Two men under the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Colorado have escaped and are still at large. The suspects, identified as Geilond Vido-Romero, 24, and Joel Jose Gonzalez-Gonzalez, 32, reportedly took advantage of a power outage to make their way to freedom.
The first suspect, Gonzalez, has been in the U.S. since 2013. He was being detained in the Adams County Jail in Brighton, Colorado, when ICE officials took him into their custody, where he was awaiting deportation. Vido-Romero, on the other hand, entered the country in 2023 but was ordered to be deported by an immigration judge in February.
Both men were held in an ICE jail in Aurora when the power went out at 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 18. The outage caused some of the automatic exit doors of the detention center to unlock, allowing the detainees to make their escape. However, ICE officials didn’t discover they were missing until they did a headcount at 12:35 a.m. on Wednesday the next day.
Even after discovering that the suspects were nowhere to be found, ICE officials reportedly didn’t alert the Aurora Police Department (APD) until two hours later, at around 2:32 a.m. This caused tension between ICE and the APD, with both organizations pointing fingers at each other.
The APD has come forward to say that if ICE had informed them of the escape earlier on, they would’ve been able to approach the matter with more urgency. However, as it stands, the suspects already had a head start of about five hours.
“Had information been supplied timely, had it been supplied effectively, we would’ve responded according with our MOU and with our policies and our procedures,” a representative from the APD said in a press conference. “But if that information is not supplied, we cannot make things up. We can’t just telepathically think, oh this must’ve occurred.”
The news, which has made the rounds on social media, sparked outrage among the public. “How badly do you have to run an organization to make the Aurora police look better?” one person wrote.
“Hahahaha what a fucking JOKE!!! 🤡🤡🤡 Exit doors are released with a power outage?! This sh*t writes itself,” another person said.
Other people are of the opinion that the power outage is no coincidence and the escape may have been planned.
“Power outage. Oh, how convenient 😂,” one user joked. “Ah darn, those power outages… so unpredictable you know?” another user mocked.
“Someone internal, let this criminal 🥲 get out of there. This is internal affairs,” another user chimed in.
According to the police report, the suspects were last seen dressed in orange long-sleeved tops, beige pants, and black crocs.
