Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration has announced a flurry of investigations into Democratic-led states and their institutions.
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Colorado has been no exception. The administration launched probes targeting diversity, equity and inclusion at colleges and universities, all-gender bathrooms and transgender athletes at K-12 schools, and the conditions inside the state’s adult and youth prisons.
These announcements rattled local institutions and their leaders, and prompted voluminous news coverage.
But what happened after the dust settled?
The Denver Post took a closer look at four federal investigations in Colorado to see what, if anything, the Trump administration has done to follow up on its public pronouncements.
The newspaper found, in one case, federal investigators never acted on their initial demands. In another, the government sought and received thousands of pages of documents and conducted site visits in the state.
Colorado institutions have taken wildly different tacks in response to these probes. Denver Public Schools publicly defied the administration’s demands — and was met by radio silence. Jeffco Public Schools took preemptive legal action against the Trump administration. And the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus chose to quietly and quickly resolve the government’s allegations.
Experts say this is all part of the Trump administration’s plan — to flood the media with stories about its aggressive actions, to scare public bodies into acquiescing and to target political enemies.
“In a lot of these instances, it feels like fishing,” said Beau C. Tremitiere, counsel and deputy impact director with Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan, anti-authoritarian organization. “What’s the bare minimum we can do to intimidate and coerce folks to get them to adopt the administration’s preferred policies without undergoing a serious, rigorous investigation?”
Two districts, two different tacks
Just eight days after Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced it had opened an investigation into Denver Public Schools for “discriminating against its female students” by creating an all-gender bathroom at East High School.
“Let me be clear: It is a new day in America, and under President Trump, (the Office for Civil Rights) will not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement that day.
Seven months later, the government found DPS violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and gave the district 10 days to agree to a proposed resolution — which included converting all-gender restrooms back to single-sex facilities — or “risk imminent enforcement action.”
Superintendent Alex Marrero said the federal agency never visited the bathroom at East High, didn’t interview any witnesses and declined DPS requests for conversation and mediation.
DPS officials ultimately defied the federal order.
Then, nothing.
No “imminent enforcement action.” No further ultimatums. No communication whatsoever.
DPS officials, in response to a records request from The Post this summer, said the school district had no correspondence between its leadership and the Office for Civil Rights since the announced investigation.
Scott Pribble, a DPS spokesperson, said Thursday that they’ve received no word from the federal government on this matter.
The Trump administration last month announced it had launched a second investigation into the school district, this time over reports that a teacher allegedly made female students kiss each other in class.
The Education Department told The Post it does not comment on ongoing investigations.
Just one county over, however, Jeffco Public Schools took a very different strategy.
In June 2025, the Trump administration announced another Title IX investigation, this time into Jeffco’s policy on sleeping arrangements for transgender students on overnight school trips. A family had sued the district in 2024, alleging their daughter was assigned to share a bed with a transgender girl on a school trip.
Ten months later, the Education Department found Jeffco discriminated against girls by allowing transgender students to compete in female sports and access female facilities. Just as it had with DPS, the government gave Jeffco 10 days to agree to a resolution or risk “imminent enforcement action,” which could include pulling more than $50 million in federal funding.
Jeffco, in July, elected to sue the Trump administration to prevent any funding cuts. District officials said the Office of Civil Rights never interviewed staff or students, and did not send any investigators to visit Colorado.
The feds’ assertions that 60 male students were competing on girls’ sports teams were wildly inaccurate, Jeffco said. Any boys listed on rosters for girls’ teams serve as managers, trainers or mascots, district officials said.
“Jeffco did not receive any communication at all from OCR during the investigation,” the district’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.
‘Quickly and voluntarily’
In contrast to these public fights, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs elected to resolve its dispute with the federal government quietly.
In March 2025, the Office for Civil Rights announced the campus was one of 50 universities under investigation for alleged racial discrimination. The inquiry focused on colleges’ partnerships with the PhD Project, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented groups get degrees in business with the goal of diversifying the business world.
The Education Department requested a laundry list of documents from the Colorado school, including the names, races and ethnicities of university students selected for participation in the PhD Project, along with the names and titles of any school employees involved in decisions surrounding the organization, according to a government letter announcing the investigation.
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UCCS, though, replied that its students never participated in any PhD Project conferences or other activities. The school doesn’t even confer Ph.D.s in business. The extent of the university’s engagement with the organization was posting 11 job openings on a job boards, the school said in an Oct. 2 letter.
