As national Republicans celebrated the election of Donald Trump as president last week, the progressives and Democrats who run Colorado and shape its policies were wondering – and starting to plan – what a second Trump administration would mean for the steadily blue Centennial State.
In the days since Trump’s victory, Colorado officials have warned that a sea of unknowns remains. It’s unclear who he will pick for his Cabinet or to what extent he will follow the Republican draft. Project 2025a blueprint for a second Trump administration that the president-elect tried to distance himself from during the campaign.
Still, state lawmakers and policy advocates have expressed concern about how potential gyrations on key domestic issues, such as new restrictions on abortion or mass deportations that Trump said he would begin in AuroraThe Trump campaign, which has positioned itself as fundamentally opposed to many of Trump’s positions, could swamp a Democratic state. On multiple fronts, they said, they expect Trump to act more quickly and aggressively to push his agenda in a second term.
“Obviously, this (new administration) is going to be more challenging,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. “It’s something we’re prepared for, something we’ve done before – and we’ll do it again.”
Colorado’s own concerns the previously contested and the protection of the state’s vast public lands. Democratic lawmakers, who last week maintained their large majorities amid a national political shift to the right, prepared to act as a bulwark against federal deregulation and conservative U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
Here’s how Trump’s second term, set to begin Jan. 20, could affect Colorado immigrants, public lands, abortion access, the legislature’s agenda and the location of Space Command.
Likely action on immigration.
In October, Trump traveled to Colorado and announced his plans to launch “Operation Aurora,” which would use a nearly 230-year-old law to deport undocumented immigrants with gang ties. He has vowed to undertake a broader mass deportation operation to expel the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. in the country, starting with Aurora.
Colorado is home to approximately 156,000 undocumented immigrants, according to a July study conducted by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston told The Denver Post last week that his city “would not participate” in Trump’s mass deportation plans.
State law prohibits local law enforcement from holding someone in jail beyond their release date only because of a “detainer” application, which is used by federal authorities to ensure they are notified before an undocumented immigrant is released.
Doug Friednash, who served as chief of staff to then-Gov. John Hickenlooper until late 2017, predicted that immigration enforcement and deportations would be among the first legal fights Colorado has with the new Trump administration.
Colorado could become “ground zero” for battles over Trump’s plans, he said.
“What happens when Trump decides on Operation Aurora, or that we’re going to start deporting, and looks to the state? Not just with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but with the National Guard, what does Gov. (Jared) Polis do, and what does the state do?” said Friednash, an attorney now with the law and lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
Through a spokeswoman, Polis, who made frequent appearances on national television during the campaign in support of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, declined interview requests about Trump’s potential impact on immigration and other issues in the state.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, a Democrat who represents Aurora in Congress, was defiant.
“If (Trump) wants to carry out mass deportations and break up families and devastate our economy,” Crow said Thursday, “then, of course, we will oppose that with all our might.”
Trump’s victory brought disbelief and uncertainty to Colorado’s immigrant community, said Mekela Goehring, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.. He also stressed the need for the group’s mission to provide free legal and social services to immigrant children and adults in immigration detention, he said.
She expects new actions in line with immigration policies implemented by Trump during his first term.
“Now, the most critical component is to ensure that there are lawyers in the system so that there is some accountability and a check on due process,” Goehring said. “Separating children from their parents (or) forcing people to be in a prison-like environment as they navigate immigration proceedings is incredibly harmful to community members.”
Pivot on public lands policies.
“Drill, baby, drill” has been one of Trump’s clearest and most consistent policy messages, and it is a policy that will be applied to some of the 24 million acres of federally managed public lands that cover nearly one-third of Colorado.
Trump’s victory is a boon for oil and gas producers in the West, said Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based trade group.
“We will be working with the new administration to reevaluate some of the rules, some of which Western Energy Alliance is demanding,” Sgamma said, who helped draft the energy policy section of the Project 2025 plan for the Interior Department.. “We will try to move forward on leasing, which the Biden-Harris administration has virtually stalled” on federal lands.
Sgamma expects the new administration to reevaluate the National Environmental Policy Act review processes that she says have slowed oil and gas development.
She also expressed hope that the administration would reverse the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, which made conservation as important a use of BLM lands as grazing, recreation, energy development and other uses. The administration should also reverse a Biden administration change that increased the costs of leasing BLM lands for energy development, he said.
