What Trump could mean for Colorado’s public lands, abortion access

As national Republicans celebrated the election of Donald Trump as president last week, the progressives and Democrats who lead Colorado and shape its policies wondered — and began planning for — what a second Trump administration would mean for the steady-blue Centennial State.

In the days since Trump won, Colorado officials have cautioned that a sea of unknowns remain. It’s unclear whom he will choose for his cabinet or how closely he’ll follow the Republican-drafted Project 2025, a guide for a second Trump administration from which the president-elect sought to distance himself during the campaign.

Still, state legislators and policy advocates have raised concerns about how potential swings on key national issues, like new abortion restrictions or the mass deportations Trump said he would start in Aurora, might wash over a Democratic state that’s positioned itself as fundamentally opposed to many of Trump’s positions. On multiple fronts, they said, they expect Trump to act more quickly and aggressively to impose his agenda in a second term.

“Obviously, this (new administration) is going to be more challenging,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said. “It’s something we’re prepared for, something we’ve done before — and we’ll do it again.”

Uniquely Colorado concerns — like keeping the previously contested headquarters of the U.S. Space Command and protecting the state’s extensive public lands — suddenly feel imperiled. Democratic state lawmakers, who last week maintained their large majorities amid a national political shift to the right, braced to act as a bulwark against federal deregulation and conservative U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Here’s how the second Trump term, set to begin Jan. 20, could impact Colorado’s immigrants, public lands, abortion access, statehouse agenda and the location of Space Command.

Immigration actions likely

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’s pledged 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 roughly 156,000 undocumented immigrants, according to a July study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston told JS 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 solely on a “detainer” request, which is used by federal authorities to ensure they’re notified before an undocumented immigrant is let out.

Doug Friednash, who was chief of staff to then-Gov. John Hickenlooper until late 2017, predicted that immigration enforcement and deportations would be among the first legal fights that 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 deportation, and he looks to the state? Not just with (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), but he looks to the National Guard to enforce that. What does Gov. (Jared) Polis do, and what does the state do?” said Friednash, a lawyer who’s now at the law and lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

Through a spokeswoman, Polis, who made frequent national TV appearances during the campaign in support of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, declined requests for interviews 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 we will of course resist that with all of our force.”

Trump’s win brought disbelief and uncertainty to Colorado’s immigrant community, said Mekela Goehring, the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network. It also underscored the need for the group’s mission of providing free legal and social services to immigrant children and to adults in immigration detention, she said.

She expects new actions in line with immigration policies implemented by Trump during his first term.

“Now, the most critical component is ensuring there are lawyers in the system so there is some accountability and a check of due process,” Goehring said. “Separating children from their parents (or) forcing people to be in a prison-like setting while navigating immigration proceedings is incredibly harmful to community members.”

Pivot on public lands policies

“Drill, baby, drill” has served as one of Trump’s clearest and most consistent policy messages — and it’s a policy that will play out across some of the 24 million acres of federally managed public lands that cover nearly a third of Colorado.

Trump’s victory is a boon to oil and gas producers in the West, said Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based trade group.

“We’ll be working with the new administration to reassess some of the rules, some of which Western Energy Alliance is suing on,” said Sgamma, who helped write the section on energy policy in Project 2025’s plan for the Department of the Interior. “We’ll be looking to move forward on leasing, which the Biden-Harris administration has all but stopped” on federal land.

Sgamma hoped the new administration would reassess National Environmental Policy Act review processes that she said had slowed oil and gas development.

She also expressed hope that the administration would roll back the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, which made conservation an equally important use of BLM land as grazing, recreation, energy development and other uses. The administration should also reverse a Biden administration change that increased BLM land-leasing costs for energy development, she said.

The BLM manages 8.3 million acres of land in Colorado, primarily on the Western Slope. Presidential appointees in Trump’s first administration moved the BLM headquarters to Grand Junction, a move that Biden later reversed.

A second Trump administration will likely act faster and be better prepared to roll back environmental regulations than its previous iteration, said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a Denver-based conservation and advocacy organization.

“I think you have to consider every conservation effort over the last three decades to be at risk, because they do not see any value in seeing public lands protected for recreation, fishing or hunting,” he said. “They look at public lands as sources of income.”

Weiss expects the Trump administration will open up more U.S. Forest Service land — which covers 11.3 million acres in Colorado — to logging under the guise of wildfire mitigation.

“That just means: If we chop down all the trees, they can’t burn,” he said.

National monuments, too, could come under scrutiny by Trump’s administration — especially those created by Biden, Weiss said. In his last administration, Trump slashed the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments.

Biden created one 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 for months have urged Biden to create a new monument along the Dolores River — an effort that would face a much steeper uphill climb under Trump.

Colorado depends on millions of dollars in federal funding for environmental protection work, so cuts to regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency could have downstream ripple effects here, said Phaedra Pezzullo. She is a professor and co-director of the graduate certificate of environmental justice at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Trump pledged during his campaign to stop any spending from the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden’s administration called “the largest investment in clean energy and climate action ever.” But Trump may find that hampering the law — which has poured more than $1.7 billion into Colorado projects — is politically unpopular, Pezzullo said.

“I think a lot of things were said bombastically on the campaign trail, so we’ll see when the rubber hits the road,” she said.

