how “LGBTQ-inclusive” their school is, using measures such as whether the school celebrates Valentine’s Day for LGBTQ couples, displays LGBTQ-themed posters in hallways, and uses the term “parent/guardian” rather than “mom and dad.”

High schoolers complete their own myth-or-fact worksheet affirming that a person cannot change his or her sexual orientation and are instructed to avoid terms like “homosexual” or “straight,” ADF’s letter states. The letter also says the high school curriculum favors gender-inclusive phrasing – using a term for female anatomy in place of “girl or woman” – as part of its approach to gender inclusivity.

ADF’s letter is also sharply critical of how the district structures parental notice and opt-outs. The group alleges Roaring Fork requires only two weeks’ notice before a 3Rs lesson is taught, that some parents receive even less, and that the district’s opt-out process is difficult to find – a paper opt-out letter placed in a student’s take-home folder, paired with a digital version the letter says is often buried among other announcements on the Remind app and labeled generically as “health education,” which obscures its content from parents. ADF argues this system was deliberately designed to preserve high participation rates rather than to give parents a genuine choice, contrasting it with the district’s own stated goal of ensuring students have access to health education.

The letter cites the case of a Crystal River Elementary School parent whose kindergartner brought home the “Understanding Our Bodies” lesson plan in January 2026. According to ADF, the opt-out form included in the folder did not specify a lesson date, only stating the lesson would occur “the following month,” and did not include the graphic slides that would accompany the lesson.

The school listed the curriculum under different names in different places, ADF’s letter states, referring to it as “Comprehensive Health Curriculum” in the take-home folder and simply “Health Curriculum” in a monthly online newsletter – where the announcement was mixed in with other school news and required parents to click through a link in the Remind app to find it.

ADF, which describes itself as the world’s largest legal organization focused on religious freedom, free speech, and parental rights, framed the core issue as a constitutional one: automatic enrollment in the lessons, combined with what it called inconsistent notice to parents and, in some cases, no meaningful opportunity to opt children out.

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Rep. Lauren Boebert Releases Statement After Son Tyler Arrested Again on Multiple Felony Charges Tied to Alleged Sexual Exploitation of a Child

Tyler Boebert, the 21-year-old son of Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, is back in legal hot water—this time facing serious felony charges related to the alleged sexual exploitation of a child.

According to court records from Garfield County, Colorado, Tyler Boebert was arrested in connection with five felony counts stemming from an alleged incident dated around January 1, 2024.

The charges include sexual exploitation of a child, sexual exploitation of a child with intent to deal in, sell, or distribute sexually exploitative material, a related charge involving videotaped material, and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, according to the Denver Post.

He was taken into custody and released from Garfield County jail on Sunday after posting a $10,000 bond. His next court appearance is scheduled for August 19 in Garfield County District Court. Specific details from the arrest affidavit have not been made public.

Rep. Boebert issued a brief statement to The Daily Mail, stating, “I love my son. We take these allegations very seriously and pray for everyone affected during this challenging time.”

This is hardly Tyler Boebert’s first encounter with law enforcement.

In February 2024, he was arrested following a string of vehicle break-ins and property thefts around Rifle, Colorado. Police initially accused him of offenses involving stolen credit cards, identification documents and several juvenile accomplices.

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DOJ Sues Colorado For Offering In-State Tuition Aid To Illegal Immigrants

The Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Colorado on Thursday over state regulations that provide in-state tuition and financial aid to illegal immigrants.

The July 23 lawsuit, filed with the District Court for the District of Colorado, accused Colorado of ignoring Title 8 of the U.S. Code Section 1623, which bans illegal immigrants from being eligible for post-secondary education benefits in a state unless the same benefits are provided to all U.S. citizens, irrespective of their state of residence.

Colorado’s Advancing Students for a Stronger Tomorrow Act, initially passed in 2013 and amended in 2019 and 2022, allows illegal immigrant students living in the state to access in-state tuition and financial aid.