The BLM manages 8.3 million acres of land in Colorado, primarily on the Western Slope. Presidential appointees in the first Trump administration moved BLM headquarters to Grand Junction, a move Biden later reversed.
Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a Denver-based conservation and advocacy organization, says a second Trump administration is likely to act more quickly and be better prepared than the previous one to roll back environmental regulations.
“I think you have to look at all the conservation efforts of the last three decades as being in jeopardy because they don’t see any value in seeing public lands protected for recreation, fishing or hunting,” he said. “They see public lands as sources of revenue.”
Weiss expects the Trump administration to open more U.S. Forest Service land – which covers 11.3 million acres in Colorado – to logging under the guise of mitigating wildfires.
“That just means: If we log all the trees, they won’t be able to burn,” he said.
National monuments, too, could come under scrutiny by the Trump administration – especially those created by Biden, Weiss said. In his last administration, Trump drastically reduced the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments.
Biden created a new monument in Colorado: the 53,804-acre. Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument north of Leadville. In western Colorado, a coalition of rafters and environmentalists has for months been urging Biden to create a new monument along the Dolores River – an effort that would face a much steeper uphill climb under Trump.
Colorado relies on millions of dollars in federal funding for environmental protection, so cuts to regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency could have ripple effects downstream here, said Phaedra Pezzullo. She is a professor and co-director of the graduate certificate in environmental justice at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Trump promised during his campaign to stop any spending on the Inflation Reduction Act, which the Biden administration called “the largest investment in clean energy and climate action ever made.” But Trump may find stymieing the law – which has poured more than $1.7 billion into Colorado projects – politically unpopular, Pezzullo said.
“I think a lot of the things were trumpeted on the campaign trail, so we’ll see when push comes to shove,” he said.
It’s also unclear what mark Trump might leave on spending and subsidies from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which local transportation leaders have begun to leverage for the Front Range Passenger Rail initiative.. Federal officials have designated it a priority transit corridor.
Strong bipartisan support from Colorado leaders and legislators for environmental protection of air, water and land gave Pezzullo hope that state policy could serve as a buffer against potential federal deregulation.
“I would feel a lot more concerned if I lived in a state that didn’t have the leadership we have on the environment,” she said.
The future of Space Command
In the waning days of the first Trump administration, January 2021, the Pentagon announced that U.S. Space Command would move from its temporary headquarters in Colorado Springs to a permanent headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama.
Then, in the summer of 2023, the Biden administration reversed course that decision and kept the headquarters in Colorado, where it reached operational readiness late last year.
Now, Space Command may be about to move again. Politico reported Wednesday that Trump is “expected” to move Space Command back to Huntsville.
U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Alabama and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told Politico that Trump would enforce what two U.S. Air Force secretaries had determined, “I mean, Huntsville won the competition … and that’s where it belongs and that’s where he’s going to build it.”
If that were to happen, it would be the latest twist in a series of ping-pong decisions affecting the newly reestablished military command. Such a move would also jeopardize more than 1,000 jobs and $1 billion in annual economic benefits in Colorado, according to 2023 estimates from the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.
Any renewed effort to move Colorado Space Command would provoke a united, bipartisan fight from Colorado’s congressional delegation. Representative-elect Jeff Crank, a Republican who will represent Colorado Springs in Congress, told The Post he had not yet researched Trump’s potential impact on Space Command. But he said he would advocate for its presence in his new district.
“Obviously, I think if it comes down to military value, (then) Colorado is the place for it to be,” Crank said Wednesday. “And I think the continuing studies have shown that. If it’s based on political decisions, it could be moved somewhere else. But I think it makes eminent sense to keep it here.”
Crow said he would “resist any attempt” to move the command headquarters, although he said it was not yet clear whether that could happen.
“With Donald Trump, you never know,” he said. “He changes positions and postures every day, and sometimes every hour. If he wants to empower the Space Force and Space Command and have it respond to the national security moment and our threats, then he’ll keep it here.”
Stand up for abortion access.
Trump’s victory dampened the celebrations of abortion rights advocates in Colorado who, in the same election, filed a ballot initiative to include the right to abortion in the state constitution.
“Even though people thought we couldn’t do it – that we were being too bold – we stood our ground because we know it’s the right thing to do,” said Dusti Gurule, executive director of the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights. “Now it’s even more critical that we did what we did.”
Although Trump’s stance on abortion has repeatedly changed, he said in recent of his campaign that he would favor allowing states to decide whether abortion should be legal.
