Tag: colorado

ICE Recruitment Tweets Are So Racist That Cops Feared They Could Incite Neo-Nazi Violence

Colorado law enforcement officials warned their counterparts across the country that social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security recruiting for ICE contained so many white supremacist themes that they could endanger the public, according to internal records obtained by The Intercept.

The Colorado Information Analysis Center cautioned in a March bulletin that “violent extremists” might perceive “White Supremacy Ideology in ICE Recruitment Materials, Leading to a Potentially Increased Threat Environment.”

The bulletin from an agency tasked with preventing terrorism advised law enforcement offices throughout the United States that these posts could create a “permissive environment to engage in vigilante action and/or violence against individuals perceived to be immigrants.”

These DHS posts, the analysts warned, could convince “white supremacist violent extremists to attempt to join or infiltrate ICE and engage in bias motivated violence, endangering the public, other ICE personnel, and local law enforcement.”

The bulletin circulated following months of inflammatory social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security intended to drive ICE recruitment and promote the Trump administration’s agenda of violent mass deportation.

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Big Tech Backs Colorado OS-Level Age Data Bill

Chamber of Progress, a lobbying group bankrolled by Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and OpenAI, is pushing Colorado Governor Jared Polis to sign SB 26-051 into law.

The bill would force operating system providers to harvest users’ dates of birth and pipe that data to app developers through an API every time you download or open an app. If Polis signs it, your phone’s operating system becomes more of an identity checkpoint, not just for children, but for everyone.

The bill landed on the Governor’s desk on May 12 after clearing both chambers of the Colorado legislature, passing the House 40-23 and the Senate 26-9.

We obtained a copy of the latest version of the bill for you here.

Sponsored by Democratic Senator Matt Ball and Representative Amy Paschal, the legislation mirrors California’s AB 1043, signed into law in October 2025. Colorado’s version would start applying to new users on July 1, 2028, with existing users folded in by January 1, 2029.

When you set up a device account, the OS asks for a date of birth. That data gets translated into one of four age brackets (under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, and 18-plus) and stored as an “age signal.”

Developers are required to request that signal at first launch or account creation through a real-time API. Every app you open gets to ask your operating system how old you are.

Chamber of Progress told Colorado lawmakers that the bill “reflects an important effort to protect children online while minimizing risks to privacy and lawful speech.”

That framing collapses under the weight of what the bill constructs. It calls age-bracket data “nonpersonally identifiable,” but an age bracket combined with a device ID, app usage patterns and an IP address makes re-identification trivial. When that signal flows to dozens of apps at launch, the aggregate profile becomes far richer than any single data point suggests.

The bill also makes anonymous device use functionally harder. If account setup requires an age attestation that follows you into every app, you lose the ability to use the software without disclosing something about your identity. That has consequences for journalists, activists, domestic violence survivors, and anyone who treats privacy as a default.

The bill never specifies how age data is verified. Account holders just “indicate” a birth date. It may not have an ID check or a biometric scan, at least for now. But a 12-year-old can type in 1988 and the system accepts it.

As a mechanism for protecting children, this is useless, and everyone involved in writing it knows that. What it does accomplish is something else entirely. It builds the architecture: the API, the data pipeline, the legal obligation for developers to query an age signal at every app launch. Once that plumbing exists, the only question left is what gets poured through it.

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Colorado Democrats pass law requiring campuses to stockpile abortion drugs

The Colorado legislature recently passed a bill stipulating that all colleges and universities be required to provide abortion pills either in their campus pharmacies or via prescriptions to obtain them off campus. 

The bill passed the state Senate last week and the House in late April, but pro-life and religious leaders told The College Fix that the measure will isolate young women and pressure them to abort their unborn babies.

House Bill 26-1335, sponsored by Democrat Rep. Lorena Garcia, requires higher education institutions “to maintain a stock of abortion medication to dispense to students enrolled at the institution” if there is a pharmacy on campus. If there is no pharmacy, it requires health centers to provide prescriptions for students to obtain abortion pills off campus. 

