A surveillance camera array and an unmarked building after hours. Facilities like this one processed thousands of people across Colorado and Minnesota before the public knew they existed. Image: AI-generated illustration.Operation Obverse | A Shadow Log Open-Source Side InvestigationThis story is based on public records, official policy documents, court filings, and published reporting. Where accounts differ, we describe the dispute and attribute claims to the relevant records or speakers. Tim Doran declined multiple interview requests from 9NEWS. We will update this story as additional records or rulings become available.Executive SummaryThe federal government’s own data confirms the existence of a detention network that ICE never publicly acknowledged. Nine hold rooms embedded in strip malls, office parks, and unmarked bank buildings across Colorado processed thousands of people between September 2023 and October 2025, while the agency listed only one facility in the state on its public website. Minnesota’s network, documented across prior Shadow Log installments, activated simultaneously: sixteen months before the current administration took office and more than two years before Operation Metro Surge began in Minneapolis.This investigation analyzes 4,320 Minnesota detention records and 4,461 Colorado records drawn from the Deportation Data Project’s FOIA litigation datasets. The data shows infants, a 91-year-old, and 66 children under the age of seven processed through facilities that ICE’s own policy prohibits from holding them. It shows a Venezuelan national recorded as having escaped from Aurora GEO nineteen days into his detention. It shows 33 percent of Colorado detainees and 39 percent of Minnesota detainees had no criminal charge at booking, figures drawn from ICE’s own booking system.The intake mechanism runs through automated license plate readers manufactured by Flock Safety. The chief who approved bulk federal access to Loveland’s camera network without individual review once stood before his new department and said the buck stopped with him. Two internal memos simultaneously removed the time limit and the judicial exit from the same system. No external body reviewed or approved either one.The Shadow Log has documented, across multiple installments, how federal immigration enforcement operates in Minnesota: the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling serving as the primary hold facility; county jails in Kandiyohi, Freeborn, Sherburne, Washington, and Crow Wing counties housing detainees under contracts and agreements that were in some cases never publicly authorized; a transfer pipeline moving people out of state to Louisiana, Texas, and Fort Bliss in El Paso; conditions at Whipple that attorneys described in sworn declarations as resembling a Third World prison, with people shackled at the ankle in rooms holding 40 to 50 individuals, excrement overflowing from toilets, requests for water and bathroom access repeatedly ignored, and phones that could not reach legal service providers.What the Shadow Log documented through court filings, sworn declarations, congressional visit records, and published reporting has now been confirmed in a different register: the government’s own internal data, produced under court order through Freedom of Information Act litigation pursued by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley School of Law.The Deportation Data Project does not file FOIA requests. It pursues FOIA litigation, suing the federal government to compel production of records that would otherwise be withheld, delayed, or redacted into uselessness. The datasets it has obtained and published under a Creative Commons Zero license, placing them in the public domain, contain individual-level records of every ICE detention stay the government has been compelled to disclose. The most recent release covers September 2023 through mid-October 2025.That dataset contains 4,320 detention stay records connected to Minnesota facilities. It shows Crow Wing County Jail appearing in federal detention records before Operation Metro Surge began, before public reporting documented it, and before the Shadow Log’s Part C investigation established that Sheriff Klang had signed a 287(g) agreement without county board authorization. The federal government’s own records confirm what this publication found.The data also shows something the Shadow Log had not yet documented: an identical network, operating on an identical timeline, in Colorado.In September 2023, monthly detention intakes in Minnesota jumped from single digits to 120. In Colorado, in the same month, intakes jumped from single digits to 50, then to 88 in October. Two states, hundreds of miles apart, are activating simultaneously. Not in response to a new administration. Not as a consequence of Operation Metro Surge. Sixteen months before the inauguration. More than two years before Metro Surge began in Minneapolis.This piece documents what the Colorado network looks