Also unclear is the mark Trump might make on spending and grants under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which local transportation leaders have begun tapping for the Front Range Passenger Rail initiative. Federal officials have designated it as a priority transit corridor.

Colorado leaders and lawmakers’ strong bipartisan support of environmental protection for air, water and land gave Pezzullo hope that state policy could serve as a buffer to potential federal deregulation.

“I would feel much more worried if I lived in a state that didn’t have the leadership we had on the environment,” she said.

Space Command’s future

In the waning days of the first Trump administration in January 2021, the Pentagon announced that U.S. Space Command would move from its interim home in Colorado Springs to a permanent headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama.

Then, in summer 2023, the Biden administration reversed that decision and kept the headquarters in Colorado, where it achieved operational readiness late last year.

Now, Space Command may be set to move again. Politico reported Wednesday that Trump is “expected” to move Space Command back to Huntsville.

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, an Alabama Republican and the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, told Politico that Trump would enforce what two U.S. Air Force secretaries had determined: “That is, Huntsville won the competition … and that’s where it should be and that’s where he’s going to build it.”

Should that happen, it would be the latest turn in a series of ping-ponging 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 Space Command from Colorado would spark a united and bipartisan fight from Colorado’s congressional delegation. U.S. Rep.-elect Jeff Crank, a Republican who will represent Colorado Springs in Congress, told The Post he hadn’t yet dug into Trump’s potential impact on Space Command. But he said he would defend its presence in his new district.

“Obviously, I believe that if it’s down to military value, (then) Colorado is the place for it to be,” Crank said Wednesday. “And I think that continuous studies have shown that. If it’s based on political decisions, it could move somewhere else. But I think it makes eminent sense to keep it here.”

Crow said he would “resist any attempt” to move the command’s headquarters, though he said it wasn’t yet clear if that could happen.

“With Donald Trump, you never know,” he said. “He changes his positions and his stance on issues by the day, and sometimes by the hour. If he wants to build out the Space Force and Space Command and have it meet the national security moment and our threats, then he will keep it here.”

Defending abortion access

Trump’s victory dampened celebrations by abortion-rights advocates in Colorado who, in the same election, ran a successful ballot initiative to place the right to abortion in the state constitution.

“Even though people thought we couldn’t do it — that we were being too bold — we stuck to our position because we know it’s the right thing to do,” said Dusti Gurule, CEO 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 shifted, he said in the final stages of his campaign that he would favor allowing states to decide whether abortion should be legal.

If he and Congress abide by that position, Colorado will have some of the strongest abortion protections in the country thanks to the success of Amendment 79, said Karen Middleton, the president of Cobalt Advocates, an abortion-rights group. But abortion providers and advocates are still preparing for regulatory changes that could impact access and options here.

“Yes, we’re worried, but we’re also prepared,” Gurule said. “We’re not going to stop fighting.”

Middleton said advocates in Colorado planned to pursue state legislation to protect against further challenges to a federal law that requires emergency rooms to provide care to stabilize patients, including emergency abortions.

The passage of Amendment 79 also could 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 care for people coming to Colorado for services from states where abortion is banned, said Nicole Hensel, executive director of New Era Colorado.

Other challenges to abortion rights and access could come through the revival of a century-old federal law, the Comstock Act, that, if enforced, would make it illegal to mail or receive medical equipment used in abortion procedures, said Jack Teter, regional director of government affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.

Weiser, the state’s attorney general, speculated about possible Trump administrative action to limit access to the abortion drug mifepristone. Any such effort, Weiser said, would lead to legal challenges from his office. Medication abortion using drugs like mifepristone accounted for 63% of all abortions in 2023, making it an increasingly common abortion method.

Despite the potential challenges in coming years, Planned Parenthood’s providers will keep working to care for Coloradans and people from all over the country, Teter said.

“We’ve been here for 100 years,” he said, “and we’re not going anywhere.”

How will the statehouse react?

In the days after Trump’s victory, Colorado legislators were still sifting through what a second Trump administration could mean for the state — and how that would affect their work and the very posture of state government.

House Speaker Julie McCluskie, whose Democratic caucus defended nearly all of its large majority in last week’s election, cautioned that it was too early to determine how the legislature may respond to a Trump administration. Affordability remains a top concern for voters, she said, and that will be the focus for legislators in 2025.

Still, she said, “there’s some issues that I think are clearly on the horizon for us. I would point to immigration (and) the statements that Trump made when he visited Colorado — that (his) mass deportation effort would start here. That is something where I think we will respond and react.”

Other Democratic legislators 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 impact 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 residuals of his (first) term — imagine that we’re in it.”

She noted the likelihood that Trump will fill another Supreme Court seat, after his earlier appointees joined court majorities that “undid administrative law, they undid reproductive rights, and I do believe they’re going to come for civil rights, when it comes to law enforcement.”

Federal action has sparked state legislative changes in the past, among them the “residuals” Bacon referred to: Legislators enshrined Miranda rights for arrestees in state law after a Supreme Court decision undercut them. The legislature passed sweeping abortion protections ahead of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. And concerns about the future of marriage equality spurred the legislature to refer a successful ballot measure removing defunct language banning same-sex marriage from the state constitution.