It stipulates that any institution of higher education, whether public or private, must provide access to abortion pills unless doing so would jeopardize its “federal grant participation, … modify the generally accepted standards of medical practice, or conflict with the institution’s sincerely held religious beliefs or practices.”

If signed into law by Democrat Gov. Jared Polis, the bill will go into effect Aug. 1, 2027.

Nathan Fisher, associate director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, expressed concerns about the bill in an interview with The College Fix. “HB26-1335 will force college-aged women into an isolated environment with one perceived option: abortion.”

The bill holds additional religious concerns for the conference. Fisher told The Fix that while there is a religious exemption for institutions as a whole if they have “sincerely held beliefs,” this is not sufficient. 

Fisher said the exemption “does not protect the First Amendment rights of speech and expression for the millions of students on non-religious campuses whose student tuition and fees will be used for abortion medication or the college faculty and staff who will be forced to permit or even prescribe the medication.”

The College Fix also contacted Rep. Garcia, Sen. Katie Wallace, and Rep. Kenny Nguyen, the lead sponsors of the bill, to ask about the religious freedom concerns, as well as the reasoning for including private campuses in addition to public. None responded to two emailed requests over the past two weeks.

The text of the bill states that “true equality cannot be achieved without access to reproductive health care, including abortion.” 

In her introduction of the bill earlier this spring, Rep. Garcia said a key issue is that “your life is on campus when you are in college, and that limits the ability to access certain services that might not be on campus when you’re there.”

Garcia said Colorado has a “constitutional right to abortion care,” so “it is imperative to make sure that all of our institutions ensure that that right exists.”

In the same session, Rep. Nguyen, a co-sponsor, emphasized the importance of abortion “accessibility.”

“I believe that reproductive rights are truly under attack in the federal government, and this continues to codify laws in the state of Colorado to protect access to abortion,” Nguyen said.

However, Lydia Davis, spokesperson for Students for Life of America, described abortion pills as “anti-woman.”

They have “injured and hospitalized women, proving these drugs have never been about ‘healthcare’ or ‘supporting women,’” she told The Fix in a recent interview.

When asked about the Colorado bill, Davis said that “these deadly drugs have killed millions of babies, harmed women, and polluted our water systems with chemically tainted fetal remains flushed into our sewer systems. This bill would turn college campuses into abortion distribution centers and continue transforming our sewers into cemeteries.”

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Colorado county Republican chair arrested in sting on allegations he tried to pay for sex with a child

Hunter Rivera, the 24-year-old chairman of the Weld County Republican Party, was one of two men arrested Thursday on suspicion of trying to buy sex from Larimer County Sheriff’s Office investigators who posed as minors as part of an operation targeting child predators.

After news of Rivera’s arrest broke late Friday, multiple prominent Republicans denounced Rivera and called for his immediate resignation from the party position.

The sheriff’s office said in a news release that “several dozen people” responded to investigators who posed as minors offering sexual acts for sale on local websites and online forums. Two men — one of whom was Rivera — showed up at an agreed-upon location to pay for sex but were arrested and later booked into the county jail, the office said.

Rivera, who lives in Windsor, faces four felony charges, the sheriff’s office said: soliciting a child prostitute, internet luring of a child, soliciting to arrange a minor prostitute in a cybercrime, and attempted sexual assault on a child.

Rivera was being held at the Larimer County jail on a $6,500 cash-only bond but was in the process of being released, according to county records. His next scheduled court appearance is May 21.

“Children are not property to be bought or sold,” Sheriff John Feyen said in a statement. “Human trafficking is modern day slavery, and we won’t tolerate it in Larimer County. I hope this operation sends a strong message. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you try to hurt kids in our community, you will be held accountable.”

The sheriff’s office release stressed that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Rivera has been a fixture in Republican circles in recent years, both at the state Capitol, where he worked for several years as a legislative aide until last year, and in broader party activity.

After serving on multiple local local boards and chairing the Northern Colorado Young Republicans, Rivera ran unsuccessfully for Windsor Town Board in 2022, the Fort Collins Coloradan reported.

