Even a progressive Democrat like Gov. Jared Polis has acknowledged the need to help federal authorities rein in the criminal element among our state’s substantial population of illegal immigrants. After all, Polis realizes the public is fed up.

Yet, his fellow ruling Democrats in Colorado’s legislature just don’t get it. For them, deporting violent criminals or repeat offenders isn’t the priority — shielding illegal immigrants is. 

Thanks to statutes the legislature enacted in the past several years, our state’s law enforcement officers who detain illegal immigrants on serious charges had better not even think about alerting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Simply notifying the feds is illegal. 

Law officers even could face punitive action by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. The AG actually sued a hapless Mesa County sheriff’s deputy earlier this year merely for mentioning on an app used by law enforcement, including federal authorities, that he’d stopped a motorist who turned out to be an illegal immigrant.

Which is why Coloradans should welcome an upcoming ballot proposal that some 200,000 of the state’s voters already have signed onto. The advocacy group Advance Colorado turned in that many signatures last week to the secretary of state for the tentatively titled Initiative 95 — restoring some sanity to law enforcement regarding illegal immigration in our state.

The citizens initiative would permit Colorado law officers to report suspects who are in the country illegally and have been convicted of a violent crime, or have a prior felony, to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Notifying federal immigration authorities — whose job it is to police U.S. borders and apprehend and deport those who cross illegally — would seem like common sense. All the more so if illegal immigrants are suspected of serious offenses.

Yet, Colorado law explicitly forbids notification. A 2021 law barred all Colorado state agencies from sharing personal data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a court order. A 2019 measure prohibited any law enforcement officer in the state from cooperating with a civil immigration detainer request issued by the federal government for a criminal suspect. And a 2023 law prevented state and local governments from entering into contracts with federal agencies for the detention of suspects on immigration-related matters. 

Such upside-down policies have been part of the legislative majority’s push to make Colorado the sanctuary state it is today — a magnet for illegal immigration from around the globe.

Recently, Polis — despite having signed those policies into law — has tried to distance himself from his party’s fringe on the issue. The governor has expressed a desire for Colorado law enforcement to cooperate with federal authorities although he has had to split legal hairs in describing how that is supposed to work under current state law.

“We encourage every county to work with ICE,” Polis said last January. “If there’s a criminal that they want to pick up, you need to work with them (ICE) to help schedule that. And that usually means you give a release window. And if they want to get them, they get them.”

We appreciate the governor’s evolving sensibilities on the subject, but the Advance Colorado ballot initiative can spare Polis — and Colorado’s law enforcement agencies — the trouble of having to tie themselves into a knot just to comply with current law.

The initiative will provide a much clearer path to Colorado law enforcement agencies for handing off dangerous offenders to federal immigration authorities. 

Pending verification of petition signatures by the state, we wish the initiative itself a clear path to next November’s ballot.