Colorado newsroom debates language over who was targeted in Springs ICE raid

The news behind the news in Colorado

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

One of the biggest stories in Colorado this week was about a massive late-night federal raid in Colorado Springs that allegedly included 300 members of law enforcement.

On April 27, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Rocky Mountain Field Division announced it had apprehended at a nightclub more than 100 people that the agency suspected of being in the country without the necessary documentation.

The DEA’s account on Twitter/X posted that the agency had “taken more than 100 illegal aliens into custody.”

The term used to describe those that agents detained has fallen out of fashion over the years among some, including the mainstream press, and might be used among others to signify an allegiance to tribal politics.

In its initial coverage, the local FOX21 station in Colorado Springs reflected the federal agency’s language in a headline that read “Over 100 illegal aliens taken into custody at underground nightclub.”

The station later changed the headline to read “illegal immigrants.”

“The article that went out originally had an error in the headline since we have retired the term ‘illegal aliens,’” said FOX21 News Director Joe Cole in an email. “The confusion surfaced with one of our younger digital reporters. In the press conferences, the DEA kept using that term and so it made it into the story. Once our manager saw it we updated the headline.”

More than 10 years ago, the Associated Press, which publishes a widely used journalism style guide to promote consistency in news writing, advised against the phrase “illegal immigrant.”

In 2022, the AP reaffirmed that.

“We don’t use the terms illegal immigrant, unauthorized immigrant, irregular migrant, alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented (except when quoting people or documents that use these terms),” the AP wrote. “Many immigrants and migrants have some sort of documents, but not the necessary ones.”

The Trump administration has recently retaliated against the AP for its style choice because the respected wire service advises against using the Trump term “Gulf of America” instead of Gulf of Mexico.

In Colorado Springs, the brief headline SNAFU led to internal newsroom conversations at FOX21.

“Over the past couple of days we have discussed the best way to describe people in these situations,” Cole said. “The debate has been all over the place.”

The discussion, he said, considered the following terms: illegal immigrants, undocumented workers, illegal migrants, and undocumented immigrants.

“What we have settled on going forward is, ‘people who entered the U.S. illegally,’” he said. “Our decision isn’t based on a political party, we were simply looking for the most comprehensive description.”

Newsrooms are often changing how they describe people in news coverage.

In recent years, some newsrooms have moved toward more people-first language just as they’ve been apologizing for past harm to certain communities. They have also adopted policies like the “right to be forgotten,” and some have been thinking better about the ways they cover “crime” stories. Four years ago, a 9NEWS reporter decided he would stop using the term “grandfathered in” after learning it had roots in racist voter suppression.

Last year, the hyperlocal Denverite digital site and its parent Colorado Public Radio dropped the word “migrant” from coverage.

Instead, the news organizations stated they would refer to people arriving from the border to Colorado as “new immigrants.”

In their initial headlines about the April 27 raid that made national news, Colorado news organizations differed in their word choices. The Gazette reported that “100-plus undocumented immigrants” had been detained, while KOAA News5 in the Springs reported 100 “people” had been. The Springs station KRDO reported 100 “immigrants” had been arrested.

In one early headline, Denver’s 9NEWS sidestepped the tricky question of characterization altogether when it reported simply: “More than 100 detained in DEA raid.”

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Ex-GOP governor candidate Walker Stapleton throws his support behind public media

As Republican members of Congress consider cutting funding for public media at the behest of President Donald Trump, a conservative voice in Colorado is opposing their efforts.

Walker Stapleton, who Republicans nominated to run against Jared Polis for governor in 2018, broadcast a video message this week as part of a campaign to protect public media.

“For eight years, I was Colorado’s treasurer and chief financial officer,” he says in the video. “I was a conservative guardian of taxpayer money. Public media funding is less than one one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget. That is zero point zero, zero, zero, one.”

Public media in Colorado have been on alert for months as Trump and his administration have been targeting the broadcasters on multiple fronts. Stapleton’s support is notable.

“Thank you to him, and so many others, who provide bipartisan support for the work we’ve done over generations to serve our communities in Colorado, and across the country,” said Amanda Mountain, CEO of Rocky Mountain Public Media. (Editor’s note: Not all heroes wear Stapes.)

Also this week, Colorado Public Radio President Stewart Vanderwilt published a column in the Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction about threats facing the station.