like, how people enter it, who operates its intake mechanism, and what federal data reveal about the population it processes. The argument is not that Colorado is like Minnesota. The argument is that Colorado and Minnesota are instances of the same thing.Since the Shadow Log’s prior reporting in Minnesota, the record has continued to accumulate. The City of Minneapolis Emergency Operations Center conducted a preliminary impact assessment of Operation Metro Surge, finding an aggregate economic impact of $203.1 million within a single month of operations: $47 million in lost wages as workers vanished from supply chains; $4.7 million in hospitality losses; 76,200 people experiencing acute food insecurity; emergency food services provided to 8,713 school-aged children; and a 50 percent drop in mental health service contact as vulnerable populations withdrew entirely from civic life.The legal record at the Whipple Federal Building has also expanded. An ecumenical group of Minnesota clergy filed a federal lawsuit arguing that ICE unconstitutionally blocked their First Amendment rights and violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by barring them from providing pastoral care to detainees. On March 20, 2026, U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell, ruling in Minneapolis Area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 0:26-cv-01576, D. Minn.), granted a preliminary injunction requiring the government to allow in-person pastoral visits at Whipple and directing both parties to file an agreed or competing access protocol within days.Democracy Forward and American Oversight, representing Rep. Joe Neguse and colleagues in Neguse v. ICE (No. 1:25-cv-02463, D.D.C.), filed an emergency motion seeking a temporary restraining order against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. The filing alleged that Noem had reinstated restrictive access memorandums without public notice, through a January 8, 2026, memo that only came to light when members of Congress were denied entry at Whipple, specifically to block congressional oversight following the fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by a federal agent during Metro Surge operations.Federal prosecutors moved to dismiss all charges against the two Venezuelan men shot by ICE officers in January, after video footage emerged that was materially inconsistent with the agents’ sworn accounts. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons publicly acknowledged that sworn testimony from two officers appeared to contain untruthful statements. The agents were placed on administrative leave. A criminal review was opened into whether the officers gave false sworn statements. On April 6, 2026, the day before this version was completed, the City of Minneapolis released security camera footage that further documented the confrontation, showing federal officers chasing an unarmed man to his residence and shooting a different Venezuelan resident. The footage was consistent with what federal prosecutors had already found when they dismissed the charges.The Colorado Times Recorder, reporting in March 2026, identified nine immigration detention facilities operating across Colorado that ICE had never publicly acknowledged. Reporter Logan M. Davis used data compiled by the Deportation Data Project, whose FOIA litigation had compelled production of internal ICE detention records. What that data showed, matched against on-the-ground reporting, was a detention infrastructure bearing no resemblance to the map ICE presents to the public.The nine facilities run from the Front Range to the Western Slope. In Denver, a hold room that processed 2,146 people as their first point of detention between September 2023 and October 2025 operated from a location that remained unidentified until ICE, responding to questions arising from the CTR investigation, confirmed for the first time that the facility is in Centennial, at 12445 East Caley Avenue, approximately 20 minutes south of Denver among a cluster of office buildings. The facility bears no signage identifying it as a detention site. The CTR’s original reporting had traced the facility to a strip mall in the Montbello neighborhood of Denver; the confirmed location is in a suburban office park in Arapahoe County. Note: The Colorado Times Recorder issued a correction on March 10, 2026, stating that the initial intake figures for Glenwood Springs, Grand Junction, and Pueblo were reported inaccurately; the corrected CTR figures for those facilities are reflected here where they align with the Shadow Log’s independent DDP analysis. In Frederick, a facility at 3770 Puritan Way processed 525 people. In Pueblo, a facility at 935 State Highway 67, adjacent to the Fremont County airport, processed 554. In Colorado Springs, a facility on the second floor of a bank building at 415 East Pikes Peak Avenue operated without external signage and without appearing in the building’s tenant directory. In Glenwood Springs, a facility