In-state tuition benefits are granted to eligible students when applying to Colorado public universities or community colleges, whereas out-of-state U.S. citizens are required to pay higher tuition rates at these institutions.

“These statutes constitute blatant unequal treatment favoring illegal aliens over U.S. citizens. Worse, such preferential treatment is squarely prohibited and preempted by Congress,” the lawsuit said.

According to a fact sheet from the Colorado Department of Higher Education, the Act removed several barriers that had prevented thousands of illegal immigrant high school students from qualifying for in-state tuition and financial benefits.

The 2022 revision of the Act reduced the time an illegal immigrant student needed to attend high school to obtain these benefits from at least three years to just one year.

Under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, extending eligibility for post-secondary education benefits to illegal immigrants is “unconstitutional,” the lawsuit said. Several courts have struck down similar in-state tuition laws as unconstitutional.

For instance, earlier this month, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a case filed by the Trump administration that Texas cannot offer in-state college tuition to illegal immigrants under its Dream Act, ruling that federal law overrides state policy.

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‘Anti-violence’ activist sentenced to decades behind bars … for murder!

An “anti-violence” activist in the leftist state of Colorado has been sentenced to decades behind prison bars for murder.

It is Lumumba Sayers Sr. who has been give 48 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections for second-degree murder and 18 months each on charges of tampering with evidence and attempted tampering, according to a report from Denver’s Channel 7. The terms were ordered to run consecutively.

A report at Law & Crime said District Attorney Brian Mason confirmed, “Mr. Sayers’ actions directly undermined the work he claimed to dedicate his life to. A man who presented himself as a mentor to young people and an advocate for nonviolence chose to commit the very act he said he stood against.”

The convict was a mixed martial arts fighter who “provided community outreach to end the scourge of youth violence,” the report said.

But when his son, Lumumba Sayers Jr., was shot and killed in Denver’s Five Points, his father was charged with being out for revenge.

“At the birthday party, the defendant shot and killed a friend of the man police once believed was the prime suspect in — and once arrested for — the Five Points shooting [of the younger Sayers]. Sayers Sr. was originally arrested and charged with counts of first-degree murder and felony menacing,” the report said.

“Mr. Sayers murdered the father of a young boy at that boy’s fifth birthday party, an unconscionable and brutal act of violence,” the district attorney’s statement said. “This is particularly heartbreaking because Mr. Sayers had devoted part of his career to advancing the message of anti-violence. Justice is carried out in courtrooms, not in parking lots in front of children by someone seeking revenge.”

The convict was charged with the killing of Malcolm Watson, 28, in 2024, at a birthday party.

As the victim was leaving the party at around 5 p.m., a man walked up to him, pulled out a gun, and shot him “in the head at close range,” witnesses told law enforcement, the report said.

“Witnesses had stated the [shooter’s son] had been murdered about a year ago by a friend of the deceased,” a case affidavit charged. “[T]his murder was probably in retaliation or revenge.”

Sayers told the courtroom someone else fired the fatal shots and then fled, and he was “only attempting to retrieve his $15,000 gold necklace that somehow ended up near the victim’s body.”

The defense lawyers cited the convict’s “extraordinary life” and his involvement in the “Gloves Up, Guns Down” program that pushes young people away from violence.

Denver’s KDVR television said Sayers had worked “as an anti-violence advocate in the Aurora area,” and was “well known in the community for working to curb youth violence at the Heavy Hands Heavy Hearts gym in Aurora.”

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Justice Department sues Colorado over in-state tuition and financial aid for illegal immigrants

The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Colorado over the alleged offering of in-state tuition and financial aid to illegal immigrants attending public colleges and universities, the latest legal challenge over what critics say amounts to discrimination against U.S. citizens.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Colorado federal court, names the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, the state Department of Higher Education and its director, JB Holston, as defendants.

“For three decades, Congress has made clear that Colorado cannot give education benefits to illegal aliens that it does not give to all American citizens,” said Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward.

