December 08, 2025 01:41 PM UTC

Ruh-Roh, Gabe Evans: It's Grandmas, Not Gangsters

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• by: Colorado Pols

As NBC News reported over the weekend, there’s new data that once again completely contradicts messaging from the Trump administration and lackeys like Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Ft. Lupton) regarding the targets of Trump’s deportation palooza:

More than a third of the roughly 220,000 people arrested by ICE officers in the first nine months of the Trump administration had no criminal histories, according to new data.

The data, which includes ICE arrests from Jan. 20 to Oct. 15, shows that nearly 75,000 people with no criminal records have been swept up in immigration operations that the president and his top officials have said would target murderers, rapists and gang members. [Pols emphasis]

“It contradicts what the administration has been saying about people who are convicted criminals and that they are going after the worst of the worst,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

The figures provide the most revealing look to date into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. They were shared by the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, which obtained them through a lawsuit brought against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This information once again makes a liar out of Evans, which is sort of his thing. Evans has been saying for nearly a year now that immigration enforcement should target “gangsters, not grandmas.” He first started using this talking point in an Op-Ed published in The Colorado Sun on December 12, 2024:

As the grandson of an immigrant from Chihuahua, I know that America must prioritize deporting gangsters, not grandmas…[Pols emphasis]

…Before we can even begin to think about deporting anyone else, we must crush the cartels, gangs and career criminals who are terrorising [sic] our communities…

…What is not a top priority is illegal immigrants who have been here for a long time, are working a job and aren’t causing problems.

Evans repeated the “gangsters, not grandmas” talking point in a press release in January and has continued to use it on social media. He said it again in comments to Colorado Public Radio in May 2025:

Evans said he’s spoken with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials about their day-to-day work. “What they told me is what we’ve said all along: they are targeting the violent, illegal criminals in our community. They are targeting the folks who have court-issued orders for removal. Those are the folks that are being targeted. They’re going after the gangsters, not the grandmas.” [Pols emphasis]

As CPR explained in the very next paragraph, this talking point was already garbage:

On Thursday, CPR News reported on a Colorado family, including a child, detained by federal authorities when they came for a routine check-in at Denver’s immigration court.

A few months later, multiple news outlets reported that immigration raids in Colorado and Wyoming were largely focused on people with no criminal history whatsoever. Soon afterward, there was a widely-covered story about the arrest of a 19-year-old college student from Utah who was driving home to visit family and instead ended up spending two weeks at a detention facility in Aurora — nevermind that she possessed both a work permit and a social security number.

Evans could start shifting his rhetoric to say that immigration raids NEED to be targeting “gangsters, not grandmas,” but instead he insists that news reports about non-criminals being targeted for deportation are fake news. Evans has turned his own inability to tell the truth — on any subject — into a massive political liability that will be easy for the Democratic nominee in CO-08 to exploit next fall.

As we noted earlier this year, it’s pretty easy to tell when Gabe Evans is lying: It’s when he’s talking.