He served as an appointed member of the state GOP’s executive committee until last month, when the state party’s interim chair, Eric Grossman, removed him from the panel following delegates to the Republicans’ state assembly censuring members who had voted against filing a motion to close Colorado’s primary election to unaffiliated voters.

“Mr. Rivera should immediately resign,” Grossman told Colorado Politics in a text message. “I dismissed him from the excomm weeks ago after being censured by over 2,000 delegates and how fortuitous that decision looks now.”

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Windsor Republican who supported Rivera’s bid for county chair last year, issued a blistering statement condemning the allegations and calling on Rivera to be “replaced immediately” as party chair.

“These allegations are vile and indefensible. I pray to God there are not real victims out there. I am angry and disgusted,” Boebert said in a text message.

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Top DOJ official predicts Supreme Court will declare AR-15 rifles legal everywhere in America

The Justice Department’s top civil rights lawyer believes the Trump administration’s lawsuit this week against the city of Denver’s gun ban will one day soon lead to a Supreme Court decision legalizing the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle – revered by gun owners and reviled by liberals – in every jurisdiction in America.

“We intend to make sure they do that,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in an interview set to be aired Wednesday night on the Just the News, No Noise television show.

Dhillon spoke just hours after her office filed a lawsuit against the city of Denver over its ban on “assault rifles,” arguing the ban violates residents’ Second Amendment rights. 

The ban covers AR-15-style rifles, which the complaint argues are owned by “tens of millions” of Americans, 

The complaint also describes the use of the term “assault rifle” in the Denver law’s language as a “rhetorically politically charged” term used by “anti-gun publicists.” 

In addition, the suit cites the 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that the Second Amendment protects the right of law-abiding citizens to possess weapons that are in common use for lawful purposes.

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DOJ Challenges Denver’s ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban and Colorado’s Magazine Limit

The Department of Justice this week filed two Second Amendment lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, challenging that state’s ban on “large capacity” magazines and Denver’s ban on “assault weapons.” Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Civil Rights Division, argues that both laws are unconstitutional for the same reason: They ban arms in common use for lawful purposes, which the Supreme Court has said are covered by the Second Amendment, and there is no “historical tradition” that would justify such a policy, as required by the Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

“The Constitution is not a suggestion and the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Tuesday after the lawsuit against Denver was filed. “Denver’s ban on commonly owned semi-automatic rifles directly violates the right to bear arms. This Department of Justice will vigorously defend the liberties of law-abiding citizens nationwide.”

Denver’s ordinance was enacted in 1989, the same year that California became the first state to ban so-called assault weapons, a politically defined category that typically hinges on arbitrarily disfavored rifle features such as pistol grips, folding stocks, and flash suppressors. But Denver’s ordinance, which prohibits the sale, transfer, or possession of “assault weapons” within city limits, defines the term to include any semi-automatic pistol or center-fire rifle with a fixed or detachable magazine that holds more than 15 rounds. It therefore covers many of the most popular guns sold in the United States when they are equipped with standard-issue magazines, including AR-15-style rifles.

The complaint in United States v. Denver notes that “the term ‘assault weapon’ is not a technical term used in the firearms industry” but rather “a rhetorically charged political term developed by anti-gun publicists.” It adds that the guns banned in Denver “include ordinary semiautomatic rifles possessed by millions of law-abiding Americans.” For example, “Americans own literally tens of millions of AR-15 style rifles, the paradigmatic ‘assault weapon’ covered by the Ordinance.” In a case decided last year, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan noted that “the AR–15 is the most popular rifle in the country.”

In January, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association, reported that Americans own more than 32 million “modern sporting rifles,” the industry’s preferred term for the rifles usually covered by “assault weapon” bans. Survey data suggest that somewhere between 16 million and 25 million Americans have owned AR-15-style rifles. They commonly report using them for lawful purposes such as self-defense, hunting, and target shooting.