“By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, Colorado is not only violating federal law but subsidizing education for illegal aliens at taxpayers’ expense.

“Our litigation efforts will not cease until we have fulfilled President [Donald] Trump’s promise that illegal aliens will not obtain preferential treatment over our nation’s own citizens.”

Fox News Digital has reached out to both agencies named in the lawsuit for comment.

A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said each state has the right to determine how to grant in-state tuition rates. 

“The federal government seizing control of determining in-state tuition across the country is absurd,” the spokesperson told Fox News. “In Colorado, we are expanding access to education to provide students with the skills to get good-paying jobs and doubling down on strategies to save students money.” 

The complaint argues that the Advancing Students for a Stronger Economy Tomorrow (ASSET) Act and related state policies violate a federal statute that prohibits states from offering higher education benefits to illegal immigrants based on their residency unless the same benefits are available to all U.S. citizens.

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Colorado Primaries Could Impact The Midterm Elections Nationwide

Colorado Democrats voted Tuesday in primaries that could hand Republicans their most useful campaign weapon of the 2026 midterms: proof that the socialist wave crashing through New York City was never just a New York problem.

Three weeks ago, the Democratic Socialists of America notched a trio of wins in New York City that sent establishment Democrats into a panic. Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in the 13th District on a platform that included shutting down prisons, eliminating ICE, erasing the southern border, and opposing the deportation of illegal immigrants regardless of criminal record. Claire Valdez took the 7th District running on citizenship and voting rights for people who entered the country illegally, taxpayer-funded transgender medical treatment, and the elimination of private health insurance. Brad Lander won in the 10th District by nearly 30 points, defeating Rep. Dan Goldman, one of the most prominent anti-Trump voices in the caucus and the man who led the push to impeach the president.

Colorado now gets to answer the question everyone in Washington has been asking since New York’s results came in: was that a fluke confined to one deep-blue city, or the opening act of something bigger? Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Diana DeGette, two of the biggest names in Colorado Democratic politics, both face primary challenges that party insiders are taking far more seriously than they expected to a month ago.

CNN’s Harry Enten warned Democrats about the implications last week after the New York primaries. “What is true in New York City in a Democratic primary ain’t necessarily true nationwide with the general electorate,” Enten said last week. The Democratic Socialists of America have a net favorable rating of +17 among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, according to Enten’s data, but are 27 points underwater with the electorate as a whole. That 44-point canyon between the party’s base and everyone else is precisely the gap Republicans intend to exploit. “Socialism has become increasingly popular among Democrats, but it is a much tougher sell in the rest of the electorate,” Enten said. Favorable views of socialism among Democrats climbed from 50% in 2010 to 66% today. Among everyone else, the number has barely moved, sitting at 30% now versus 29% sixteen years ago.

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Colorado Supreme Court Blocks Democrat Redistricting Effort

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday blocked the Democrats’ effort to redraw its congressional map.

The proposed map would have added three more Democrat seats in the US House of Representatives.

Colorado’s high court unanimously struck down two attempts at redistricting.

Colorado’s Congressional map will remain at 4D and 4R.

Politico reported:

Democrats just suffered a major setback in their plans to counter Republican redistricting gains before the 2028 elections.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday that all five proposed redistricting ballot measures in the state — three led by Democrats and two led by Republicans — violated the state’s constitution, preventing either party from implementing new maps by undoing the independent commission that currently controls the process.

Colorado’s eight House seats are currently split evenly between both parties, and one of Democrats’ most ambitious redraw efforts would have created a map where seven of the districts favor the party.

Because Democrats would have needed a measure on the ballot this fall in order to redraw for 2028, the timing of the ruling makes it all but impossible to redraw.

The court issued two opinions on the redistricting measures Monday, and both were unanimous decisions against proposed remapping efforts.

Meanwhile, Republican-led states have successfully eliminated racially gerrymandered districts going into the midterm elections.

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