Here’s part of it:

The Trump Administration has drafted/issued a memo to Congress that would end nearly all federal funding for public broadcasting. The intent is to take back the funding that has previously received bipartisan Congressional approval for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in order to defund PBS and NPR. The reality of this action will be felt in local communities across the country, and in Colorado there will be no greater impact than in the 3rd Congressional District.

There are more local and independent public broadcasting stations receiving federal support along the Western Slope and Southern Colorado than any other part of Colorado combined.

In Alamosa, Aspen, Carbondale, Cortez, Crested Butte, Durango, Grand Junction, Ignacio, Paonia and Telluride, these stations provide news, information, emergency alerts and community connection that can only be done from within their communities. These services can’t be replaced by an internet feed of news from a national source. They’re powered by human voices — people who show up in and for their communities each day — creating an impact unmatched by other media.

Local public radio and television stations are not partisan organizations, they are a direct reflection of the people who live and work in their communities.

“To withdraw funding already promised and approved will impact local communities by weakening and possibly closing local stations,” he wrote, adding that it could impact 160 employees in the 3rd Congressional District and more than 550 across the state. Republican Congressman Jeff Hurd, first elected in November, represents Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.

Vanderwilt this week has also been broadcasting a similar message about the importance of public media over the air.

A Colorado town lost its newspaper. Then no one ran for mayor

In the age of news deserts, studies have shown that when a community loses a source of local news, civic engagement drops and fewer candidates run for office.

This week, Colorado College students working on a project I’m overseeing reported a notable development.

In 2022, the small rural Eastern Plains county of Cheyenne, population 1,700, lost its local newspaper. Now, for the past year, the town of Cheyenne Wells is operating without a mayor for the first time the town clerk can remember.

The reason: No one ran.

A handful of CC students are working on a project to see what colleges and universities might be able to do when a newsroom goes dark and have been doing remote reporting on Cheyenne County. They’ve pulled a year’s worth of incident reports from the local sheriff, obtained audio recordings of town meetings, and interviewed public officials.

The students are publishing their reporting directly to a Facebook page called “Cheyenne Wells, Kit Carson, and Arapahoe Memories, NEWS, ADVERTISMENTS!” that has 1,700 members and has essentially become the de facto public square in the county of Cheyenne. with its (checks notes) 1,700 people.

This week, students Sydney McGarr and Lorelei Smillie published their story about why the town of Cheyenne Wells doesn’t have a mayor.

Denver TV anchor wears tie of a Soviet journalist to talk about the privilege of a free press

No local TV news personality in Colorado is doing more to consistently highlight the ongoing threats to freedom of the press than Kyle Clark of 9NEWS in Denver.

This week, he explained to his audience why he was wearing a tie once owned by a well-known Soviet journalist whose granddaughter, Anastasiya Bolton, worked at 9NEWS and gave to Clark.

“Viktor had a forty-year career at the pinnacle of Soviet journalism, and yet every American journalist from the national level to local reporters have a privilege that Viktor did not,” Clark said on air. “The freedom to report critically on the government without fear. If that privilege did not have great power, then authoritarians would not seek to take it away. For all the journalists across the world and across time without that power, those of us in the media here and now ought to use it.”

We need more state-based newsletters covering the local media scene

This week, the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont published a research report I wrote that examined a lack of newsletters in other states like the one you’re currently reading.

From the report:

In 2025, CCN surveyed programs in all 50 states to investigate if they have a local media newsletter or site, specifically with ties to a higher education institution, that covers the news behind the news and regularly reports on the state of the local news ecosystem.

There are at least six with some similarities and differences. One common theme is that they all provide meaningful reporting, analysis, and actionable intelligence to some degree about the state of local news in their state or region. While there is a dearth of state-based media newsletters, the study also found there is an appetite for them.

Respondents in nearly half the states indicated they believed their state could benefit from something like it. Several said they were interested in learning how to create one.

I’ll be talking about the report during a webinar on May 8 at 11 a.m. Mountain Time via Zoom if you know anyone who might be interested in starting one on their own state.

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More Colorado media odds & ends

🎓 With graduation season in full swing, I spoke with graduating senior Garrett Mogel at CSU Fort Collins about “how aspiring journalists should prepare themselves to enter the industry, what the industry looks like in Colorado, and where it is headed” for the inaugural podcast “Notes from the Newsroom.” Listen here.