Without sending much of the documentation requested by the government, UCCS proposed a resolution agreement. In it, the school agreed to discontinue any membership or partnership with the PhD Project and promised to review all associations with external organizations “to identify any … that restrict participation based on race” in violation of the Civil Rights Act, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by The Post through a records request.
UCCS said it “maintained a desire to resolve this matter quickly and voluntarily.”
In December, the school told the Education Department that it had reviewed its partnerships and determined that it had none that restrict membership based on race. Officials identified one organization, the Colorado Springs Black Chamber of Commerce, but said it would maintain its membership with the chamber due to its support of all businesses, not just Black-owned ones.
Two months later, the two sides reached a deal. University officials haven’t heard from the government since, said Michele Ames, a school spokesperson.
Site visits, documents and a freed clerk
Similarly, Colorado prison officials have taken a nonconfrontational approach with federal investigators.
In December, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the state’s adult and youth correctional facilities. The government said the probe would examine whether Colorado prisons are violating the constitutional rights of adult inmates and youth detainees through excessive force, inadequate medical care and nutrition, and policies surrounding the housing of transgender offenders.
Industry watchers immediately questioned the validity of the investigation, noting it came soon after Trump had lambasted the state for continuing to imprison Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk convicted of election-related crimes.
Emails disclosed in a recent court case also showed that the Trump administration, a week after announcing the Colorado investigation, gathered agency leaders to brainstorm how to punish the state amid the Peters furor. The federal government ultimately canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and moved to shutter a renowned science lab in Boulder.
Yet despite Gov. Jared Polis reducing Peters’ sentence in May and releasing her from prison early, the Justice Department has continued its investigation, according to records obtained by The Post.
The state has produced nearly 20,000 documents in response to investigators’ requests, including policies and procedures, contracts, staffing plans, census reports, medical policies and reportable incidents, according to an index of records reviewed by The Post.
Last month, a contingent from the Justice Department visited the Denver Reception & Diagnostic Center and Denver Women’s Correctional Facility in northeast Denver, records show. Typical visits include meeting with key administrators before doing a walk-through of the facilities, where officials talk to incarcerated individuals and staff, federal investigators told the state’s lawyers in an email. DOJ employees also said they planned to take photos of cells, storage spaces, locks and fire alarms.
Emails show the two sides also discussed plans for federal officials to return to Colorado this fall to tour a youth detention campus.
Advocates and families, though, say they haven’t heard a peep from the Justice Department.
The government’s initial letter outlining its investigation mentioned allegations of the state failing to provide adequate nutrition to inmates. The Post in November reported that young people held at the Youthful Offender System prison in Pueblo were losing extreme amounts of weight due to a lack of food.
But parents whose kids are incarcerated at the Youth Offender System prison say they have contacted the DOJ and heard nothing back. Meanwhile, no one with the Colorado Youth Justice Collaborative, a 131-member group dedicated to reforming youth detention in the state, has been approached by federal investigators, according to Dana Walters Flores, one of its members.
“Are they just blowing hot air, or are they doing something?” said Erica Brown, the head of a parent group for Youth Offender System family members.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
‘The damage has been done’
Colorado has been targeted by the Trump administration “through a coordinated campaign of federal investigations, funding cuts and other punitive actions,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of the nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight.
“The point isn’t to uncover wrongdoing or reach well-supported conclusions,” she said. “It’s to generate damaging headlines, threaten federal funding and pressure public institutions to abandon lawful policies and conform to the administration’s ideological agenda. The administration doesn’t care whether the public believes it has the evidence or capacity to pursue every investigation. By the time those questions are asked, the damage has been done.”
This administration’s tactics are unprecedented and specifically designed to target political enemies and impose a rigid ideology over who they believe is a real citizen in this country, said Tremitiere, of Protect Democracy.
It’s important, he said, for targeted entities and individuals to stand up to the “unlawful coercion” from the federal government. Tremitiere likened the current environment to a bully at school trying to take your lunch money: It’s more effective to stand up to the bully, stare them down and make clear that you won’t be a pushover, he said.
And yet, even if the local government or university has the law on their side, these investigations drain immense time and resources, Tremitiere said. There’s also the opportunity cost of the federal government not pursuing legitimate investigations to protect the civil rights of its citizens.
“It means there is real law-breaking going uninvestigated,” he said, “because the limited capacity of the administration is going toward political projects instead of protecting the public and enforcing the laws on the books.”
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