Such rifles are rarely used by criminals. In 2019, according to FBI data, “only 364 homicides were known to have been committed with rifles of any type, compared
to 6,368 with handguns, 1,476 with knives or other cutting instruments, 600 with personal weapons (hands, feet, etc.) and 397 with blunt objects,” Dhillon notes.

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Judge Halts Colorado AI Law After First Amendment Challenge

A federal judge has frozen enforcement of Colorado’s first-in-the-nation AI law, the statute that would have required developers to police their own models for “algorithmic discrimination” and to inform the state of “foreseeable risks” before the rules took effect on June 30.

Judge Cyrus Y. Chung signed off on a joint request from xAI and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on April 27, putting the law on ice while state lawmakers draft a replacement.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The order was filed in xAI v. Weiser. The state agreed not to enforce SB 24-205 against xAI, or to issue rules under it, until at least 14 days after the court rules on a forthcoming preliminary injunction motion.

The June 16 scheduling conference was cancelled. The deadlines in the case are suspended.

This is a significant retreat as Colorado spent two years insisting the law was a model for the country. It was the only state AI statute named in President Trump’s AI executive order last year. Now the state is asking a court to stop the clock while its own governor’s policy group drafts a bill to repeal and replace it.

The law itself is the reason the climbdown looks the way it does. SB 24-205 told developers of “high-risk” AI systems they had to take “reasonable care” to prevent algorithmic discrimination, with one carveout that has done more work in the lawsuit than any other clause: the law exempts discrimination intended to “increase diversity or redress historical discrimination.”

The state forbids one kind of discrimination by an algorithm. It permits, and arguably requires, another. The developer is left to figure out which is which, with the attorney general’s office deciding after the fact.

xAI sued on April 9, calling the statute a First Amendment problem dressed up as consumer protection. The company’s complaint is more blunt than most filings of this kind. “SB24-205 is decidedly not an anti-discrimination law,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “It is instead an effort to embed the State’s preferred views into the very fabric of AI systems.”

The argument is that Colorado isn’t regulating outputs neutrally. It’s choosing which viewpoints an AI model is allowed to produce, then enforcing the choice through “onerous policy, assessment, and disclosure requirements,” in the words of the Justice Department’s filing.

The DOJ moved to intervene on xAI’s side, the first time the federal government has joined a constitutional challenge to a state AI regulation.

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Judge Blocks Enforcement Of Colorado’s New DEI-Driven AI Law

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the State of Colorado from enforcing a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence law.

Colorado is prohibited from taking enforcement actions on alleged violations of the law occurring up to 14 days after the court issues a ruling on the company xAI’s motion for a preliminary injunction, judge Cyrus Y. Chung ruled on April 27.

The Department of Justice had said the state law, which was set to go into effect on June 30, would have required AI developers and deployers to “discriminate based on race, sex, & religion—all in the name of DEI.”

DEI is an acronym for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Brett Shumate, an assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Division, called the suspension a “huge win for the American people.”

“Colorado immediately caved and agreed not to enforce the law against ANY AI company,” Shumate wrote in a X post on May 1.

Gov. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) signed into law the Consumer Protections for Artificial Intelligence in May 2024 and issued a statement sharing his reservations about how it could impact Colorado.

In the statement, he urged the General Assembly to revise and delay implementing it until January 2027.

“I am concerned about the impact this law may have on an industry that is fueling critical technological advancements across our state for consumers and enterprises alike,” Polis wrote.

However, the legislation was not revised; instead, it was delayed until June 30, 2026, which prompted tech billionaire Elon Musk’s company xAI, which created Grok, to sue the state on April 9.

The unedited legislation was months away from going into effect when xAI asked the court to block the law from being enforced.

The Justice Department added its name as a plaintiff alongside xAI on April 24, marking the first time the DOJ had stepped into a case that challenged AI on a state level.

Both alleged that Colorado’s law would have caused unconstitutional “algorithmic discrimination” and asked a court to block it from being enforced.

“Laws that require AI companies to infect their products with woke DEI ideology are illegal,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who works under the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“The Justice Department will not stand on the sidelines while states such as Colorado coerce our nation’s technological innovators into producing harmful products that advance a radical, far-left worldview at odds with the Constitution.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to Polis and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser for comment.