🔏 A veto Democratic Gov. Jared Polis issued of a bill to extend Colorado Open Records Act response deadlines for requests made by the public and businesses “will stand after legislators Friday abandoned their effort to override it,” Jeff Roberts reported for the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

🗞 🗑 Two wealthy local developers who owned the biweekly Colorado Springs Independent newspaper laid off the paper’s entire staff last week and transferred the Indy’s ownership to local publisher Dirk R. Hobbs after apparently getting fed up with it.

📀 Longtime Colorado Springs Independent journalist Pam Zubeck told Dan Boyce of Colorado Public Radio that “she hopes Hobbs restores the online archives of the Independent’s reporting, which languished under the Pikes Peak Media Group.” That would be “the best community service that could be done,” she said. “There were so many good stories done over the years of the Independent that are not accessible unless you kept every hard copy that appeared on newsstands.”

🔙 America’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, which owns the Fort Collins Coloradoan and Pueblo Chieftain newspapers that bookend Colorado’s Front Range, “will no longer publish demographic and diversity data about its workforce, and has revamped its corporate site to remove mentions of diversity,” Hanaa’ Tameez reported for Nieman Lab.

🤔 “I will not allow media and those who are not public safety experts to continue pushing a false narrative and defame the hard work of my deputies and law enforcement in the Pikes Peak region,” said El Paso County Sheriff Joseph Roybal in a public statement without offering specifics or context.

🛑 The Colorado legislature earlier this week “declined to override Jared Polis’ veto of a bipartisan bill aimed at protecting children from the harms of social media, sparing the governor the embarrassment of the state’s first veto override in 14 years,” Jesse Paul reported for the Colorado Sun.

🎓 It’s that time of year when journalists for the Collegian newspaper at CSU Fort Collins write personal columns saying goodbye as they graduate.

✍️ The Science Writers Association of the Rocky Mountains is hosting a panel discussion May 29 titled “How to be a freelance science writer.” In the discussion, hosted by “freelancer-turned-NYT-editor, Erik Vance, we will talk to Sarah Scoles, a Colorado-based science journalist and author, about how to set up a career in freelance journalism and balance financial needs with the alchemy of building a platform. Then we'll talk to Steven Bedard, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of bioGraphic magazine, about what editors want to see in a pitch.”

🤬 Check out the Facebook comments on this Montrose Daily Press guest column by Mario Nicolais that was critical of the MAGA folk hero felon Tina Peters. “Lots of negative comments towards the Montrose Daily Press for publishing this opinion piece,” Publisher Dennis Anderson wrote on social media. “So kids, Tina Peters broke the law. She undermined the election process. I don’t understand what’s so hard to comprehend here.”

👀 The American Prospect magazine’s investigations editor, Maureen Tkacik, examined the systemic issues at work in the Great Aurora Venezuelan Gang Story: “The ‘invasion’ of Aurora was the result of a series of conscious political market interventions: the Trump administration’s decision to vaporize what was left of the Venezuelan economy, the Biden administration’s decision in 2022 to loosen work authorization restrictions under pressure from corporations reeling from ‘labor shortages,’ Denver’s decision to brand itself a ‘sanctuary city,’ Texas’s decision to punish sanctuary cities with hundreds of buses of migrants who can’t legally work, Denver’s decision to quietly outsource the problem of housing new residents to a handful of community activists with no systems of governance or oversight.”

📸 “Thousands of you have met Kevin,” former Denverite editor Dave Burdick wrote for the hyperlocal digital site about photojournalist Kevin J. Beaty. “The Denver library just confirmed he’s great.” (Beaty has “recently been honored by the Denver Public Library with the 2025 Eleanor Gehres Award for pointing his curiosity, his compassion, his tenacity and his camera at history in the making for a decade or so, much of which includes his time at Denverite.”)

⚖️ Law360 announced it has hired Zach Dupont to cover Colorado courts. “Dupont currently works as the criminal justice reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette, where he covers various aspects of the criminal justice system,” Chris Roush wrote for the site.

🐎 Who’s with me in betting on Journalism to win the Kentucky Derby tomorrow?

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute, advisor to Colorado Media Project, and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Colorado Media Project is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter, hit me up.) Follow me on Bluesky, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.