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WEEK OF MAY 1, 2025
VOLUME 98 | ISSUE 22
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Bike Streets launches app to incentivize bicycle transit to local businesses BY MERYL PHAIR SPECIAL TO COLORADO COMMUNITY MEDIA
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract detention facility located on North Oakland Street in Aurora.
“usurp” Trump’s authority to address “what he has identified as an invasion.” When Trump issued a proclamation in March invoking the Alien Enemies Act, he said that Tren de Aragua is a “hybrid criminal state” that “is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” The gang “commits brutal crimes” including murder and kidnapping and is “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States,” the proclamation said.
RiNo’s River North Brewery transformed into a neighborhood bicyclist’s paradise for the celebratory launch of Bike Streets’ “Destinations,” an event complete with a complementary bike valet and mechanic along with one “Passport Stamp” toward a free beer after three rides for all those who biked over to partake in the community gathering. With the launch of its latest active transportation initiative, Bike Streets is connecting the everyday bicyclist with local Denver businesses within biking distance, rewarding them for their peddling efforts and highlighting the significant economic payoffs of a bike-centric city. Bike Streets is a communityled project initiated to meet gaps in the city’s evolving cycling infrastructure. Denver has plans in the works for 230 new miles of bikeways, as part of a 20-year vision for developing a network of accessible bikeways throughout the metro area. However, Bike Streets contends many of these lanes are currently on or being planned for busy arterial roads, not necessarily safe or welcoming for the neighborhood cruiser. “We’ve been operating with one simple, straightforward idea, and that is people of all ages and abilities should be able to bike anywhere in Denver today, not in 50 years,” said Avi Stopper, founder of Bike Streets during a presentation at the River North launch. To meet the challenge, Bike Streets created what it calls a LowStress Denver Bike Map, a 500mile network of quiet bicyclefriendly streets. First launched in 2018, the map was drafted by numerous “neighborhood captains” who used local knowledge of their neighborhoods to create these “low-stress” routes.
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SEE BIKE STREETS, P4
PHOTO BY OLIVIA SUN / THE COLORADO SUN VIA REPORT FOR AMERICA
Denver judge halts deportation of Venezuelans U.S. attorneys argue that block of accused TdA members would usurp Trump’s authority BY JENNIFER BROWN THE COLORADO SUN
The Trump administration cannot deport Venezuelans held in an Aurora immigration detention center to a prison in El Salvador without giving them adequate notice and a chance to fight in court, a Denver federal judge ruled April 22. The ruling from U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney came after ACLU Colorado and an immigrant rights group argued that two men from Venezuela were at risk of getting sent on a plane to an infamously dangerous Salvadorian prison. The ruling applies not just to the
two men, but to all Venezuelans held at the detention center who face near-immediate deportation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The act invoked by President Donald Trump gives the government broad authority to deport people in times of war or invasion. The Denver court is among a few others across the country to take up the issue as federal immigration officials have bused immigrants from detention centers to airports, then loaded them onto planes bound for the Terrorism Confinement Center, a megaprison accused of using electric shock and waterboarding to torture prisoners. The prison already holds about 300
VOICES: 8 | LIFE: 10 | CALENDAR: 12
deportees accused by the U.S. government of being members of the dangerous Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua. Deportees were given little notice, no time to consult a lawyer and no chance to try to prove they are not gang members — rights of due process normally afforded to immigrants facing deportation, civil rights attorneys have argued. In many cases, evidence of involvement in Tren de Aragua has been based on detainees’ tattoos. Attorneys for the government argued in Denver that blocking deportations would “irreparably harm the United States’ conduct of foreign policy” and
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