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Harmeet Dhillon Announces DOJ’s Big Win Defending xAI from Colorado DEI Law

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon announced a major win for American artificial intelligence (AI) dominance after her department intervened in a lawsuit challenging a new Colorado law that prohibits “algorithmic discrimination” during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday.

Speaking with Breitbart News political editor Bradley Jaye, Dhillon revealed details on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recent success at getting the state of Colorado to agree not to enforce SB24-205, which requires AI developers and deployers to satisfy certain disclosure, reporting, and prevention requirements when creating algorithm products designed for services like mortgage lending, student admissions, and job-candidate selection. 

The bill’s text included an explicit carveout for discriminatory algorithms designed to advance “diversity” or “redress historic discrimination,” and AI company xAI filed a lawsuit against the statute on April 9, alleging it is unconstitutional.

Marking the first time that the DOJ has intervened in a case challenging state regulations on AI, Dhillon’s team joined the case on behalf of xAI on Friday. Together, they argued that “embedding AI with state-mandated discrimination is a recipe for disaster.”

Emphasizing that the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ is meant to “protect American citizens, and even American companies, from discrimination on the basis of impermissible racial, gender, et cetera criteria,” Dhillon told Jaye that Colorado had attempted to require companies and municipalities to “look at outcomes and then racially balance and adjust their algorithms to produce outcomes that reflect the demographic population.”

“This is not required by law. In fact, it’s prohibited by federal law,” she stated. “And you know, worse, the statute actually carved out if people or companies are doing discrimination to remedy past discrimination, that’s okay. All of this is just nonsense, and it stifles innovation, and it’s illegal under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

In addition to violating the Fourteenth Amendment, Dhillon noted that xAI also has First Amendment arguments against the bill, “because, effectively, the state is compelling it to utter certain speech in furtherance of these DEI goals.”

“We’re not arguing that because the government doesn’t have that obligation, but we’re stepping in to protect American citizens and American companies,” she explained, before revealing the success of her efforts on Friday. 

“We had a great result yesterday,” Dhillon announced, recounting how Colorado “agreed to not enforce the law against xAI” within just a couple of hours of the DOJ intervening. 

“And by the evening, before we went to bed, we had Colorado agree to not enforce it against anybody until they send it back to the legislature to fix it,” she explained. “So it’s pretty much a total win for American consumers and companies, and the first instance of the United States Department of Justice stepping in on an AI case to really protect this innovation and protect Americans from discrimination by AI algorithmic manipulation.”

Highlighting why civil rights work should be “important” to people on the right side of the political aisle, Dhillon told Jaye that conservatives “have come to look at civil rights as something that’s been weaponized against Americans, but civil rights are for all Americans.”

“So what we’re doing in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is exactly that — we’re standing up for all Americans, like in this xAI case.”

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DOJ joins Musk’s AI company in suing Colorado for new ‘DEI’ regulatory law

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced its support for Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, as it sues the state of Colorado over a new law set to go into effect in June that would regulate AI technology.

The company filed a suit against Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Thursday to prevent the enforcement of the law, which would impose new requirements on AI programs to protect users from “algorithmic discrimination” in education, employment, healthcare, housing and financial services, and other sectors.

xAI argued that the statute “severely burdens the development and use of AI” and infringes on First Amendment free speech protections.

“Its provisions prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the State of Colorado dislikes, while compelling them to conform their speech to a State-enforced orthodoxy on controversial topics of great public concern,” the lawsuit reads.

It also claims that the law would force Musk’s company to rework its AI chatbot called Grok, which can be found on the social media platform X, to “conform to a controversial, highly politicized viewpoint” instead of maintaining its objectivity.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division announced on Friday that it partnered with the Civil Division to file a motion to intervene in the suit.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said in a video posted to social media that the state law in question requires companies to comply with its “crazy, woke, DEI goals,” referring to the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies instated widely across left-leaning and liberal organizations.

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