July 22, 2025 09:50 AM UTC

Gabe Evans Rages Against Immigration Raid Reality

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• by: Colorado Pols

Freshman GOP Rep. Gabe Evans campaigned for office last year as a full-throated supporter of Donald Trump’s vow to carry out “the largest deportation campaign in American history,” to the extent of helping spread Trump’s wildly exaggerated claims about the city of Aurora, Colorado being “overrun” by migrant gangs while local officials like Aurora’s Republican mayor pleaded with them to stop. Since Evans and Trump took office in January, Evans has remained a devoted cheerleader for the new administration’s immigration crackdown–with a small exception, a letter Evans sent with some other swing Republicans asking the administration to prioritize the arrest of, in Evans’ words, “gangsters not grandmas.” “Gangsters not grandmas” is a slogan the tediously slogan-friendly freshman congressman has regularly turned to when describing his own priorities on immigration policy.

But as the Colorado Sun reported this weekend in a collaborative effort with counterparts in Wyoming, the administration doesn’t appear to be interested in differentiating between the gangsters and the grandmas as they aggressively round up whoever they can to meet ambitious quotas:

Most people arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents between Jan. 20 and June 26 of this year in Colorado and Wyoming did not have any criminal convictions, according to ICE data released over the last few weeks. Among those arrested who had a conviction at the time of their arrest, the most serious crime is most often noted by ICE as drunken driving in both Colorado and Wyoming, the data shows. [Pols emphasis]

The data, obtained from ICE and published by the Deportation Data Project, is the most detailed, publicly available picture of who is being swept up by ICE’s dragnet arrest tactics in the two Western states this year. The University of California, Berkeley School of Law, which is behind the project, published the data, and The Colorado Sun and WyoFile analyzed arrests made under the jurisdiction of ICE’s Denver field office, which covers both states.

The ICE arrest data contradicts the purported goals of the Trump administration to target the “worst of the worst.” Increasingly, ICE is arresting immigrants with no criminal history, the data shows. Advocates who work with immigrant communities said the tactics, which include arresting people who appear for their immigration court proceedings, are unlike anything they’ve seen before.

The data reported in this story shows that the percentage of convicted criminals of the total arrested by federal immigration enforcement has plummeted from 73% to 42%, while the percentage of individuals arrested with a pending criminal case has increased. Gabe Evans seized on this increase in arrests of people before conviction to push back on the whole story as leftist hoo-hah:

So first of all, most people in America would say the principle of innocent until proven guilty applies to everyone, so deporting people merely accused of a crime is a short-circuiting of justice for both offenders and victims. Either way, the huge decline in the percentage of migrants actually convicted of a crime being rounded up by ICE is undeniable based on this data. What’s more, the crimes immigrants have been convicted of to justify their inclusion in that category are turning out to be mostly low-level offenses that do not fit the stereotype of vicious foreign gang members taking over city blocks.

Yet just a week ago, Evans was on the radio reciting ICE’s purported assurances that 100% of ICE’s arrests were justified. In attempting to push back against the Sun’s reporting, Evans is directing his supporters to data that, any way you spin it, proves Evans isn’t telling the truth.

It’s another situation where keeping quiet would be the best choice for America’s Most Vulnerable Freshman™, but Evans again has made the choice to dishonestly lean in in defense of increasingly unpopular policy. Politically, it’s a confounding misfit with the interests of Colorado’s most Latino congressional district.

Maybe Gabe Evans doesn’t want a second term.