If he and Congress stick to that position, Colorado will have one of the strongest protections against abortion in the country thanks to the success of Amendment 79, said Karen Middleton, president of Cobalt Advocates, an abortion rights advocacy group. But abortion providers and advocates are still bracing for regulatory changes that could affect access and choice here.
“Yes, we’re concerned, but we’re also prepared,” Gurule said. “We’re not going to stop fighting.”
Middleton said advocates in Colorado planned to seek state legislation to protect against new challenges to a federal law requiring emergency rooms to provide care to stabilize patients, including emergency abortions.
Passage of Amendment 79 could also allow more Coloradans to receive insurance coverage for abortion, including state employees and people who use Medicaid. That will free up capacity for outside providers to serve people who come to Colorado seeking services from states where abortion is prohibited, said Nicole Hensel, executive director of New Era Colorado.
Other challenges to abortion rights and access could come from the revival of a century-old federal law, the Comstock Act, which, if implemented, would make it illegal to mail or receive medical supplies used in abortion procedures, said Jack Teter, regional director of government affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.
Weiser, the state attorney general, speculated about possible administrative action by Trump to limit access to the abortion drug mifepristone. Any such effort, Weiser said, would result in legal challenges by his office. Pharmacologic abortion with drugs such as mifepristone. accounted for 63% of all abortions in 2023.making it an increasingly common method of abortion.
Despite potential challenges in the coming years, Planned Parenthood providers will continue to work to serve Coloradans and people across the country, Teter said.
“We’ve been here 100 years,” he said, “and we’re not going anywhere.”
How will the House react?
In the days following Trump’s victory, Colorado lawmakers were still shuffling through what a second Trump administration could mean for the state, and how it would affect their work and state government’s own stance.
House Speaker Julie McCluskie, whose Democratic caucus defended nearly all of its large majority in last week’s elections, cautioned that it was too early to determine how the legislature might respond to a Trump administration. Affordability remains a top voter concern, she said, and one that will be the focus of lawmakers in 2025.
However, he said, “there are some issues that I think are clearly on the horizon for us. I would point to immigration (and) the statements Trump made when he visited Colorado – that (his) mass deportation effort would start here. That’s something I think we will respond to and react to.”
Other Democratic lawmakers said Trump’s victory would change their agenda in 2025 and beyond, even if the exact contours of a second Trump term remain unclear.
“It will have an impact on the legislative agenda. It will,” said Denver Democratic Rep. Jennifer Bacon. “I don’t know to what extent. But if it did (in recent years), when we were dealing with the residue of his (first) term – imagine we’re in it.”
He noted the likelihood of Trump taking another Supreme Court seat, after his previous appointees joined judicial majorities that “undid administrative law, undid reproductive rights, and I do think they’re going to come for civil rights, when it comes to law enforcement.”
Federal action has prompted state legislative changes in the past, including the “waste” to which Bacon referred: lawmakers enshrined Miranda rights for detainees in state law after a Supreme Court decision undermined them. The legislature passed broad abortion protections prior to the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade. And concerns about the future of marriage equality led the legislature to refer a marriage equality bill to the Supreme Court. a ballot measure removing language prohibiting same-sex marriage from the state constitution.
Bacon listed Medicaid and Pell Grant funding as specific concerns for possible funding cuts. She and other Democrats also pointed to air quality and the future of the EPA, which will likely have different priorities under Trump. State lawmakers last session created state regulations protecting certain waterways after a U.S. Supreme Court decision undid federal protections.
If Trump rolls back regulations, Bacon said, the state may have to reconsider its role in oversight.
State Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat who has championed immigrant rights bills in the legislature, said Colorado officials will continue their work to protect marginalized communities, including immigrants and transgender people.
He called Colorado “a state that lives its values of treating people with dignity and respect” and said the statewide results – which show Democrats retaining strong majorities at the Capitol – reinforced those values. Gonzales expects to continue working on that front in the coming months, though it’s too early to say exactly what those policies will look like.
“Immigrant communities, in particular, have been through this before,” Gonzales said. “We’ve seen the pain, division and fear-mongering that the first Trump administration caused in our communities. This time we know what to expect. And that’s why, over the past few years, at the local and state level, we’ve worked to enact policies that protect the safety and well-being of all Coloradans.”
Staff writers Joe Rubino, Nick Coltrain and Elizabeth Hernandez contributed to this article.
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