What The Hell America!

A new lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of using a secret subpoena to force Colorado officials to ignore state laws and hand over private financial information of residents sponsoring unaccompanied immigrant children. The state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, is demanding that those state officials comply, allegedly under threat of termination, according to court documents reviewed by the Lever.

The previously undisclosed Trump administration subpoena was detailed in an explosive new whistleblower lawsuit filed in state court on Thursday. The alleged subpoena targeting information protected by state privacy laws represents a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown — and the lawsuit’s allegations also prompt new questions about Democrats’ cooperation.

The suit, spearheaded by one of Polis’s top labor officials, accuses the Democratic governor of actively aiding the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and pressuring his employees to violate privacy statutes Polis himself signed into law in 2021 and in May 2025.

“The Polis directive to collaborate with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is illegal,” states the complaint written by attorneys for Scott Moss, who serves as the Polis administration’s director of the Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. “It also harms an unknown but potentially large number of state employees, by directing them to commit illegal acts, risking a wide range of professional and personal harms, including personal penalties of up to $50,000 per violation under the legislation Governor Polis himself signed into law.”

The lawsuit comes just weeks after Polis signed new legislation barring state agencies from handing over undocumented immigrants’ personal information to federal immigration officials.

“Helping our federal law enforcement partners locate and, if necessary, rescue children being abused and trafficked is not only in line with the law but also a moral imperative. We expect the courts will agree,” wrote Conor Cahill, Polis’s communications director, in an email:

We are committed to protecting Personal Identifying Information with regard to purely civil matters. After careful consideration of the subpoena and Colorado law that allows for the sharing of information to support timely criminal investigations, we do believe complying with this subpoena meets requirements set forth in law and is in the service of investigating and preventing criminal activity.

In an email to the Lever, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency said that it does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation, and that “noncooperative jurisdictions waste taxpayer money and government resources while putting their communities at risk.”

At issue is an April 24 subpoena from President Donald Trump’s ICE agency. The complaint says the subpoena lists the names of thirty-five people defined as sponsors of unaccompanied minors, and then orders Colorado’s Department of Labor to hand over copies of their unemployment benefit filings, Family and Medical Leave Insurance records, employer information, and “any other records that show the following information for the listed sponsors: address of residence, telephone number, and email address.”

“It is important to produce records in accordance with criminal investigations to ensure the safety of Coloradans and, most importantly, to protect and ensure the safety of children. Attempts to delay or block this information could prolong criminal exploitation and abuse of children, and we are eager to assist,” Cahill wrote in an email to the Lever. “We would comply unless a court deems otherwise.”

But according to a June 3 internal memo that Moss sent to the Polis administration, “the actual request is for labor-related records of 35 adults ages 20–45 (calling into question how any ‘children’ could be ‘unaccompanied’ if the inquiry is into 35 working adults).”

“The subpoena is for purposes of finding minors to deport,” Moss wrote in the June 3 memo, explaining that the document doesn’t allege probable cause for a criminal investigation. “There’s no real argument that every civil, administrative immigration subpoena is actually ‘criminal’ just because a civil, administrative investigation could find crimes that then might trigger an actual criminal investigation.”

Moss alleges that because the administrative subpoena is not signed by a judge and does not allege criminal wrongdoing, it cannot override state law and thus illegally requires him and other Labor Department officials to ignore Colorado’s own statutes.

“The subpoena does not allege that there is an ongoing criminal investigation, nor does it cite any criminal law that has allegedly been violated or any probable cause supporting any unidentified criminal investigation,” the complaint states.

“The ICE collaboration directive thereby imposes a choice between harmful options upon Moss and other state employees,” continues the suit:

Illegally disclose [personal identifiable information] of the Impacted Population for ICE for immigration enforcement, risking financial, licensing, professional, and reputational harm to themselves, and deeper harm to the immigrants who entrusted their [personal identifiable information] to them; or decline to commit the illegal act Governor Polis ordered, risking termination or other negative professional and personal consequences.

Moss alleges he will be forced to break a 2021 law that bars state agencies from sharing nonpublic personal information with federal immigration officials unless a court orders them to do so. Moss also alleges he will be forced to violate a 2025 law, signed by Polis just two weeks ago on May 23, that extends the 2021 law by expanding the information sharing restrictions to certain court and probation employees, among other actions.

The lawsuit argues that handing over this information would furthermore jeopardize family members, coworkers, and the unaccompanied minors themselves — groups of people that Polis promised to protect. The labor records in question, specifically Family and Medical Leave Insurance records, “include a range of personnel and employment records that could list spouses, children, or other family as beneficiaries of employment benefits, [and] emergency contacts,” the complaint states.

Moss’s June 3 internal memo also claims that if state employees hand over the requested information, it would “severely damage trust in state officials and agencies, by embroiling [the agency] in ICE raids that appear to be lawless or violent, to abuse children, or to target the innocent.”

During a speech on January 9, Polis said: “We don’t support efforts to deport American citizens, to target those on pending legal status, to break up families, to create orphans of American children whose parents are alive and who come to this country to build a better life for their families.”

He also told news outlet Axios on January 28 that Colorado is committed to helping immigration officials with federal criminal cases “rather than just being an extension of the government and focused on federal immigration laws.”

The subpoena comes after the Trump administration labeled Colorado and forty-one out of its sixty-four counties as “sanctuary jurisdictions,” municipalities that do not fully cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, on May 29, as part of the president’s immigration crackdown.

Immigration officials also recently subpoenaed California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants, which provides monthly benefits to elderly and disabled immigrants in California who are ineligible for federal benefits. The California subpoenas are seeking the beneficiaries’ names, dates of birth, and copies of the applications. California officials refused to hand over the information, stating that the program is entirely state funded.