DENVER — Lawyers for Gov. Jared Polis wrote to a Denver judge last month that the governor shouldn’t face a restrictive ruling that would limit how he could respond to subpoenas from federal immigration authorities.

Polis had attempted to fulfill a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoena last year, only for the judge to tell him that doing so would be illegal under state laws limiting cooperation with ICE. It was baseless, the governor’s attorneys argued, to suggest that a similar subpoena would come anytime soon.

That argument was submitted to the court on March 20. But a week earlier, ICE had sent a subpoena to state officials that bore striking similarities to the request Polis had tried to comply with last spring.

The new subpoena, which has not been previously reported, was also sent to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, according to a copy obtained by The Denver Post. Last year’s request sought information on the sponsors of minors without legal status who had been separated from their parents and were in the custody of relatives or guardians; the recent subpoena says ICE wants information on “sponsors” and requests the exact same employment and personal information that the 2025 version sought.

The latest subpoena comes as a Denver judge this week rejected Polis’ request that the 2025 litigation end with no additional limits placed on the governor’s authority to respond to ICE subpoenas. The disclosure of a new subpoena also comes as lawmakers look to require more oversight of those requests in response to Polis’ efforts last year.

At the same time, the governor’s staff has quietly rolled out a new policy that would keep deliberations about subpoena responses secret from the public.

In an unsigned statement to The Post on Tuesday evening, the labor department said it had not yet responded to the latest ICE subpoena, which requested a response by March 30. Asked if the state intended to fulfill the subpoena, a representative who didn’t provide their name said Wednesday that the agency was still working through Polis’ new policy. That policy gives final authority on subpoena compliance to the governor’s office.

Eric Maruyama, a spokesman for Polis, referred comment on the subpoena to the labor department and did not respond to questions about Polis’ legal filings.

The subpoena was disclosed this week in ongoing litigation against Polis by a now-former state employee, Scott Moss. Moss sued Polis last year over the earlier ICE subpoena, challenging the governor’s intent to comply with it.

Laura Wolf, Moss’ attorney, accused Polis’ legal team this week of withholding the new subpoena. She wrote that she received the subpoena through a public records request after asking Polis’ legal team for it.

In the subpoena, because the names of the sponsors are redacted, it’s unclear if ICE is seeking information on any of the same people as last year, though the list of sponsors is shorter this time.

“It is clear the governor intends to share personal identifying information with ICE to support the agency’s lawlessness and inhumane practices,” Wolf said in a statement to The Post.

Colorado’s laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities have come under fire from the Trump administration. But on Tuesday, a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against state and Denver officials, rejecting the federal government’s attempt to strike down their limitations.

At issue: Is an investigation criminal?

Under an amendment to state law passed by the legislature last year, state officials can comply with ICE subpoenas if they’re related to criminal investigations. Polis had tried to argue that the 2025 request fit under that exemption — a claim that Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones rejected as baseless.

Moss, who left the labor department last summer, argued that complying with the 2025 subpoena would violate the state law limiting information-sharing with ICE. He had worked as director of the Division of Labor Standards and Statistics.

ICE’s 2025 subpoena said the agency wanted the information so it could check on the well-being of the children who were separated from their parents. But in the new subpoena, an ICE agent wrote that the information was now being sought as part of an “active criminal investigation into specific human trafficking crimes.”

The document does not provide any additional information about the investigation, and the document states elsewhere that the subpoena is part of an “investigation or inquiry relating to enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.” The subpoena is not signed by a judge.

The new and explicit reference to an “active criminal investigation” is evidence only that ICE has paid attention to the litigation, Moss’ attorneys argued in a legal filing Monday. The agency, the lawyers argued, appears to have realized that it needs to adjust “the language of its subpoenas to sanction the production of (personal information) for purposes of federal immigration enforcement, in violation of state law.”

Moss and other immigrant-rights advocates have argued that ICE wants information on undocumented children so that it can arrest them and their relatives. Laura Lunn, an attorney with the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, said Wednesday that she has clients who are unaccompanied minors and are being held in ICE detention.

The new subpoena’s attested link to a criminal investigation also comes amid the state’s recent changes to its subpoena policy that emphasize fulfilling those types of requests.

The directive tells state employees to consult with agency heads and consider statutory limitations that might prohibit compliance. But when it comes to immigration enforcement subpoenas, the policy also states that information should be released “promptly” if it’s sought as part of a criminal inquiry “because lives might be at stake.”

Failing to respond to a subpoena, the policy states, “could result in legal action” while preventing “legitimate law enforcement activities that make Colorado safer.” Ultimately, the decision to comply with the subpoenas falls to the governor’s office, after consultation with other state officials and attorneys.

The policy seeks to keep those discussions from public view. It directs employees to mark emails about subpoena compliance as “attorney-client privileged” — a designation that would then shield those communications from disclosure under the Colorado Open Records Act. The subpoenas themselves could still be obtained through records requests, said Jeff Roberts, the executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

In a statement, Maruyama said the new policy “is simple, and it follows the law: We cooperate on criminal investigations with the federal government regardless of whether an individual is here legally or not, and we do not cooperate on non-criminal matters that are only for civil immigration enforcement.”

The governor’s office denied that the subpoena policy was an attempt to restrict court or public oversight of subpoena discussions.

State Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat who sponsored legislation that now limits ICE cooperation, criticized the new policy.

“That strikes me as being wildly inefficient,” she said. “And I fear that it can lead to less transparency and more opacity when it comes to these matters.”

Ongoing litigation

The disclosure about the new subpoena comes as Polis struggles to extricate himself from the Moss litigation, which has successfully — and publicly — blocked the governor’s efforts to turn over information to ICE.

After Jones said that it would likely be illegal to fulfill the 2025 subpoena, Polis’ legal team has tried to turn over more limited information to ICE and to dismiss the challenge altogether.

When those efforts failed, Polis’ legal team asked Jones in February to end the litigation and permanently block the governor from complying with the 2025 subpoena — in part because ICE apparently didn’t need the information anymore.

But Jones denied that request Monday, saying it lacked “any legal authority.” Moss’ attorneys have also resisted Polis’ attempts to summarily end the litigation, and they were scheduled to depose the governor last month as part of the lawsuit.

To end the case, Moss’ lawyers asked Jones to prohibit Polis and the labor department from complying with any other ICE subpoena, absent a court order.

Moss wants that prohibition, his attorneys have written, because he’s worried that ICE would simply send another subpoena seeking similar information that Polis could then quickly and quietly fulfill.

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