in a commercial strip between Midland Avenue and Interstate 70 processed 77 people, 45 percent of whom had no criminal record. Among those who entered through Glenwood Springs, the longest documented total detention journey across all facilities in the transfer chain ran 176 days. Local protests were ongoing at the time of the CTR’s reporting. On March 17, 2026, Aspen Journalism reported that the city of Glenwood Springs was considering revoking the facility’s special-use permit after federal data showed detainees were held well beyond the 12-hour limit the permit implicitly assumed. The investigation also uncovered that the facility had operated for over two decades without ever receiving a final certificate of occupancy for the 6,751-square-foot suite. City Manager Steve Boyd issued a formal deadline giving ICE and the U.S. General Services Administration until the end of March 2026 to cure the deficiencies. City Attorney Karl Hanlon clarified that the planning and zoning commission’s options are binary: revoke the permit or sustain it. No modifications are available. A revocation would forcibly close the facility. On March 11, 2026, Representative Joe Neguse traveled to Glenwood Springs for a congressional oversight inspection. No agency personnel came to the door or answered the phone. He was unable to enter the facility.The human record at Glenwood Springs is not only demographic. Luis Armando Rivas Martínez arrived in the United States in 2004 and spent 18 years living, paying taxes, and operating a handyman business in the Roaring Fork Valley. He was intercepted by the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office’s Special Problems Enforcement and Response task force, a unit created in 2022 ostensibly for human trafficking and drug enforcement that local advocates argue functions as a conduit for civil immigration arrests. Civil rights organizations Towards Justice and Voces Unidas sent cease-and-desist letters to the Garfield County Sheriff following his arrest, alleging unlawful enforcement practices. In Grand Junction, Craig, Alamosa, and Durango, additional facilities completed the network.The Shadow Log analyzed the federal dataset independently, filtering for Colorado facilities. The numbers match the Colorado Times Recorder’s reporting with near-exact precision, validating the underlying data as reliable. GJCHOLD, the Grand Junction facility, shows 310 intake detentions against 311 in the CTR’s reporting. DURHOLD shows 33 in both. The one-record variances are consistent with differences in dataset timing, not errors.Aurora’s GEO Group facility, the one Colorado ICE detention site the agency publicly acknowledges, processed 541 first-facility intakes in the same period. The nine undisclosed facilities processed more than seven times that number.The Colorado Springs facility carries a detail not visible in the numbers alone. Its full name in the federal data is Colo Springs Den HSI Hold. HSI stands for Homeland Security Investigations, a different enforcement arm than ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which operates the other eight facilities. The Colorado Springs hold room answers to a different division of the Department of Homeland Security, with a different chain of command and different reporting structures. The building is unmarked regardless.Sixty-six people born in 2018 or later, children seven years old and younger at the time of detention, were processed through the Colorado hold room network during the dataset period. Sixty-one of them entered through the Denver hold room. Two entered through Frederick. Two through Pueblo. One through Alamosa. An infant born in 2024 was booked into the Denver hold room on July 30, 2025, and transferred to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Children born in 2022 and 2023 appear across five separate Colorado facilities. The National Detention Standards prohibit holding children in hold rooms. The federal data, produced by the same agency that wrote those standards, repeatedly records them being held there.Eleven people born in 1955 or earlier, age 70 or older at the time of detention, were also processed through the hold room network. The oldest, born in 1934, was booked into the Denver hold room on June 12, 2025, at 91 years old, and removed through the El Paso Soft Sided Facility. A person born in 1944 entered through the Denver hold room in December 2023 and was removed through a facility coded FSF. Two Iranian nationals, born in 1951 and 1954, respectively, entered through Denver and Colorado Springs; their records list no release reason, indicating their status at the time the dataset closed was unresolved. A Cuban national born in 1950 entered through the Denver hold room in August 2025; same result: no release reason, status open. The NDS prohibition on holding adults over 70 in hold rooms applies to all eleven of them. The data records all eleven being held there.The Colorado Times Recorder documented what these facilities physical